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@cee-dee wrote:

 

I don't think there's any doubt that things are warming but it's what's causing it that's at issue. Those taking the climate change position attribute it to human intervention but those taking the opposing view don't seem to make much issue about what's happened on Earth before as shown in the natural "records" in soil samples, tree records and levels of flood deposits, all those when there was very little in the way of "human intervention".

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That's what I find more than a little troubling about the debate as well.  It seems that the pro-global warming side are allowed to pick and choose the bits of evidence that suit them without being picked up on the historical evidence that the same things have happened before, when human activity couldn't have been a factor.

I've seen it said that because we can now grow grapes outdoors in Southern England and make wine it's proof of climate change, but the Romans did that.  It's on record that British white was much appreciated in Roman society.

I recently read that although Northern Europe is getting warmer at the moment it will soon get much colder.  Something to do with the melting sea-ice (or lack of it) at the North Pole affecting the North Atlantic Conveyor sea current,  causing the Gulf Stream to move south.  This will cause warmer, wetter air to have more influence in the Mediterranean Basin but leaving N.W Europe more under the influence of the Arctic.  

In turn this will increase rain-fall in the countries of Southern Europe and N. Africa.  Again it's on record that the south of France, Italy and Greece had forests and abundant woodland in early historical times and N.Africa had vast areas of grassland, lakes and rivers. 

Early Greek explorers left records of seeing ice-bergs amongst the fog banks in the North Sea and garbled accounts of what seem to be Walrus in Scotland or Northern England. 

Doesn't that indicate that the Gulf Stream was more to the south than it is now?  More perplexing to me is the speed with which things changed and why.  The early Greek stories were only a few centuries before the Romans were growing grapes in more or less the same latitude and historical Romans were able to import Giraffe from isolated pockets of grassland in North Africa not long before Julius Caeser arrived in Britain.  Yes, something changes the climate significantly and with worrying regularity, to blame it all on burning fossil fuel seems to me to be the easiest answer, but probably not the correct one.