hedgehog

This article in the Independant implies that he has offended almost everyone that a decent member of society should strive to offend.

http://news.independent.co.uk/people...icle326741.ece

Perhaps he should form a political party with the aim of moving us on from listening to the hysterical, PC, we are all doomed nutters who seem to dominate most press coverage these days.

RB170

What a load of crap that article is

unclebuck

Good man!! It reads like a catalogue of successes to me.

SJ_Skyline

Seconded!

Looks like the author really did get their sandals in a twist!

TheBigMan

The Independent - a paper for gays of the highest calibre.

Clarkson is a ***, but he's still cool never the less.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Hmm who are "they" and what right do "they" have to dictate to us that we "should" be offended by a journalist making quips for sakes of humour and voicing his own opinions...which last time I checked, was legal to do?

The sooner we shoot these PC moaners who dicate to us what we should and should not do, the better

OllyK

Seems entirely reasonable to me

_RIP_

They should stop eating dogs then

drumsterphil

iTrader: (1)

Jeez, the ramblers have to be the biggest bunch of hypocrites going - they proudly walk (literally) over anyone who objects to their activities and 'right to roam' yet won't extend the same courtesy to anyone exercising their right to do the same (but by motor vehicle).

More power to Clarkson is what I say!

Leslie

As ever it is a matter of degree. I think JC says all those things which are OTT purely to invite comment and to show up the equally OTT attitudes of the Greens and the rest of the PC environmentalists.

I wonder why these committed sandal wearing lentil eating nut crunchers are so reticent when it comes to the other sources of pollution which are associated with big business.

When you consider the immense amount of pollution caused by the miilions of aircraft flights who transport people in such an inefficient manner as far as burning hydrocarbons is concerned, why are they not railing at the airport expansions which are planned and will increase the throughput of passengers by such an enormous number.

It takes 40 tons of kerosene to cross the Atlantic in the average airliner and the greenhouse gases are dumped where they will do the most harm! That is just one example of pollution.

Time we had a fairer attitude towards pollution instead of blaming it all on the easy target, namely the motorist.

Les

New_scooby_04

iTrader: (4)

I alsmost fell asleep reading that article.

"a curious and misguided attitude to the real and major threat posed by climate change"

Really? I thought -if anything- it would be the politicians who had to explain their position on this issue.

Maybe, it's just that Clarkson's views that, relatively speaking, motorists contribute very little to Global warming (which is factually accurate) don't sit well with environmentalists and the governments who justify extortionate burdens on the UK motorists with the 'damage to the environment' line.

Just a thought...

NS04

SJ_Skyline

Seeing as they are so concerned about global warming, you would think that they would cut back on the amount of hot air they spout!


Driving over the countryside is just a natural extension of "right to roam"

hedgehog

It is factually accurate because there is absolutely no scientific evidence, apart from the rantings of the lentil munchers which hardly counts as science, for man having any impact at all upon climate change. Climate change is a great political tool with which to provoke fear and, therefore, allow control but quite simply humans have nothing at all to do with it. You must remember that in the 1970s the very same nutters were calling for us to spread black ashes on the polar ice caps to stave off the next ice age because, at that time, the climate was showing a cooling trend. Today the climate is, when some very specific and limited temperature records are viewed, showing a slight warming trend.

When Clarkson claims that man made global warming is nothing but a lie he speaks the truth. Just looking at the science journal "Nature" for this week i find a paper on the 1,470 year glacial climate cycle which begins "Many palaeoclimate records from the North Atlantic Region show a pattern of rapid climate oscillations" and it concludes that these oscillations have been "triggered by solar forcing." Now clearly these palaeoclimate records don't show the effect of man made climate change, they show natural processes and climate change that was happening when we were still rubbing sticks together to try and make fire.

In another article in this weeks Nature an atmospheric scientist says that we "cannot disguise the fact that levels of both methane and carbon dioxide began to increase long before the onset of industrialisation." Again, it looks like science says that you, me and Clarkson are all off the hook on the climate change charge.

With this in mind it is important that the concept of man made climate change doesn't become accepted by default just because the greens are repeating it every single day in the various media outlets. Nature (which is the leading UK science journal) estimated that about 1 in 10 climate scientists believed in man made global warming. So, lets stop talking about man made climate change as if it were real. Climate always changes, that is fact, but this change is natural and normal and it would happen even if we weren't here. The ice caps on Mars are currently reducing in size for example, not because of the CO2 from your car but because the output of the sun is increasing, does that give you a clue as to what might be happening on earth as well? Be sure to challenge anyone you meet who has had the misfortune to be sucked into the media hysteria about man made climate change, they may be well intentioned but they are also wrong.

boomer

Don't let the tree-huggers hear that!!!

There will be draft legislation to restrict interplanetary rockets to a maximum of 50mph before your can say "they are a bunch of nutters"

But on a more serious note, that is a very powerful argument against the lentil munchers' lies - and we need to shout it out more!!!

mb

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

1) The output from the Sun is reducing, has been for a couple of billion years, and will continue to do right up until the Sun turns into a red giant star in about four billion years time.

2) The polar ice caps on Mars are decreasing because they are made of dry ice (solid CO2) which is subliming due to the fact that Mars has almost no atmosphere to retain it. Unless the surface temperature of Mars drops to constantly below about -90oC (it sometimes rises to about -50oC) then this process will continue until there is no CO2 left in solid form. The rest of the atmosphere (about 1% of Earth's, and almost entirely CO2) will also slowly be lost into space.

Apart from that, a great argument.


M

CLSII

Well done Clarkson...The article is complete rubbish from start to finish..

hedgehog

The billion year scale decline in the output from the sun is not constant but varies, and this has a significant impact upon the "warmth" of the surface of the earth. As I documented there is the Dansgaard-Oeschger event, with a 1,470 year cycle, the DeVries-Suess cycle every 210 years and the Gleissberg cycle every 87 years. These are all superimposed upon and are of substantially greater magnitude over moderate timescales of, say, 100,000 years than the effects of the sun progressing along its lifecycle.

The situation on Mars is that the polar ice caps are retreating somewhat more rapidly of late than has been the case in the past, or than should be the case, with the effect of the sun being in the frame. Geologist Jack Mustard (honestly) who worked on the data from the NASA Mars Global Surveyor stated "They way these polar pits are retreating is absolutely astounding" Triton (a moon of Neptune) is seeing something similar but probably for other reasons, it looks likely that changes in the reflectivity of its ice are causing it to warm up, yet again an entirely natural process. Pluto is also showing signs of warming that appears to have been happening for about the last 14 years and while this is not fully understood, especially because until recent observations were analysed it was thought Pluto was cooling, this also appears to be an entirely natural event.

So, it certainly looks like a great argument to me that the output of the sun is very important here on earth and when it goes up the earth gets warmer. The cycles above are just about to get into phase with each other such that they are in the same phase that lead to the Little Ice Age of approx 1645 - 1715. So, we should start to see some substantial cooling pretty soon and certainly within the next 20 - 30 years, driven entirely by a change in solar output. A group of Russian scientists specialising in solar cycles currently have a $10,000 bet with a man made global warming true believer that there will be a cooling within the next 10 years. Personally I think they are taking a bit of a risk on the 10 year timescale but they know their subject, if it had been a 30 year timescale I'd have thrown in a few quid myself.

Climate change is entirely natural, it even happens on other planets for a range of reasons. Currently things are warming slightly here on earth but that is all about to change, again, and there is nothing at all that we can do about it. Unless of course you know someone who has control of the sun.

Petem95