There is hope yet..

This morning, surprisingly, the Toady programme gave air-time to an Australian academic who doesn't entirely subscribe to the new religion of Global Warming.

To my mind, he defended himself admirably, mainly because he was arguing from facts. I missed part of the grilling, but he was claiming that we have had short periods of warming and cooling, for well over a century, and in the 1970s many forecasters were warning us of a mini ice-age which was soon to hit us.

Perhaps his most interesting finding is the small amount of extra CO2 which is actually man-made. The vast amount is from volcanoes, according to his reckoning.

This may not be a complete rebuttal to the eco-doomsters, who don't seem to want to argue on the basis of facts, but if he is right then we still have the two questions - is the climate warming, and if so is it man made?

The question is also highlighted by the findings of a Bristol University Study, that the earth is absorbing much more of the greenhouse gases than had been thought, and the CO2 in the atmosphere has remained constant at approximately 50% of emissions despite the massive rise in industrial and other emissions.

The findings from Bristol, and from other studies, do not mean that we may ignore the emission of CO2, but it does question the easy assumptions which are leading to a lemming rush to impoverish everyone. We need facts, even those which are inconvenient.