Good Read...
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Paul Johnson may be an emminent author and historian, but he knows even less about global warming than Eeyore. The physics behind the concept of antropogenic global warming provides rather more robust support to that theory than anything Marx and Freud coud drum up to support the theories Paul Johnson invokes to justify his ignorant scepticism.
The theoretical basis of anthropogenic global warming is certainly falsifiable - though the science involved is messy and the predicted warming is uncertain within a range of around two or three on the exact amount of warming we wll get for a given increase in CO2 or methane level.
What is certain is that if we keep on burning fossil carbon and jacking up the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere we will eventually raise the global temperature to a point where the crops that we now grow in any given area won't yield enough food to make it worth our while to plant them there any more - wheat yields in southern Australia have already become depressingly erratic - and subsntatial numbers of people will starve.
One of the other effects of global warming is rising sea levels. If all the ice now sitting above sea level in the Greenland and Antarctic ice-caps melted, or even slid down into the sea, the sea level would rise some 70 metres, which would add further complication. The Antarctic ice cap isn't going to slide off soon, but the Greenland ice- cap - good for about 7 metres of sea level rise - might met fast enough to emulate the Laurentian ice-cap which melted remarkably rapidly at the end of the most recent ice age.
If you want a scienfically literate good read, try
which is appreciably less complacent and cites real evidence, if not the kind of evidence Jim or Paul Johnson could be expected to understand.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen