Terry Wogan, The Disk Jockey Who Defies Reality

In the UK, there is a famous disk jockey named Terry Wogan.  He plays middle of the road music on the national radio station Radio 2.  Terry has taken it upon himself to dismiss the findings of environmental scientists the world over in a one man crusade against the concept  of global warming.  As he is in such a high profile position, Terry is able to air his views to millions, and this he does regularly.  

To Terry, the research scientists are grasping fools who are simply “after research grants”.  For him global warming has been happening “since viking times”, for him environmentalists are “tree huggers”, for him the people measuring what is happening to the world are feeble harbingers of doom who are  “pulling the quilt up around their ears”.  Terry’s opinions are in stark disagreement with those of thousands of scientists - so where lies the truth?  Is Terry right, or is Terry deluded?  Lets take a quick look at the science of climate change.

Here we have schematic a diagram of measurements from earth.  Measurements of CO2 have been taken for many years from many places; lets look at levels measured at high altitude on the island of Hawaii.  Since Hawaii is quite isolated, the concentrations measured will more accurately match the global averages, as Hawaii is far from industrial sources of CO2 and CO2 absorbing forests.  In the graph, the annual variations of CO2 can be easily seen - these annual rise-and-falls represent the effects of the large forests, which absorb more CO2 during summer growth periods.