Welcome to Climate Change for Beginners

The hope I have for this site is that it will fill the gap that I found existed in climate change information when I first researched the topic. In other words, I want this to be the site that I was not able to find when I first became interested in this topic.

Climate Change for Beginners is meant to be fairly simple without being simplistic or patronising. It will seek to explain the current state of the science and what the politicians are doing to change things. This is not, of course, to assume that they are doing anything!

I have tried to avoid loads of images and video in order to make the site immediately accessible. The information is the thing, not the web site or my familiarity with the latest web technology. I have also tried to make the text such that it can be read on screen (online) in order to avoid wasting paper by having to print it out. However, if you have a small monitor or find it difficult to read online I have tried to create the page in a format such that it can be easily printed. At a later date I hope to add some printer friendly pages. Not, of course, that I will ever recommend printing.

By it's very nature, this site will be in a constant state of development as new information and research is published and as politicians talk about doing something while they, in fact, do very little. Apart from frequently jetting off to various locations adding to the Carbon Dioxide already in the atmosphere. A lot of this site will reflect my own political beliefs which can in a nutshell be stated as:

Humans have caused this - the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was pretty static until the arrival of the Industrial Revolution about 200 years ago. We can fix it if we act fast - and that means now - many of the experts currently believe that we have a window of 10 years in which to make this happen or we face runaway global warming. The term runaway means a state where we lose control of what may happen and severe climate change will occur no matter what we do. I also believe that waiting for the politicians will achieve nothing - they have other interests, saving the lives of those in the majority world does not get a high priority.

The capitalists have ruined our world and it is important that we get our heads around the idea that we have to get rid of capitalism to have any chance of dealing with this. We can only do this by organizing with like minded groups of people and making things happen.

This is the greatest problem we, as a species, have ever faced. We owe it to future generations to do something while there is still time.

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