“Emissions are produced by everything we do — if we use electricity, steel, cement, timber, cars, trucks, planes, ships, trains or food from farms, we will always produce emissions. Even people sleeping on the beach burn carbon food energy and emit carbon dioxide.”

I could be wrong, but isn’t the bedrock of the entire issue the carbon-cycle and how human activity is throwing it out of balance? The issue of human-induced climate change is that carbon which has been locked out of the carbon cycle for millions of years (what we call fossil fuels, ie coal and oil) is being burned to create the energy for many human activities and, therefore, released back into the carbon cycle. This is the heart of the issue of anthropomorphic climate change.

Yes Vic, burning wood; a cow farting; turning the compost which will be used to grow a potato; a person, ahem, “sleeping on the beach” releases CO2. But this carbon was only briefly out of the cycle, therefore is not contributing to the net amount of carbon in the cycle (which is what is driving global warming).

Fundamental stuff, Vic, you may start your learning via Wikipedia.

More of my ranting about this issue at this blog post - Addressing the anthropogenic climate crisis requires direct action.

I just want to say global warming is almost the exact opposite to Y2K: With Y2K there was hundreds of thousands of lines of code to check for 99->00 roll-over issues, and probably thousands of potential bugs fixed before the transition actually occurred. The effects of a 99->00 roll-over may have been somewhat dramatisiced, but who knows, a date may be attached to a time and a tick that should return a +1 change might actually return -3155673599999 milliseconds. What sort of a glitch could that cause?

That there were no reported Y2K issues on January 1, 2000 is only due to the fixes being in place (or old code/machines being retired).

However, global warming is probably a real effect that may be due to human activities and the “fixes” may not work; and we won’t know for sure if we got it right until it is too late.