Yesterday a business colleague asked me what we here on this side of the pond think of the global warming scandal. You know the one where they over dramatized global warming. I replied, “we are basically not ignoring it because we are experiencing climate change first hand.”

Yesterday it started snowing by us in Switzerland. It was not the first time this year. About three weeks ago the mountains received their snow fall. The thing is that climate change is happening and while many will say “see they over dramatized it.” I reply do yourself a favour and watch “The Power Of Nightmares”.

Just today in the German magazine focus they said that things are problematic.

Von 1999 bis 2008 hat sich unser Planet nach Daten des britischen Hadley-Klimaforschungszentrums in Exeter um nur 0,07 Grad Celsius erwärmt. Der Weltklimarat hatte hingegen eine Zunahme der globalen Durchschnittstemperatur um 0,2 Grad prognostiziert.

Here is the problem, the planet only heated up a slight 0.07 degrees Celsius instead of the 0.2 forcasted. While most might think, hey this shows no global warming. No, not so quick. As has been discounted by many the solar effect happened. BTW I happen to be a big believer in the solar effect. Namely our planet should have cooled down quite a bit due to lack of influence by the sun. 

This is the problem, we still managed to heat up, even though we were supposed to cool down. As the article said, a German scientist predicted this, but said things will change in 2015. And that is what worries me. The lack of action by politicians, and the pause will change quite dramatically in about 5 years.

If you look at the stats the human presence could be argued as not that significant. Specifically that it does not influence the planet that much. But the human presence has enough effect to not allow the planet to cool down.

Ironically, at the height of the conference Europe, and North America was in the grips of a cold spell. That cold spell has ended and we had a very warm Christmas and New Year. Sure now it is a bit cooler, but climate change is here are we are going to miss an opportunity to do anything about it.