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On what basis do we assume that warnings of global warming are hype? Is it because we have reached the stage of not trusting media sources. Or are we not able to trust the facts as portrayed by politicians? Well, when could we?

The media can be a dangerous beast. Providing a valuable and vital public service at times, it can also set up so many tenuous arguments, stir up so many hornets' nests, open so many erroneous Pandora's boxes, that we, the public, are left not sure whether it is reporting the truth or not.

And then there are the vested interest groups and lobbying organisations which feed in information and often distort facts for their own ends.

Who was it who wrote of lies, damn lies and statistics'? Certainly statistics can be distorted to draw all sorts of varying conclusions, but if we think that warnings of global warming are hype, let us unravel this hype.

But if we cannot trust statistics, or the media, or politicians, who or what do we use to unravel it? We can trust facts and we can trust our own personal experience.

When I was studying Geography at school in the sixties, all the talk was of a down turn in global temperatures. The earth's ambient temperature follows cycles which are caused by a combination of factors, some not fully understood, but it is known that through earth's history temperatures have risen for a time and then fallen. There have been ice ages, and so called interglacials, i.e. periods of relative warmth.

The temperatures we hear reported on TV and in the press are averaged over thirty years, and in the sixties it looked as if the rise in temperatures since the last ice age had levelled out and they were beginning to fall again. It would not be a regular fall, and there would be blips on the graph, but the general trend for the coming centuries was down.

Then, in the seventies I studied for my Geography degree, including a course on climate change. We learned about the type of evidence that is used to determine past climates: preserved pollen in ancient marshes, tree ring growth, deep ice cores, etc. We also learned about affects of mankind which could, if unchecked, bring about changes in climate: greenhouse gas accumulation, a breakdown of the ozone layer in the atmosphere, etc.

A likely scenario seemed to be that industrial pollution, rain forest clearance and other factors could bring about drastic changes to world climates, not just through global warming, but through a change in general climate stability. By this I mean there

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