Hadn't had the intention to start the 'global warming' debate once again. Well, now that it has gone so far, I can add my point of view.

I have to admit that I haven't red so many sources as Gawain has, haven't even seen the Al Gore movie, but I follow the topic for quite a while.

I did my final thesis in Physics in 1994. There I had to do some literature research about mulecular spectroscopy. Accidentially I also found some articles about the effect of the Ozone hole from the 70ies. Sientists predicted the existence and the effect quite clear. However, until the 90ies, they were widely ignored. Then there were news about blind soals and increase of skin cancer, so that the studies could not be ignored any longer.

In 1995 I attended a presentation at the Technical University of Munich about global warming. Lecturer was a scientist of the Fraunhofer Institute (an institute with an excellent scientific reputation).

The lecture was done in a very scientific way: these are the facts, these are the assumptions, this is a best case scenario and so on. Not the polemics, that usually accompanies topics like that.

Nevertheless, or should I say, because of that, the impression was frightening. Although many things were still uncertain, even best case scenarios showed that there would be a warming, that would change the world significantly.

At the end one student asked the lectorer, why he went on working on that field, if the chances to stop the warming were so low. The answer was: "I do not want to tell my children, that I hadn't tried everything!"

Today the speed and the effect of the warming is still vague. Nevertheless, the signs are clear that there is a global warming.

Today, some say that the global warming is due to natural facts. To me this is only a lame excuse to do nothing. What we see today is exactly what scientists had predicted more than a decade ago.

Even longer we know that CO2 rises the absorption of thermal radiation. More CO2 will lead to a new equilibrium, that means a higher temperature of the earth.

If I am sitting in a water pot and someone tells me that there is a fire under that pot and I find out that the temperature is rising, then I can either argue that the rise of temperature can result from a sunny day or I can start thinking how I can leave that pot!