We were told recently that the ice sheets of West Antarctica are now calving and melting at an accelerating rate. It is claimed that this is a new phenomenon which is due to global warming, which in turn is the consequence of our dependence upon, and increasing use of, fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Every six months or so, another prediction of abrupt and dramatic climate change, driven by our use of fossil fuels, appears in the media. The most dramatic illustration was the film The Day After Tomorrow where global warming was proposed as the tipping point for rapid onset of the next ice age. Sustaining all these media events are the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since its formation in 1988, the IPCC has issued three reports, each one more alarmist than the previous one, the most recent having been released in Shanghai in January 2001. At the press conference in Shanghai a graph of global temperatures from 1000 AD to 2000 AD was displayed on a giant screen.
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