The news that scientists have managed to create artificial life has posed all sorts of deep philosophical questions in terms of man’s relationships to the natural world, the nature and purpose of man’s existence and the nature of God, if he or she exists.

It also has serious repercussions for the environmental movement, as one of the stated aims of Craig Venter’s experiments is to geo-engineer life forms that can take the edge off the climate change that industrialised and industrialising countries have created.

This marks a step-change for environmentalists, who have, up to this point, looked at practical and physical ways to negate the negative effects and impacts of both climate change and global warming.

Indeed, up to this point, environmentalists have been far more likely to suggest placing a giant floating sun shade into space than creating C02 eating bacteria.

Yet Craig Venter has shown that possible solutions to climate change are just as likely to come from innovations in biological sciences as they are in better established physical ones.

Of course, the development of geo-engineering raises some huge, soul-searching questions for both philosophers and engineers, and it’s certainly the case that universal consensus on the deployment of any manmade being into the world would have to be made before these modern day Dr Frankensteins can really offer any benefit to climate change.

In a demonstration of a fact often made by those interested in climate change and global warming, a team of science experts made up of members from countries across the world have today released findings that appear to show that natural climate change played a large role in the extinction level event that almost wiped mammals off the face of our planet some fifty thousand years ago,

The finding, which are published in the Evolution journal, find a new tactic in approaching the divisive topic of natural climatic changes. These naturally occurring changes are often used by climate change deniers to claim that the current alterations in temperature are entirely down to natural patterns, and have nothing to do with pollution.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is adamant that climate change is a result of both natural fluctuations and the introduction of man-made pollutants into our atmosphere.

“Until now global evidence to support the climate change argument has been lacking, a large part of existing evidence was based on local or regional estimates between numbers of extinctions, dates of human arrivals and dates of climate change,” said Dr Nogues-Bravo. “Our approach is completely different. By dealing with the issue at a global scale we add a new dimension to the debate by showing that the impact of climate change was not equal across all regions, and we quantify this to reveal each continent’s “footprint of climate change.”

The scientists work has opened up a new seam in climate change modelling on the global scale as it investigates how climate change will affect small, localised areas and not just the earth as a whole.

 What is Global Warming? 

Global warming is a term that describes the recorded and projected increase in the earth’s temperature through time.

Because the earth is subject to a set of dynamic climatic systems, our planet’s temperature has risen in the past and is likely to rise again in the future, regardless of human inputs into the system as a whole.

However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has determined that the current increase in global temperatures is not simply the result of natural fluctuations in the planet’s climatic systems, but is at least in part the result of man’s presence on the planet and our contribution of pollutants into the atmosphere.

These polluting gases include CO2 and contribute to what has become known as the greenhouse effect.

And what exactly is the greenhouse effect?

If you’ve ever stuck your head inside a greenhouse you’ll recall the feeling on your face and, if you stayed in for a little while, your lungs. The glass roof above, and glass walls around you, allow for incoming solar radiation (short-wave radiation) to enter the greenhouse but do not allow outgoing radiation (long-wave radiation) to escape.

That all sounds a bit abstract. But it’s the explanation for the sudden warmth you felt when you entered the greenhouse (sometimes called hot houses, of course).

Although the earth’s atmosphere is actually, and quite unsurprisingly, quite different to a greenhouse roof, the effect of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere is quite similar to that of a greenhouse – they allow warming short-wave radiation to enter the earth’s atmosphere, but do not allow outgoing long-wave radiation to escape. Instead, this long-wave radiation is reradiated back down into the atmosphere, creating a net increase in temperature.

Does global warming mean we are going to get warmer?

No. Global warming is a clumsy description for a wider set of changes to our climate.

Climate change is a far more useful description of how greenhouse gas emissions will influence our planet’s atmosphere.

Some already perceived results of man-made climate change include

• Rising sea levels as ice at the polar caps melts
• Changes in rain-fall levels – either more or less precipitation
• Spread of tropical disease into areas that were previously unaffected
• Increases in air pollution