Truth Will Out spoke to a number of experts in the field of climate change to get their view of global climate change. These articles were originally published in July 2001

Vivienne Parry is a writer and broadcaster. A scientist by training, she is a former presenter of BBC TV's Tomorrow's World"

Britons have just squelched through one of the wettest winters on record. Floods, torrents, only 20 minutes of sun one cruel winter month in Leeds. The finger of blame pointed to global warming as the cause of these extreme weather event - and then moved swiftly on to us - drivers of cars, belchers of smoke, polluters of planets. It seems blindingly obvious. Of course the two things must be linked. But are they?

Humans very badly want to believe that global warming is caused by human activity. We want to blame it on ourselves. We can see what pollution has done to our environment, and intuitively, putting catastrophic global warming down to us, seems right. And there's a mass of ominous data and doomsday modelling systems with which to beat ourselves.

But nowhere in science is data more fought over, or interpreted in so many ways. Two things alone seem certain. First, there has been an undoubted temperature rise over the last 100 years. Secondly, climate is immensely complex, not static and subject to large natural variations, quite independent of human activity. Thereafter, pretty much everything is up for grabs.

The sceptics argue that most of the half degree rise in temperature of the last 100 years occurred before 1940 whereas most of the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere entered after this date.

They point to the complexity of the climate and mistakes in the modelling systems and scoff at suggestions that temperature thousands of years ago can be measured to an accuracy of tenths of a degree. They point out that CO2 is not the most important greenhouse gas - water vapour is - and that warming is not intimately connected to carbon dioxide levels as people imagine.

Raised on woolly mammoths and dinosaurs, we believe temperature change to occur gradually, perhaps over tens of thousands of years. Yet evidence from ice cores reveal past change to have been very rapid - sometimes within a single generation. For instance, dramatic changes in climate occurred within decades as the result of flips in ocean circulation. The very bad news is that Britain would not become Marseilles by the sea - more like Siberia in the Tundra. Humans could be hastening these flips - or simply be experiencing what is natural.

But if we were warming the planet, the crunch would come if it were amplified by feedbacks such as ocean currents and cutting down forests, setting in train further change that may be unstoppable. Precaution seems wise even though, in the long term, we may discover that natural planet events such as volcanic activity are far more important to climate change than anything humans do. But here's my prediction. We'll cope. And somewhere out of left field - in all probability from the States - will come the science that nixes all our models. My guess is that one development - probably in fuel cell technology - will re-write the future. And if human activity has caused global warming, one thing is sure. It will be human activity and ingenuity that gets us out of trouble.

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