trolls - get a life

I think we should all be doing two things to prepare for the future. First the personal one - changing your lifestyle so that oil shortages and extreme climate have the smallest impact possible. This can range from growing your own and developing hardcore compost to learning new post-oil skills like carpentry or metalwork. And secondly we should all be doing something bigger, that can benefit the wider post-oil community.

My baby is the New Somerset and Dorset Railway which is a group looking to restore the main line between Bath and Bournemouth, closed under extremely suspicious circumstances in 1966. It's a no-brainer, the line will serve many large towns and two cities, and will link Britain's only World Heritage City with Britain's biggest seaside resort, through stunning countryside. As well as offering freight and passenger services for people living along the route, speeding up journeys that are currently almost impossible by road, it will also seek to recreate the glory days of the route, once the most popular line in the world, bringing tourist traffic (and pounds!) to the area.

It won't be easy, but the line now has five bases where trains are operated or stations are being restored, with a sixth one currently being stalked!

Now you would think that something like this would be welcomed, particularly within the rail community, and to a huge extent it is. But we have also been stalked by group of trolls (or perhaps one using different names) coming out with the most ludicrous nonsense. I used to actually reply to these idiots but don't any more, and that has calmed it right down. They always use seven letter surnames (latest is Stevens) which I assume is some sort of code they use between themselves. And they always talk in clichés ...

The latest one sent an email would you believe! A tirade against climate change and peak oil that had no sense at all. He claimed that climate change is impossible (despite it being something that always happens due to changes in the Earth's orbit, solar output, position of continents etc) and that it couldn't be quantified because we don't have the technology to check global temperatures. All nonsense of course, there are tens of thousands of measuring centres all over the Earth, and anyway if this were true surely we could also not tell if temperatures are static?

I think he's missed the point completely - NO scientist claims that climate change ISN'T happening, it's merely that there's not conclusive evidence or consensus on how much of that rise is due to human activity - but we are getting closer to that agreement. Climate Change IS happening, and there's no point claiming otherwise.

He also blethered on with the same old rubbish about 'scientists in the sixties and seventies were forecasting an ice age'. We all know they weren't. What a FEW scientists were saying was that there SHOULD have been signs in the 60s and 70s that global temperatures should have been falling as we should have been approaching an ice age in thousands of years time. The fact temperatures were RISING rather than falling led to the first inclinations that perhaps we were heading towards a warming.

In any case the fact that a few scientists thought differently in the 60s until evidence suggested otherwise does not preclude the possibility that warming is now happening - and it was a  FEW scientists, not 99% of climate scientists who believe that climate change is caused - to some extent - by human activity.

His attack on Peak Oil was even more laughable - he linked to one of those crazy sites that claims (against all scientific evidence and logic) that oil is 'spontaneously generated' inside the Earth,

And his credentials - his dad was an engineer! He then in all seriousness suggested that the writer STOP writing about climate change and peak oil!!

Richard - I know you're scared, and I know you aren't educated. But you really need to stop being an anti-social idiot and start preparing for the future - your future, your family's future and your community's future. You are being a dick and if you really think I am going to stop writing because some uneducated socialist dreamer tells me to you are VERY much mistaken! I will write MORE because of idiots like you. Now go and start composting or do some carpentry. The normal ones amongst us have a world to save.