That's true for most energy companies. Ecotricity however run their own wind farms, so yes it is actualy renewable energy I'm paying for. They invest entirely in their own farms.
Also SB, it might seem like there is great "debate" about what is actually happening, but I've never seen anything written by a scientist who claimed climate change was not anthropogenic who wasn't also funded by an oil company. I'm doing physics at Imperial, and every climate or atmospheric physicist I've spoken to would say that there's a good chance that greenhouse gasses from human behaviour will bring about a large rise in average temperature in the next hundreds or thousands of years.
The CRU story was jumped on by "climate skeptics" immediately, but as I expected, all their claims were out of context. See
the wikipedia article for more info. The crux of it is:
Independent reviews by FactCheck and the Associated Press said that the emails did not affect evidence that man made global warming is a real threat, and said that emails were being misrepresented to support unfounded claims of scientific misconduct.
So, in my mind (from my experience too) the theory behind global warming is sound. By which I mean that the larger scale behaviour (forget about predicting the weather in your town - that's much harder) is well modelled, but very susceptible to initial conditions. The best thing to do then is run the climate simulations lots and lots of times, which is where CPDN comes in.
And surprise surprise, their model predicts a jump in worlwide average temps over the next 100 years. No data fiddling, just thermodynamics and initial conditions.
I leave you with what I thought was the most persuasive thing:
click me (taken from
here, called 'Myles Allen, Energy and Climate: understanding climate change, Said Business School, Oxford, January 2008') The server is a bit flakey.
In particular slides 12 and 13. 12 shows the model with human influences turned off (diverges) compared to 13 with humans turned on (good fit).
The other presentations on that link are also interesting.
And regarding folding and finding a "cure for cancer" - I think humans are doing quite well enough. I'm much more concerned about the (up to) 140,000 species which go extinct each year (
source), mostly due to habitat destruction, hunting by humans, and yes, climate change.
Overall, the Holocene extinction is most significantly characterised by the presence of human-made driving factors.
it's already got it's two models past 70.3% already at an average of 713 (not sure of that's 713 per model).
