3rd April 2000, Manchester Airport, 3rd April 2000, Manchester Airport, England. My family had just come over to join me in the UK for a couple of years. It was raining. Not exactly an unusual occurrence for Manchester. My family whinged, having just flown in from Sydney, Australia where they had left behind -blue skies, warm weather and little rain, due to the country being into its 5th year of drought. Also, not an unusual occurrence. At about the same time I started to read the occasional article and hear the odd radio snippet about global warming. About how the planet was heating up and how this was going to change the climate and, potentially, cause the destruction of humanity. Bah Humbug, thought I. I had heard all this doom and gloom before. So I carried on life regardless, working hard and making money, nodding knowingly when the BBC weathermen cockily informed us that we had always had a wetter August, or a hotter November at some time in the past and that the warm and wet weather in the UK was just normal climatic changes. Meanwhile, back in Australia, the cockies observed over their cold beers about how Australia was the driest continent on the planet and droughts were just part of life's great cycle. So life continued on for me and my family in the UK. The rain kept falling. But it always had done in England. Then we had a bit of flooding. But this just brought out the 'Battle of britain' spirit in the Poms who merrily bailed and bagged and brushed the waters out of their houses. But. It kept on raining. Twelve months after my family arrived in that torrential downpour of rain in April 2000 it was announced that the UK had just experienced the wettest 12 months since records began, and their records go back to the 17th century. Suddenly the BBC weathermen weren't quite as cocky in their dismissal of global warming. Some 6 months after that record year, with rain still continuing, my family cried 'enough' and we returned to Sydney. To clear blue skies, near perfect temperatures, icy cold beer and chardonnay, where we forgot all about global warming for a while. But then we noticed that the drought was continuing. It was no longer the 'five year drought'. While we were away it had become the '10 year drought'. Then the '10 year drought' became the '100 year drought'. Some even claimed it was the '1,000 year drought'. At sometime during these years, my skeptical view of global warming and climate change started to weaken somewhat. At the very least, I thought, I should try to find out more about it to see what is really going on. For, if the predictions of some of the climate change doomsayers proved even half right, our world and our life would be changing dramatically. To cut a long story short, I quickly discovered three things about global warming: 1.  The 'science' of greenhouse gases and global warming had been around for almost 200 years. French mathematician Joseph Fourier calculating in the 1820s that the planet should be a lot colder than it was and that elements of the atmosphere must be trapping in the sun's heat. Irish physicist, John Tyndall identified those gases in the 1870s and, in the 1890s, Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius calculated that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase temperatures by some 5 degrees Celsius. 2.  Most of the high profile sceptics were backed and, in many cases, financed by industries and corporations who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo 3.  No scientist seriously questioned the existence and effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, nor did they question that we are rapidly increasing those gases through the burning of coal, natural gas and oil. It was pretty clear therefore that, all else being equal, our continued production of greenhouse gases would increase global temperatures. I then turned to climate change itself where there was a different story: 1.  Whereas the science of global warming has been around for a couple of centuries, climate change science is very recent. Modeling of global climate only being possible with the development of powerful computers. 2.  Where there is scientific consensus on global warming, there are many different predictions on the effect of a warming planet on the climate. 3.  Although there are differing predictions on climate change, few of them are beneficial. Principally because the speed of temperature increase is so rapid that plants, animals and humanity may struggle to adapt. My journey terminated when I saw this graph, from the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Even if there is only a small percentage chance of temperatures continuing to track carbon dioxide emissions, the consequences are so profound that it is a risk we simply cannot take.   One final clincher was the realization that temperatures a mere 5 degrees cooler than today put us into the last ice age.  What ever we may think about the effect of a warming planet on our climate, a 5 degree increase (as currently predicted if we continue with 'business as usual') is not something that we can risk happening.