The Press
Climate does change and frequently! but surprisingly hasn't changed much at all in the last 2000 years. If you listen to the media you would think climate change has never happened before!. No matter what we hear on the TV or read in the press presenting 'Climate Change' as being a totally new phenomena, i.e. records being broken every year for an increase in: Temperature, Rain, Drought, Storms and some measurement being the highest in the last 10 years etc. The media doesn't normally put over very well or even attempt to tell us is that climate has always changed dramatically throughout history and always will.

Predicting Change
Fairly Accurate weather observation recordings have only been kept for the last 350 years in central England. Accurate recordings about 150 years. Nothing really is it, considering that our Earth is approx 6 Billion years old. So how are climate change predictions made? - well they are based on scientific analysis of tree rings and mud layers and most importantly ice layers (on the Greenland ice sheet and Antartic ice sheet) from the last 100,000 years. Models are built on the analysis that take many different parameters and the models are run with the different parameters on some of the most powerful computers in the world. There are many different result sets produced and if there is a group of results that are closely matched then this is taken as the best prediction from the data that has been run through the models. A weather forecast is produced in the same way but based on a smaller volumetrics of the Earths atmosphere.

It's not that long ago
There have been periods of time when our climate has been very uncomfortable for those living at the time, e.g. during 'The Little Ice Age', or for the weather for the years '1947' and '1963'. The river Thames was regularly frozen over during the Little Ice Age years of 1250 to 1850, when i say 'frozen over' I mean ice 1 to 2 metres thick of ice. Can you imagine how cold it was in the Peak District, the Lake District or Scotland, if those extreme cold conditions existed 200 miles south of us in London! As recently as 150 years ago, when your Grandad's - Grandad was alive the weather was far colder and for longer periods of time than now. In the last few hundred years whole villages in Europe have been over run by glaciers as they flowed at a rate of many metre's per day and nothing at all could stop them. Can you imagine a year without a summer?, globally '1815' was 'a year without a summer', it was dark wet and cold most of the year. This was the result of a massive volcanic eruption on an Indonesian island. The dust that stayed in the Earths atmosphere reflected some of the Suns energy back out to space and not to earth.

A few thousand years ago
The frequency of climate changes has been very different than it is now. Proof of this exists in the history of hill settlements in the Peak District, i.e Castlenaze (Chapel-en-le-Frith) and Mam Tor (Castleton), there were settlements of people in the Iron Age and Roman times on top of local hills 1500 feet above sea level!. At these times the climate must have been warmer than it is now otherwise people, and their animals could not have survived. Can you imagine even living on top of a 1500 ft hill even in some of our winters!

Climate Change and life
The Irish potato famine which killed untold hundreds of thousands of people was mainly caused by continuous rains and cold periods like we have never seen. Another reason for the famine was a total reliance on the potato as food and the mass export of other products like Oats leaving nothing else for the Irish to eat but potatoes. The crop failed 2 or 3 years running.

But it's not just Greenhouse Gases that affect our climate!
Other affects on our climate are caused by Volcanic eruptions, slight alterations in the Earths orbit around the Sun, Earthly 'wobbles' to a different inclination and the gravity of major planets in our solar system.

Global Warming
There is no doubt that we are altering our climate through greenhouse gases to never seen before levels but past cyclic patterns of climate change show that we should actually be just about, (just about - this may take upto 30,000 yrs) to plunge into another major ice age. Scientists are predicting a rise of 1 to 6 degrees celsius over the next 100 years. At the top end of this prediction are massive temperature changes and locally the changes could be even more. Economists forecast that to tackle climate change could us trillions of dollars. Is this a price we should pay?. Could the trillions of dollars save more lives spent on say supplying food and water to deprived nations?.

Climate Change happened before - but it became colder
As the last major Ice Age was coming to an end about 17,000 years ago, Greenland temperatures averaged approx -60 deg c, these days it doesn't drop much below -30 deg c there on average. The Earth continued to warm over the next 5000 years. Then very suddenly about 12,000 years ago, at a time named the 'Younger dryas', the average temperature plunged back dramatically from -40 to approx -55 deg c in less than a decade, in probably about 3 years and could have even been less. Compare this to the 0.6 deg c rise of the last 150 years. Not quite as dramitic is it? So dramatic climatic temperature change does happen and alters our average temperature both quickly and dramatically 'Up' or 'Down' regularly.