It certainly does seem that the government is using global warming as an excuse for yet more stealth taxes. Fortunately, I'm in Australia at the moment and the government here doesn't give a monkeys about the environment. I had a look at that link Gary provided to the Channel 4 show, which I'd like to have seen, and a lot of the information and arguments were the subject matter I studied at university. One of the subjects which I did was “Pleistocene environmental changeâ€, and involved analysing peat bog and ice cores and several other climatic indicators to recreate the environment and, to cut a long story short, the climate has been oscillating up and down in terms of temperature for the last two million years and the current warming trend is probably part of this process. The argument that more significant greenhouse gas inputs to the system are occurring from volcanoes etc than humans is correct. However no-one really knows the impact we have had as it is not readily quantifiable and hence the ongoing debate.
So what does all this have to do with model rail, well if it gets too hot our trains wont function correctly!