2008 Woodie Awards
Is global warming just a doomsday prophecy?
Letter to the Editor
Issue date: 10/4/07 Section: Opinion
- Page 1 of 2 next >
Is global warming a fact? Probably. But then, global warming and global cooling have been a fact for something over 4 billion years.
Are we humans the nasty devils who are causing it? I know that many of the human-induced warming faithful will quote scholar after scholar to support their argument. But will they also quote the size of government grants received by these scholars? Such motivating grants have been handed out at an average of a billion dollars a year since 1990 - grants that would vanish if their recipients preached anything less inspiring than Armageddon.
I will quote but one source as typical of the "minority" scientists' view:
Dr. John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, said, "I remember as a college student at the first Earth Day being told it was a certainty that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy. Such doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines, but have proven to be completely false…Similar pronouncements today about catastrophes due to human-induced climate change," he continued, "sound all too familiar and all too exaggerated to me as someone who actually produces and analyzes climate information."
And who is to say what the "ideal" temperature for this planet is? And for which creatures? Granted the 0.6 degrees Celsius increase over the past century or so may well, some day, annoy a few polar bears. But what of the lady bug? Or the bee? Has anyone asked them? Perhaps a warmer climate would please them immensely. Both are certainly as grand a miracle of life as the polar bear, and both do far more for us humans. Pardon me. Us nasty humans.But let's assume for the moment that we truly don't want the planet to get any warmer. To hell with the bees. Can we stop the planet's own eons-old temperature meanderings? Nope. And it would be a folly of arrogance to think we could. If she wants to get warm, mother earth will do exactly that. Alright, then as a fall back position are there any genuinely rational actions we can take to minimize our dubious and minimal contributions to warming?
Are we humans the nasty devils who are causing it? I know that many of the human-induced warming faithful will quote scholar after scholar to support their argument. But will they also quote the size of government grants received by these scholars? Such motivating grants have been handed out at an average of a billion dollars a year since 1990 - grants that would vanish if their recipients preached anything less inspiring than Armageddon.
I will quote but one source as typical of the "minority" scientists' view:
Dr. John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, said, "I remember as a college student at the first Earth Day being told it was a certainty that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy. Such doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines, but have proven to be completely false…Similar pronouncements today about catastrophes due to human-induced climate change," he continued, "sound all too familiar and all too exaggerated to me as someone who actually produces and analyzes climate information."
And who is to say what the "ideal" temperature for this planet is? And for which creatures? Granted the 0.6 degrees Celsius increase over the past century or so may well, some day, annoy a few polar bears. But what of the lady bug? Or the bee? Has anyone asked them? Perhaps a warmer climate would please them immensely. Both are certainly as grand a miracle of life as the polar bear, and both do far more for us humans. Pardon me. Us nasty humans.But let's assume for the moment that we truly don't want the planet to get any warmer. To hell with the bees. Can we stop the planet's own eons-old temperature meanderings? Nope. And it would be a folly of arrogance to think we could. If she wants to get warm, mother earth will do exactly that. Alright, then as a fall back position are there any genuinely rational actions we can take to minimize our dubious and minimal contributions to warming?
Be the first to comment on this story