The debate on global warming to the lay person tends to be:
One: We are polluting, and if we don’t stop, we’re all gonna die (It’s Bush’s Fault).
or Two: It’s nonsense.
Being a doctor, Climatology is outside my field, although if one knows history, one is aware that the Sahara was once a prairie, and Minnesota was once covered with 200 feet of ice, so something has obviously changed.
The problem with the global warming scenerio is that it reminds me of the 1970’s “population bomb” scares that said we’d all be dead of famine by 1990…whoops. The only famines nowadays are in Africa, where murderous dictators and civil wars allow them to go on. As for the scenerios of wall to wall people, newer predictions say the earth will stablize at 10 billion and then the numbers will start going down.
That is why I am happy that this BBC4 Report has unearthed a couple global warming experts, both economists and scientists, who question the recent Stern report on global warming, especially how it was inaccurately covered by much of the press.
The BBC4 Report link has links to PDF files of both the Stern report and links to all sorts of other reports telling us we are all going to die of the heat, and why. (the BBC is, of course, one of the worst culprits on promoting Global warming hysteria).
The dirty little secret about the Kyoto Treaty is that implementing it would be devastating to local economies. So most European nations who signed the treaty haven’t met their goals. And the growing economies of India and China are exempt from Kyoto, even though China often uses high sulfur coal to generate electricity.
And scientifically, those who concentrate on proving that pollution is changing the climate ignore that solar cycles have much to do with global warming.
Now, pollution is a bad thing. I see how smog has improved since implementing enviromental laws, and having lived in Appalachia, I have seen environmental degradation of stream and forests burned by acid rain. And how many cancers are due to pollution? How many childhood malformations?
Yet I am quite skeptical about the hysteria of those pushing Global warming, because the most strident voices seem to be using the movement for other purposes (Gore, to give his life purpose after losing an election, leftist yuppies to give a new aim after the fall of the Berlin wall, Eugenics/population bomb devotees who now see untermensch in India and China taking over the world economy, and Bush haters European anti Americans who use it to justify their paranoid hatred of America) .
So my take on all of this is:
One:Global warming is real.
Two: Pollution is bad.
Three: Pollution contributes to, but is not the main cause of Global warming.
Four: If we radically get rid of pollution, we will destroy economies, leading to a lot more problems (and deaths) from poverty than from climate change or even from pollution.
Five: I won’t give up my air conditioner, ozone hole or no ozone hole.
My prediction on all this?
Well, when Hillary is elected and signs Kyoto, nothing will change in the USA (she is, after all, too smart to wreck the economy) and Europe will continue to ignore Kyoto, so it will die a quiet death. But the press and the many lost who need a cause to justify their existance will merely go on to find a new real problem to exaggerate.
Unless, of course, if NYCity or Tel Aviv are nuked, then all bets are off.
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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines. Her webpage is Finest Kind Clinic and Fishmarket
2 users commented in " Global warming…uh wait a second "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackHello Nancy,
First time I’ve come across your blog but I’m going to have to post to disagree with a couple of the things you’ve said. To start at the bottom and work up, get a solar-powered air conditioner (no electricity brown-outs and turns the problem – too much light – into the solution – cooling). Millions of people use air-cons and coal-fired air-con with massive peaks of CO2 emissions during hot spells just reminds me of lemmings and cliffs. I was under the impression that CFCs (used in air-con and which zap the ozone layer and also have a greenhouse effect) have been banned and replaced – maybe you have a special old-school dangerous one? BTW the CFCs are only released if you don’t dispose of the unit in the correct way.
Kyoto targets and economies falling apart: the period covered by Kyoto (to 2012) covered the first moves by some of the richest nations to cut greenhouse gases. My opinion is the EU as a whole will scrape under the target by the skin of its teeth – not elegant but still ok. UK has cut emissions by 16% since 1990 while the economy has grown 35% (death? collapse? hair-shirts? weird eco-freaky lifestyle? hardly). The next stage is post-Kyoto 2012-2020. The EU has already set its own target of 20% below 1990, and international diplomacy is aimed at getting the USA, Canada, Australia, the big developing countries to participate presumably by taking the first move of stabilising emissions or cutting by 5%: so they’ll be chasing the EU which will have the best regulatory environment for fast-growing low-carbon industries. California has had stable emissions for years because of strict pollution controls while their economy has gone ballistic. China has far, far more to lose than the EU or USA if climate change bites, and they take it correspondingly far more seriously at the national government level: they are ACUTELY aware of the dangers of going down a coal-fired route but have a national income per person 1/30th of the UK (for India it is 1/60th) so they will find it more difficult to make the transition to clean energy if rich nations cop out of leading the research process.
Attribution of global warming (who done it?): 1860-1999 GHGs strong and increasing warming effect, The sun moderate and stable warming effect, aerosols (visible particles, soot etc) moderate and increasing cooling effect. That’s from ‘Weather, Climate and Climate Change: Human Perspectives’ by O’Hare et al (university climatology textbook). We’ve already cleaned up the aerosols in Western countries: if we clean up the Asian aerosols without tackling CO2, it will improve their air quality but increase the rate of warming.
Why are people in a hurry (hysterical, alarmist, fantasist, whatever) about action on GW? Because coal power stations last for 40 years and if we do the next 10-20 years economic growth by a massive deployment of dirty coal then this will accelerate warming. And because of GWB – the leader of the free world, baby. Until the big man, the leader of the USA is leading on GW, we’re going to struggle at the international level. All main 2008 contenders will introduce mandatory limits as soon as they walk through the door of the white house. It’s just a question of whether GWB will get with the programme or not. He’s part way there if you check the State of the Union speech.
My position on the debate: it’s real. We (the humans) are going to adapt to reality by moving quickly to clean energy. Are we too stupid/stuck in our ways to adapt? No. Our house and the 7 neighbouring ones have installed a woodchip boiler and changed to a wind electricity supplier. Our local city council (Derby, UK 230,000 pop) last night set itself a 25% reduction target over 5 years with cross-party consensus support, moving next to negotiations with all major employers in the city.
‘You can’t stop reality from being real’ Public Enemy
‘Move to the groove or be removed’ Industrial Artz
‘Thousands have lived without love, not one without water’ W.H. Auden
peace to the Philippines
Ed
BRAVO!!
I, and many people I know have not fallen to believe something simply because…because…bcause…someone said so!!
The fact presented to promote Global Warming are not based in science.
Personally, I like the doom and gloom of Greenland melting – which will raise sea level to destructive higher levels.
It’s a load of bull.
Greenland has 3 million cubic kilometers of ice – or 300000000000000000000000000 cubic centimeters of ice.
One cubic centimeter of ice required 66 calories to melt.
That’s an awful lot of calories to melt all that ice.
Oh, and by the way, the UN paper on global warming states that Greenland will, if global warming continues, will melt in 150,000 years.
What does Al Gore want us to believe ??
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