There may be legitimate, albeit small, changes in aspects of the world’s climate that bear study and discussion, but the furious fervor one hears in the mainstream media about its apocalyptic implications is simply unwarranted. I read an editor’s note in a science magazine earlier this year (I think it was Scientific American) that made this same point: the worst case doomsday scenarios that are regularly trotted out as the way of the future unless the most stringent, extreme green agenda is universally and slavishly adopted, are just not responsible.
The ideas that humans are capable of “destroying” the earth, much less of “saving” it, both strike me as arrogant.
More and more news supports this:
Exclusive: Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Who Endorsed Obama Dissents! Resigns from American Physical Society Over Group’s Promotion of Man-Made Global Warming
Also, the worst scenarios of terrorist activity were always about something else than flying a non-threatening commercial airliner into a skyscraper. And the wors scenarios now are as wrong as they’ve ever been.
Also, the most positive scenarios like the “human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period” have usually been wrong. People have always been wrong about something, many people, at the same time, all the time.
However, most arguments against man-made global warming are strawmen. They do not solve the long-range problem we have, which is that we dump too much stuff in the atmosphere, oceans and the earth. Because we don’t know exactly what is going to happen in 100+ years, we should not be too sure of anything, so green policies are smart, because they bring smarter technology in the market.
Human history has shown that popularity is usually an indicator of something that is not quite the right guess. So we’re always left with the best guess being something that the consensus of science bears out. A few hundred dissenting scientists do not break a consensus in a world of millions of them.
I guess few people realise how much more we need to invest in climate study before we can make more educated guesses? Meanwhile, we have the people with science saying let’s be a bit more conservative about destroying our environment, and the people with bucks are saying let’s destroy wantonly and fight meaningless wars, the Second Coming is near, anyway.
I believe in the Second Coming, but if I’m right, the Lord is going to want to know how we (the “me” we, not the “them” we) have treated the environment he created for us. There’s some strong language about that in D&C 59:16-20. One mostly hears the “Earth is full and there’s to spare” (which does come out of a different context), and about “the fulness of earth” being ours. But mostly in defense of wanton destruction of our environment. How about “not to excess neither by extortion”?
And I realise I’m somewhat beating a strawman here, but let’s face the fact that the GW denials mostly come from people with money invested in current technology, and all the “greening” efforts would mean they’d have to invest in new technology, while their technology is still “viable”. That viability would not be true, if we had to pay for the real use of resources.
We have created an economy that actually rewards reckless use of resources, so what do we do about it? Global warming (which comes out quite clearly in the temperature readings and guesses about older temperatures from pollen counts, ice layers, tree growth rings, etc.). We have temperature estimates from a thousand years ago from people talking about extreme climate events. A lake won’t freeze if it’s the temperature is above 0 Celsius, and it won’t melt unless it is.
So a frozen lake in the summer means a cold year in that area. People’s letters, journals and other writings confirm the estimates from pollen counts, tree rings, ice layer thickness and constitution from the same years. They wouldn’t agree if the temp. estimates were so wrong in the whole. Some estimates and actual temperature measurings are wrong for various natural reasons, but there are statistical ways of factoring out freak extremes. Statistics don’t lie as much as the proverb suggests they do.