Correction: News Sources are saying that the IPCC has made statements of the sort I allude to below. At the same time they imply that the IPCC says that humans are responsible. I guess I need to actually get a copy of the report and read it to know exactly what is said. As for the rest of my rant... I leave it there for the doubting thomases to gnaw on!
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Oh my god... A U.N. Panel has presented a report that says they *think* humans may be contributing to global warming!
Picture me shaking my head.
When I was just a lad a panel of respected scientists presented a report saying that they believed that the human race was generating more CO2 than the ecology of the planet could deal with without casing a climatic shift.
That was over thirty years ago.
They went so far as to predict certain changes which would indicate that those shifts were underway.
Fast foward to the 21st Century, many of the indicators that were predicted have come to pass and are with us now.
Low lying inhabited islands in the Indian and Pacific Ocean's have disappeared under the waves causing forced migration of the people living on those islands in the past 10 years. It's not a debatable point it's a known fact.
Paleogeologists and Climatologists have known the general means by which the planet has heated and cooled for decades and with current computer modeling they have an even finer appreciation of what is occuring.
More than 90% of the people involved in research into this global event are convinced that the data points directly at human acitivies as being the cause of the current unprecedented change that the planet is undergoing.
Are there natural events that contribute to global warming?
Certainly, after all this has been going on long before mankind entered the industrial age.
The issue is like that of trying to put more tea into a cup that's already full to the brim. Can the cup hold more tea if it's already full?
Of course not.
Ok, so say that the tea cup is 96% full and we decide that we're going to add another 4% since there's that much more space till the cup is full.
Did we account for the fact that natural events are already adding to the existing volume occupying that cup?
No?... ooops!
Ok, well can we quantify in a general manner how much green house gas is created by human activities?
We can? Oh good! Take that number and then quantify what the average green house gas creation would be if we weren't actively contributing to the cycle. Figure that the amount we contribute adds X load/accelleration to the process where Y would be the normal rate of the cycle. X equals our contribution to 'forcing' the normal process to excede it's usual time frame.
Does it really take that much in the way of brain power to figure out that if you light a fire you are creating heat? What if 6 million people light fires, will the amount of heat in the atmosphere increase?
And what happens when 6+ billion light fires?
Is it normal for 6 billion fires to occur every day 365 days a year?
In simply cooking a meal we change the thermal dynamic of the atmosphere. When we cook three meals a day we increase the amount of 'mechanical heat' available in the world by a knowable factor. But how many people cook with a wood stove, how many still cook using coal? Every action carrys a cost. A simple cause and effect.
Now toss in the exhaust from hundreds of millions of cars, the exhaust of jet airliners, the methane effluence from the absurdly large number of domesticated food animals we herd, the waste gases from our power generation plants.. the list of things we do that aren't part of what naturally occurs could fill more pages than I care to type.
And the specious argument that since humans are a natural part of the world and therefore everything they do is 'natural' is the same type of logic that said that the Earth was the center of the solar system so don't even go there.
The world most humans participate in is anything but 'natural'. We wouldn't have aluminum foil if we'd stuck to the natural world. Do I want to abandon the technological world I live in? Hell no!
Are there better ways to do the things we do? Yup, but it costs more money to do things the smart way. And that's exactly why people keep hedging on the issue of global warming.
So when I see a report saying that 'probably' we contribute to the party I just have to shake my head.. it seems a good portion of what purportedly were humans are actually members of the Ostrich clan.
In the end the planet will regain it's equalibrium, but we probably won't be around to see that.
2 comments:
George Carlin said that maybe the reason we're here is because the planet needed plastic, but couldn't produce it by itself.
And now that it has plastic, it doesn't need us anymore. So it came up with a virus that attacks people where they're most vulnerable: the immune system.
And he thinks that, while people have a sense of superiority, the planet -- which is alive -- will shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
I've not heard so much about this issue as I have in recent months. Seems like everyday there's something new.
What I don't get is why so much time is being devoted to deciding whether people had anything to do with it, or if it's a natural phenomenon. The point is that it's happening, and all these eggheads, rich men and politicians need to forget about themselves for a little while and think of a way of keeping the planet alive so that we can stay alive.
I think that's what I was trying to articulate.. and ended up doing a lot of ranting instead, thanks Eddie.
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