If anyone had asked me a week ago if I would engage in a knock-down-drag-out fight about global warming, I would've said "no." If you asked anyone I know "is Brian a climate fanatic?" they would've said "what? He never talks about that."
But I have seen too much blatant denial in the past week to ignore it.
None of the questions you're posing are serious questions, except for "what should we do?" We have influence over what is happening because the most likely cause of rapid climate change is the human production of greenhouse gas. It isn't about whether warmer or cooler climate is more desirable, it's about the rate of change. There is some pretty good evidence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maximum) that the last time the climate rose this rapidly it caused a mass extinction of life. (And no, this isn't the same mass extinction as the theorized meteor strikes that killed off a lot of dinosaurs. Those were estimated at 250 million years ago. This was a mere 55.8 million years ago, according to geological records.)
Once you actually start paying attention, "is global warming happening/are we causing it" is no longer a serious question. It's very well-established that it is. The place people disagree is what to do about it. I suspect that this is partly because any Repub who proposes Big Business and Big Oil reduce their greenhouse emissions is going to find himself out of a job, but that's just me.
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Date: 9/5/08 13:04 (UTC)But I have seen too much blatant denial in the past week to ignore it.
None of the questions you're posing are serious questions, except for "what should we do?" We have influence over what is happening because the most likely cause of rapid climate change is the human production of greenhouse gas. It isn't about whether warmer or cooler climate is more desirable, it's about the rate of change. There is some pretty good evidence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maximum) that the last time the climate rose this rapidly it caused a mass extinction of life. (And no, this isn't the same mass extinction as the theorized meteor strikes that killed off a lot of dinosaurs. Those were estimated at 250 million years ago. This was a mere 55.8 million years ago, according to geological records.)
Once you actually start paying attention, "is global warming happening/are we causing it" is no longer a serious question. It's very well-established that it is. The place people disagree is what to do about it. I suspect that this is partly because any Repub who proposes Big Business and Big Oil reduce their greenhouse emissions is going to find himself out of a job, but that's just me.