Global Warming

[teddy]

The first video was interesting. It says that parts of the ice are disappearing off Antartica, but surprisingly, the ice is growing in other parts of Antartica. This is climate change, and I believe climate change is always occurring. The question is whether or not we are causing it, and I believe our contribution is minimal.

The 2nd video was about loans and face book.

[Steve Gardner]

...global warming

I'll be interesetd to see the reaction to this. Not only is Global Warming not man-made, the emissions are "actually beneficial", according to these signatories.

Source: The Telegraph

More than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition denying that man is responsible for global warming.

The academics, including 9,000 with PhDs, claim that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are actually beneficial for the environment.

The petition was created in 1998 by an American physicist, the late Frederick Seitz, in response to the Kyoto Protocol a year earlier.

It urged the US government to reject the treaty and said: "The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind."

It added: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of ... greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the forseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments."

The petition was reissued last year by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, an independent research group, partly in response to Al Gore’s film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth.

Its president, Arthur Robinson, said: "If this many American scientists will sign this petition, you certainly can’t continue to contend that there is a consensus on this subject."

One of the signatories, Frank Nuttall, a professor of medicine, said he believed the Earth was becoming warmer, despite his signature.

"This issue is whether the major reason for this is from human activities. I consider that inconclusive at the present time," he said.

A spokesman for the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, said: “The world’s leading climate experts at the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believe that it is greater than 90 per cent likely that human activity is responsible for most of the observed warming in recent decades. That is a pretty strong consensus.

“The science has come a long way since 1998 and it continues to point in one direction - the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avert dangerous climate change.”

[teddy]

I think a jump in temperature of -10 or +10 is bad either way. Whether +1 is good or bad depends on where you live. Whatever, I'm more and more convinced now that global warming is mainly a natural occuring cycle, and that we contribute to probably about 0.1 degrees difference.

On a related topic, I went to see the school play of my nephew a couple of days ago. It was an Italian school (not that that matters). At a certian point, they talked about global warming and how we people had done this. It was not lost on me that this was a catholic school, because the "sin" mentality is how much of environmentalism works - it makes us feel guilty - it's like a new religion, also because you are like a heretic if you talk against it. It also disturbed me that these kids were being taught this - as if it was a proven fact. It really does bother me a lot! I believe our education establishments are becoming part of the political propaganda machine, unbeknownst to the teachers.

While we concern ourselves with CO2 emissions, and how we are ruining the planet, perhaps we should focus on some other environtmental problems that I believe are more important. How about the fact that the honey bee is disappearing all over the world, and the reasons are unclear but the effects could be devestating as they are such an important insect for pollination. Or what about Genetically modified crops, or GM anything? We are introducing a monster of a change to our eco-system IMO, and we are going to regret it in the future, I think.