Here’s are my beliefs about Global Warming. (Caution: What I’m about to say is exactly the opposite of the existing conventional wisdom on the subject. I will probably get blasted and slandered for this, but here goes:)
You constantly hear the terrible things global warming will cause: Increased flooding from melting iceburgs, more severe droughts, stronger hurricanes, plant and species extinctions, and all sorts of nasty stuff, unless we change the ways we live our lives. So say Al Gore and environmental groups, as well as the media.
I am not a scientist, but from the internet information I’ve gathered, I am skeptical that the Apocolyspe is on the horizon.
I don’t think we can pin all of this warming on mankind. In fact, can we blame mankind for any warming. Back in the 1970’s, scientists and the media were predicting that an ice age was coming. In fact, there has been flip-flopping between global warming and global cooling for over a century. That seems to have been completely forgotten.
Temperatures have been several degrees warmer than in the present. Like the Medieval Warming period that took place between 1000 AD and 1400 AD. Apparently in that point in time, the polar icecaps didn’t melt nearly enough to drown coastal cities. There’s isn’t any evidence that there were mass extinctions back then, and if there were mass outbreaks of diseases, it would probably be because the technology wasn’t advanced enough to combat them.
Now I will talk about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. I give it two thumbs down. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, just about every statement made in AIT was one-sided, misleading, exaggerated, spectulative or wrong. Even some global warming advocates have said that Gore overstated his case for global warming. The latest estimates of sea level rise by the IPCC, have been 8 to 17 inches by 2100. Gore stated they would rise 20 feet. Where he gets that number I don’t know.
Lastly, I would like to talk about greenhouse gas reduction. In order to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we would have to reduce emissions by 50, 66, to 80 percent. To do that, we would basically have to reverse all the technological advances we have achieved since the Industrial Revolution. Even that might be enough to stop or reverse global warming, or decrease all the greenhouse gases people say we need to eliminate.
I’m not a big supporter of Big Oil or the coal industries. I am not a holocaust denier, or an apologist for the tabacco industries. I don’t have a warped sense of reality, nor any of the other titles global warming advocates dub global warming skeptics. I am an average American who takes what they can get. If you ask me, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear is more accurate about global warming, than Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
