"Over the time of the chart above, man did pretty well. His population grew from fewer than 10 million to almost 7 billion. He had an agricultural revolution, an industrial revolution and an information revolution. He started cities. He started writing. He started recording his own history. He walked on the moon."
Global warming is a complicated subject. It therefore takes a lot of hubris or ignorance to think you can explain either the "for" or "against" case in a few hundred words. But I stumbled onto some data that meets my "keen grasp of the obvious" threshold for understanding.
Recall that we really need to answer "yes" to four separate questions before we join the Al Gore religion of "sign the treaty immediately or we will all die."
(1) Is the globe getting warmer?
(2) If so, is man doing it?
(3) If so, is it bad?
(4) If so, is the massive-reductions-in-CO2 approach the best way to deal with it?
You might have seen such questions before, but they frequently get mixed up in public discussions. For example, some people imply that if the answer to (1) is "yes", then the answer to (4) must be "yes" as well. If the temperature graph is going up, destroy your SUV. Or at least switch light bulbs.
However, Bjorn Lomborg thinks the answers to (1) through (3) are "yes", but that the answer to (4) is "no." He once challenged Al Gore to debate that fourth question alone. But Mr. Gore treated Lomborg as he would any other global warming skeptic or "denier", comparing him to tobacco companies of old and lecturing him about arctic ice caps and sea levels.
I am not only stuck on question (2), I'm stuck on question (1). I've seen graphs of temperatures, such as the so-called "global" temperature. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, presents such a graph in its "Summary for Policy Makers." While this graph does present to the eyeball a rising trend, one could ask several questions.....read entire article here
It never ceases to amaze how the simple mention of global warming in a news story sets off a tsunami of rhetoric. It generally comes from a very vocal minority that would go to its grave swearing that the sum total of climate science is a liberal plot to enrich Al Gore. Alternately, we are told the Martian ice caps are melting, proof that solar radiation and sunspot cycles — and not greenhouse gases — are the cause of planetary warmups.
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