Read : EDITED. lol
So brenda and i were chatting the other day about earth hour (mostly me saying how i think its absolutely pointless) and she brought this to my attention:
ZOMG right!?!
Short extract from said site
MYTH: Global warming will cause huge disruptions in climate, more storms, and the coasts will flood! America must sign the Kyoto Treaty!
This has to be broken into four pieces.
MYTH No. 1: The Earth is warming!
TRUTH: The Earth is warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the global average surface temperature increased about 0.6 degrees Celsius over the 20th century.
MYTH No. 2: The Earth is warming because of us!
TRUTH: Maybe. The frantic media suggest it's all about us. But the IPCC only said it is likely that we have increased the warming.
Our climate has always undergone changes. Greenland was named Greenland because its coasts used to be very green. It's presumptuous to think humans' impact matters so much in comparison to the frightening geologic history of the earth. And who is to say that last year's temperature is the perfect optimum? Warmer may be better! More people die in cold waves than heat waves.
MYTH No. 3: There will be storms, flooded coasts and huge disruptions in climate!
TRUTH: There are always storms and floods. Will there be much bigger disruptions in climate? Probably not.
MYTH No. 4: Signing the Kyoto Treaty would stop the warming.
TRUTH: Hardly.
many scientists laugh at the panic.
Dr. John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville said: "I remember as a college student at the first Earth Day being told it was a certainty that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy. Such doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines, but have proven to be completely false." "Similar pronouncements today about catastrophes due to human-induced climate change," he continued, "sound all too familiar and all too exaggerated to me as someone who actually produces and analyzes climate information."
The fundamentalist doom mongers also ignore scientists who say the effects of global warming may be benign. Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas said added CO2 in the atmosphere may actually benefit the world because more CO2 helps plants grow. Warmer winters would give farmers a longer harvest season, and might end the droughts in the Sahara Desert.
Why don't we hear about this part of the global warming argument? "It's the money!" said Dr. Baliunas. "Twenty-five billion dollars in government funding has been spent since 1990 to research global warming. If scientists and researchers were coming out releasing reports that global warming has little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn't be as much money to study it.Extract from a readers comment:
Thinking that humans could single-handedly destroy a 4.5 billion year old planet in just under 100 years it just hubris. It has been proven time and time again that while carbon dioxide emissions have increased, the global temperatures have stayed constant, and now are decreasing. Another issue environmentalists contend is that the ice caps are melting and the sea levels are rising. This is not only unfounded, but does not even make sense. First the Arctic is an ocean, not a landmass, and because of water displacement and the density of ice versus water, the sea level would actually stay the same or decrease (this could be found in any basic chemistry book). As for Antarctica, which is 90 percent of the worlds ice, it is been cooling for the past 20 years and West Antarctic ice has been increasing for the past 6,000 years.
Interesting, no?
