Teaching Kids to laugh at junk/demoKKKrat "science"

Curiosity compells me to respond on this topic.

I can understand and agree that the media does, in fact, blow things way out of proportion in regards to many, many subjects on an almost daily basis. However, the global warming issue is one that has had some scientists (who detected/discovered and were actively monitoring data on the subject) screaming since the 50's and 60's for someone to listen because we collectively were heading for some potentially serious problems in the future. I do agree that we've gone now to a little more of a scare-tactic approach to something and that leaves some people with a hopeless feeling of "the damage is already done, what could I possibly do to reverse the trend or help out at this point." But to me, it's almost as though we were walking around with our proverbial heads up our butts and completely ignoring the issue until the outcry was made that things really were more serious and "catastrophic" than otherwise claimed to be.

Many companies have been at the forefront of denouncing global warming as just a left-wing environmentalist scare-tactic to get people to vote for their candidate and continue to buy gas and oil with no worries in order to keep the economy stable - at least the economy for their particular company. And I truly, truly understand the complexity of what it would mean or take for an oil and gas based economy/society such as what ours has become to have to move to a different commodity. That process would have to be an extremely lengthy process in my opinion because we employ so many people in the oil and gas industries as well as the automotive and transportation industries and would require some major growing pains to do an economic shift of that magnitude. And the oil and gas companies know that based on their studies there is still PLENTY of oil out there to pull from the ground and sell to the consumer which translates into MANY more billions of dollars and jobs.

With all that being said, the issue to me is one of time. There are a couple of key points that I think we should consider regarding this issue.

First, we (should) know that getting off the oil and onto another form of energy will take a lengthy period of time for a society to do. Which is why you had so many scientists screaming for change 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. Most scientists understand that change over time is normally a VERY gradual process. So to invent new technology that will work and help remove us from an oil-based energy society will take quite some time.

Second, global warming has many contributors to it. One of which is definitely the sun. The second is the way climate changes work on a natural basis without the inclusion of man-made forces that add to or contribute to the already existing natural phenomena that occurs. For example, we know through study of the past that the earth generally goes through periods of spikes in the "warming" of the climate and troughs of "coldness" or ice ages. There is a definite trend that we can see through historical scientific data that we've collected regarding the climate. And we need to know what all the natural contributors are. So the final question about the contributors is "how much do humans affect these trends?" Or another very important question along those same lines is "how much have we sped the natural process up?" This is where there is much speculation, but we have ignored it for a very long time and now the worry among many scientists is, "have we waited too long to think about it?" I'm of the opinion we haven't, but I do think it will be more difficult NOW for us to reverse a climate trend that we've affected than it would have been 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.

Third, the current number one suspect to global warming is additional CO2 in the atmosphere. The definitive number one cause to additional CO2 in the atmosphere is automobiles. China has just recently begun to change their economy from a bicycle society to an automobile society. Not to mention that they still burn coal in most all their power plants which is another big contributor to greenhouse gases. Ever wondered about all those respiratory diseases and problems that keep popping up on the news that begin in China or eastern Asia? It's not really that hard to put two and two together. Not only do the automobiles contribute to the greenhouse gases, but also to atmospheric pollution.

Bottom line is that this is a very complicated issue based on what we know and what we don't know, economies and jobs, and people's perceptions of whether we've waited too long already or not. The big thing that I've seen as far as youth are concerned is that many people currently have the attitude that they aren't going to worry about and the next generation will "take care of it." That's not EVERYONE's feeling or opinion, but their are a lot of people like that. So scaring kids into action for the future is probably not the right way to approach it; however, this IS an issue that could very well be the number one problem of the next generation and something that they should definitely have on the forefront of their minds as they grow up.

ryn wrote-



But the problem is that if something effective is done about it as opposed to something done about it, such as talking, the result may well be more serious and catastrophic than can be shown to be the case if nothing is done about it that has an effect.

We are much less likely to take notice of a far off and theoretical disaster scenario than an imminent one and particularly so when we are psychologically dependent upon conspicuous consumption to verify our self esteem.

If WW-II didn't cause the great man-made eco-disaster, it can't happen.