wolf wrote:Scrat, I don't know what your motivation is, but I find anyone trying to debunk the dangers of global warming highly irresponsible. Any planet's ecosystem would sustain heavy changes with a steep rise of temperature in one century. I have no problem with that on an uninhabited planet.
As it happens, this is exactly the rhetoric I got to hear in mid 1999, when all my colleagues were extremely nervous about the "Y2K bug", and I tried to calm down some of their hysteria. Remember Y2K? The reason I bring it up is that you cannot safely assume that scares are real just because a lot of talking heads on TV debate them. You are therefore stuck with the possibility that global warming is basically just another Y2K. Given this possibility, why is it "highly irresponsible" for people to try and debunk it? They may well do us a big favor!
owi wrote:Compare the number of cars that are driving on the streets today with those 50 years ago. Now guess what happens when the Chinese want to start driving with cars. The total amount of emission is not falling.
On the other hand, there's a limited amount of oil in the ground, and humankind can't burn more than all of it. This puts a strict limit on how bad global warming can get in the very long run. I wonder why environmental activists never mention the fact, because they tend to be the same people who keep telling us that we will run out of resources, and the sky will fall upon us because of
that.
owi wrote:Scrat, I hope you are right and global warming is just a myth of most scientists but in this case I trust the scientists more than you.
Good point, but if you trust the scientists, you might as well be consequent about it. Few scientists deny that global warming is real, but most of them also find that any likely amount of global warming will be non-catastrophic. The high end of the IPCC range estimates (up to 12 °F in the 21st century) was deliberately designed to yield a worst-case estimate, and the IPCC explicitly declines to estimate the likelyhood of these scenarios. As I said in response to wolf, their latest best guess is 5°F from 2000 to 2100, which is tolerable.
owi wrote:Scrat - What else - but the global warming - caused/s the rising sea level?
Global warming may well cause sea levels to rise, but note just how little of a rise climatologists are actually predicting. In the case of the IPCC, their prediction is about ten inches from 2000 to 2100, which is real but far from catastrophic. Can you see the recurring theme here?
-- Thomas