Re: Higher temperatures =
I know. It's still so damned disappointing though. When you consider, that when one of the growth industries of lying about a certain issue spring up, it can only function as a delaying tactic. In the end the process will make the final determination, but it is just such an indefensible waste of time. In the tobacco cause, the lying and obfuscation lead to them not losing a case in court for what, fifty-five years? A generation or two, of people who should have known better, smoked more and a percentage died.
With this issue, however it's different. WE delay, and it becomes harder, and harder, and more expensive... This is an escalating threat. When a public forum/journalist/agenda uses the basic lack of educational systems, and the resulting deplorable ignorance, against us.... What do they gain by throwing us all under the bus? Taylor and the like over at the Heartland Clown College get to be employed in one of the largest growth industries today, i understand. His kids will go to collage. I get it.
But. What then?
Have people even noticed that all of the most capable climatologists, and all of those who can speak well in the public forum, are wasting no time trying to publicize this issue? Why should they? Those in a position of public trust, who are supposed to watch out for and react to just these issues, seem only able to focus on their own venial short-term agendas while the rest of us are thrown as a whole right under that buss.
I've never liked the term 'Catastrophic Global Warming." Life will go on, but changed. The planet will continue, even though our public opinions seem perfectly content with allowing our governments and industries to run destructive testing on the only bit of rock in the universe that we can live on. What really offends me, however, and this is the unforgivable part, is that they've never read a history book. When there are ten to twelve billion people on the planet, just about the time we are running out of oil, the same governments that are running amok and acting like undisciplined toddlers right now, are going to be panicked for survival.
Who could possible imagine, that a few degrees of temperature rise in the middle of the Pacific ocean would lead to millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa dying, or being in danger of dying', of thirst? America was at the height of it's power, and Europe was working together as never before. Oil was cheaper and far more plentiful, and food production setting records every year... And all they could tell us is that we did not have the resources to reach those people in time.
It's people who are at risk from AGW. It's our food production, and our economic models, and the political balance of power, that we don't seem to be very good at maintaining in the best of times. No. The readers here need to ask themselves, that while the climate scientists in the US can't work, because they are being so badly harassed by spurious freedom of information requests, why they no longer bother to expose themselves to the sea of articles just like this one?
It's because we've screwed around with this for fifty years, and the meaning has been clear for twenty years before that. Reduce CO2 emissions. Not tariffs or taxes, nor caps and trades, but an actual reduction in the pollution that is causing obvious and measurable physical damage to the atmospheric bubble we are trapped within. Now, with tipping points kicking in, and methane bubbling out of the Arctic and Atlantic ocean... Eight degrees of warming may well seem like a gift.
Nature, as it always does, will settle this "Debate," but wasted time as well as our inability to act due to private agendas are the true Catastrophe here. This is not a failure of our technology. It is a failure of our educational systems, our political systems, and our society as a whole.
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