You know what I hate about this whole debate? The fact that Global Warming is standing in for an entire spectrum of ecological and even philosophical/moral issues. The way the debate has been framed, if you believe in global warming, then it's right not to waste resources, if you don't, then it doesn't matter. According to the shysters' unspoken logic, if global warming isn't real then you shouldn't worry about conservation, sustainability, or compassion for the environment. Just go ahead continuing to look out for yourself and amass and consume as many resources as you can; that's what keeps making us "richer" and "raising our standard of living."
Perhaps even more devious is the fact that the "debate" throws doubt on the entire scientific method and erodes people's confidence in their ability to know. Everything becomes about opinion, ignorant "skepticism," and unconscious/unreasoned motivations.
Debate is good. Honest debate, that is, where the varying perspectives are truly interested in SHARING the truth. And not just the isolated truth of some specific question, but the whole truth: what is really going on, what is important, what is the most reasonable, honorable, and moral way to live.
Global warming is now the poster child of environmental issues. It's a huge, scientifically complex topic, that most of us have no empirical first-hand evidence of. It is undeniably a critical issue, but it shouldn't been seen in a vacuum. What about Mass Extinction? What about Resource Depletion? Deforestation, pollution, erosion...
People who base their perspectives on isolated information are much more susceptible to manipulation. Those who seek to influence/manipulate us in one or another direction know this and use it. They try to make ideas simple and binary and to psychologically reward us for doing and thinking what they want us to.
The "debate" over global warming is a smokescreen to hide the evidence all around us that we are living in a destructive, insane, and untenable way. I believe there are people on both sides of the debate who don't want the population to know what's really going on.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/sciencefair/2009/07/coul...
Could the best climate models -- the ones used to predict global warming -- all be wrong?
Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.
"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."
During the warming period, known as the “Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum†(PETM), for unknown reasons, the amount of carbon in Earth's atmosphere rose rapidly. This makes the PETM one of the best ancient climate analogues for present-day Earth.
As the levels of carbon increased, global surface temperatures also rose dramatically during the PETM. Average temperatures worldwide rose by around 13 degrees in the relatively short geological span of about 10,000 years.