With all due respect for Al Gore (which isn't much), I think he's full of baloney. I believe he would do anything to further his cause and his opinion.
What I believe really doesn't matter, but here it is just so you folks know where I'm coming from.
I do believe that the earth cools and warms in cycles, and I also believe that what man does or does not do, contributes only a very minute amount to the process. Natural events such as volcanic eruptions do a lot more to effect warming than anything we are capable of doing.
So does this mean that I think we should pollute the earth? Of course not. We need to be responsible, but let's call it what it is rather then get all tied up in Al Gore's fuzzy math.
He created the internet, didn't he?
Tim,
I agree that Al is not the messenger that we would select for this subject. I think he is trying to remold himself for the 2012 elections. He has picked on an important subject of public interest but he is not fully informed and he is probably only 95% sincere and 120% driven by delusion of full comprehension.
Summary: Yes, every once in a while a meteor wipes out a 100 square miles or so, but until then, we need to protect what we have, just like we would on any short hike in the wilderness. For that we are aware of nature, conserve water and food and not get over-heated! That, after all, is what our life journeys are really about. At this time, we're overheating, poisoning and disrupting what we and our grandchildren love and need.
Explanation:
That having been said, the natural disasters wipe out millions of years of species development. That has happened before and will happen again. Some of these cycles are simply caused by natural cyclic shift in the earth’s axis and so the moon's pool on the water is changed and consequently temperate zones shift and seasons care earlier or later and plants and animals either adjust or lose out.
This we know.
We also know that mass planting of the wrong plants, such as fir tees replacing natural chaparral on the hills above winding rivers in S. Africa, dried up the rich rivers to trickles threaten all the thousands of creature, fish, birds animals in the food chain that depended on them.
One woman got permission to replace the natural vegetation to its wild state with native species and cleared the pines. The tributary subtended by that land refilled with water and life was rescued. Now they applied her work to the rest of those man abused hills.
We know that the acid droplet perpetual mists in China are changing weather patterns. More work is being done. But the Kyoto agreement foolishly allowed India and China to be shielded to protect them because they were developing countries!
The U.S. corps of Army Engineers helped all the communities to tame the mighty Mississippi and so essential silt no longer washed down the flat swamp lands wit hits own fragile ecosystems of anchoring plants that break the force of hurricanes, and so they can now roar in at almost full force over a fraction of the wetlands, now vanished that slow them down.
So what we do does change the planetary interconnected systems.
Add to that the blanket effect of green house gases we worsen the situation.
As a scientist, I am more convinced than not that the increase in industrial and churned up gases and decaying millions of tons of waste food in garbage dumps and the methane from cows contributes to global warming.
I feel that we can easily remedy this damage.
Of course, nothing we do matches the spasms of nature. We are always under threat of another volcano erupting or a meteor crashing devastating life for a long time.
In the meanwhile, in practical terms, we are the principal cause of climate change in our own life spans. That is what I consider the facts are.
However, even if this was not true, the climate is changing and without addressing this by all amelioration possible we will have industrial disruption, food shortages and tragic famines. There will also be blame on the West and further fuel for wars.
Even if that did not happen, we still have almost total loss of fish and other native aquatic life in most major rivers in the industrial word. The organic man made toxins have altered the sex of fish, wiped many out and the ones we catch are laden with some degree of these toxic substances.
Besides this 30% of all bird species and 70% of all news, frogs, toads and the like will be wiped out over the next 10 to 50 years. Pollution, season and climate change, introduction of non-native species are robbing our offspring of the planet's richness.
So let’s broaden our idea of "Climate change" to represent that all we do without necessity to destroy what we have gained dominion of: the entire plane.
Asher
