Climate Change – not what you expect September 11, 2008
Posted by Al in : nature,personal,politics , trackbackClimate Change is something that we all agree on, isn’t it? We all know that our excessive lifestyles are causing CO2 to rise into the atmosphere, and this process is causing the Earth’s climate to become hotter and hotter, to the detriment of all of us. However, there are strong arguments that this is not really happening, and that the Earth’s climate is, in fact, getting colder. As the evidence for this grows, then it might be time to think about why governments and large corporations want you to think that we are responsible for this non-existent global warming: could it be that there’s a lot more profit and tax in getting consumers to replace all their existing kit with new, environmentally friendly alternatives. Alternatives that their guilt will force them to accept paying a premium for?
That would be a very cynical attitude to take; but there is mounting evidence that global warming may not be happening after all. Indeed, the average temperature of the Earth has fallen every year for the last 10 years. This is, to recycle a phrase, “an inconvenient truth” and one that all the policy makers would prefer to ignore, or to dismiss as merely a delay in the inevitable process of global warming. This would have nothing to do with their vested interests, of course. The same scientific policy makers projected a huge rise in global temperature related to the increase in CO2 in our atmosphere, but while CO2 has continued to rise to match expectations, the global average temperature has not risen at anywhere near the projected rate: this would tend to suggest that the study linking CO2 to global warming should be revisited. In fact, some senior physicists have subjected the IPCC’s working to a bit of analysis and have cast doubts over the data used, the way it has been interpreted and the conclusions drawn from these studies.
Finally, just to add a bit more doubt to the whole global warming issue: a new study suggests that as polar ice melts it allows billions of tonnes of phytoplankton to bloom in previously ice-bound seas. These phytoplankton might be a more efficient carbon store than all the rainforests of the world put together, which may well lead to a dramatic drop in the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere. This remains to be seen, but it is clear that whilst melting ice-sheets are bad for polar bears, they may not be bad for the Earth as a whole.
I, personally, don’t believe that the whole global warming issue is as bad as has been made out, and I think that profit and the benefit of a worried and guilty society are the main reasons that this has been pushed into the mainstream media and so onto an unwitting public. I don’t believe that it is coincidence that global warming became the main threat to the world at around the same time that the Cold War finished: governments like their populace to have something other than government to worry about, and so give the government an opportunity to show itself as protecting it’s people. We currently have global warming and terrorists to keep us worried, and I’m certain that there is a killer disease, potential natural disaster or even alien attack waiting in the background, just in case any of the current sources of threat are disproved. Maybe I’m too cynical, but it stops me having to worry.
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