Do We Have to "Do" Anything?
I took the time to peruse a summary of the UN (more accurately, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report about global warming. It makes a reasonable argument that effects of human activity, when viewed separately from other phenomena, do indeed contribute significantly to global warming, and will continue to do so. (Even though I have residual skepticism because of things like this and this.)
The report does not support the hysteria about the effects. For example, the concerns about ice melt have been played down considerably from what the media tells us. The report indicates that Antarctic ice will actually increase due to more precipitation. When serious consequences, like more severe storms, are predicted, they are with a proviso that "confidence . . . is limited" because the models do not give reliable projections.
Even so, I can accept human causation, as well as environmental effects. What I cannot accept is that we necessarily have to do anything drastic. Changes will come with or without us. We will have to adapt to them over time, no matter what. Evolving in the right direction--less consumption, cleaner burning, alternative fuels, etc, makes sense. Radical changes, at huge cost, will not likely have a great deal of effect on the upcoming changes in our environment, so are they really necessary?
2 comments:
We need to go in radically different direction on energy production and usage from where we have been in past or face more waring to protect our oil interests and the climate/health occurances which are caused by adding all the garbage into our envirnoment from burning fossil fuels!
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism"
Date: February 15, 2007
Time: 12:00 noon
Speaker(s): Christopher C. Horner
Author
Host(s): Ben Lieberman
Senior Policy Analyst,
Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies,
The Heritage Foundation
Details:
For decades, environmentalism has been the Left's best excuse for increasing government control over our actions. It's for Mother Earth! It's for the children! It's for the whales! But until now, the doomsday-scenario environmental scares haven't been large enough to justify the lifestyle restrictions they want to impose. Manipulation of “global warming,” however, is the ideal scare campaign for those who hate capitalism and love big government. Horner posits that the massive global warming hysteria reveals the full anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-human agenda of today's environmentalists. He reviews the ten top global warming myths, carefully examining the evidence to determine how much warming there really is and what is actually causing it. And, he argues, it’s time to stand up to the environmentalist industry and insist: human beings are not the enemy.
Christopher C. Horner, a practicing attorney in Washington, D.C., is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and an acknowledged expert on global warming legislation and regulation, who has testified before Senate Committees as well as the European Parliament.
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