Burner Trouble- global warming and climate change from a personal perspective
Water wars, oil wars, climate change, global warming, A personal view
The Stern Report: Ignoring climate change will cost trillions
Author: martin2 Nov
The recently released UK government report compiled by respected economist Sir Nicholas Stern (summary here) shows quite compellingly that ignoring climate change or even intentionally suppressing references to it, is going to cost us big time. He projects worldwide economic conditions worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, driven by widespread drought, the spread of disease and damage to coastal areas from rising ocean levels, all in the next 20-40 years.
Tracking the news on climate change and warming, as I do daily, gets increasingly alarming, especially as our (US) interest in doing anything about it seems to wax and wane with the price of gasoline. I am wondering why Al Gore doesn’t broadcast his film, An Inconvenient Truth, on PBS and freely distribute DVDs to schools. It would serve two valuable purposes: raise the alarm and put Gore into the spotlight as I believe we need a President who will make this issue the focus of their presidency- unlike this idiotic debacle in Iraq.
2 Responses for "The Stern Report: Ignoring climate change will cost trillions"
This is an interesting article that touches on only a few basics of what is going on climatologically, but I do not think Al Gore is the spokesperson to carry this banner.
He thinks he knows far more than he does on the causes of our global climate changes.
Yes the earth is warming, yes we need to slow our destruction of the environment, but the #1 greenhouse gas is water vapor, not CO2. Also the earth goes through regular cycles that can be proven through geologic and human records. The earth was much cooler as recently as the 1850s, but the earth was much warmer in the 1400s than today.
Personally I try and do as much as I can environmentally. I recycle everything, all my paper, and all my organic waste is composted. I drive a pickup for my business with a small V6 rather than a V8 (and that is hard to do, as I need a full size truck to carry the loads I need to carry and all that is available are V8s).
In the business I am in (aquarium products and ocean décor), I stopped carrying coral from reefs and only carry synthetic coral (which has hurt my business, as it is much harder to sell due to the higher price). I also promote domestic breeding programs of fish too.
Thanks Carl but I have to respectfully disagree with you regarding today’s warming compared to the past. As Gore shows in the movie, we are warming far beyond any point in the last 850,000 years, all warming and cooling cycles taken into consideration. This was recently reinforced by older ice core samples that extend those measurements out to the 1 million year mark. There is nothing natural about this warm-up. Water vapor may be a factor but we have never had this high of a concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Now we’re adding methane because of permfrost melt which multiplies the rate of warming even faster- methane is 20-25 times as potent a greeenhouse gas as CO2.
It has been my observation that hobbyists like aquarium owners and gardeners are often the first observers, on a personal level of climate change.
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