Moving away from the blind ramblings of my insomniac self and on to the ramblings of my angry self. Has this country's lack of respect for logic gone so far as to even infiltrate the computer-savvy community? Today on digg, much to my horror, a british "documentary" claiming that global warming is a sham made it to the front page. Basically, they argue that "climate change has always happened" and "since the atmosphere isn't heating up as quickly as the earth's core, global warming is a sham." Both of these if you think about them for just a few minutes are quite ridiculous. Firstly, any 8th grade earth science student knows about the infrared heat radiated by the earth. The key about global warming isn't that CO2 gas heats up quickly from the sun, but that CO2 gas traps heat into the Earth's atmosphere. Just like February is colder than december and 3pm is warmer than noon, the infrared radiation absorbed and then radiated by the ground affects the general temperature alot more than the absolute amount of sunlight coming in. The more heat that gets trapped in the atmosphere, the more this infrared radiation bounces back and forth before escaping into space. So OF COURSE the ground is getting hotter than the air at a quicker rate. C'mon, did no one pay attention in earth science?
Then there's the argument that climate change has always happened. This is true. Let's set aside for a moment that the rate of climate change is increasing at an exponential rate and the average temperature of the earth is heading way past anything in recorded history. Since, I believe it is true that at times in Earth's history the average temperature has been many times what it is today. Okay, that's fair. Only the Earth itself couldn't give two shits about global warming. In fact, I have a feeling if the Earth were conscious, it would be like "thank goodness these crazy humans are about to kills themselves off so I can get on with my celestial life." Global warming is PURELY a human concern. The Earth has adapted and will adapt and perhaps humanity will go the way of the dinosaurs. The point is that WE CANNOT ADAPT TO SUCH DRASTIC CLIMATE CHANGE. Perhaps thousands of years ago, it didn't matter if half the current continents suddenly were underwater. In fact, it probably didn't. But with the current population, that would be devastating. We're just not set up to take the extra hurricanes and water levels and all the other lovely things that come from global warming.
I really don't understand why some people are fighting it so passionately. Let's pretend for a moment that global warming wasn't happening. Is it so horrible that people are switching to more efficient lightbulbs? In fact, wouldn't it be great if we could develop new energy technologies that got us completely independent of foreign oil sources? In fact, considering that the oil resources are going to run out in less than a century, aren't alternate energy sources even more important? Clearly, I'm quite past convinced that global warming is very real and very dangerous and is going to sneak up on humanity so that by the time people wisen up it'll be too late to reverse. But even if the whole damn thing were a scare tactic, the resulting changes certainly are benign when compared the the thousands of lives lost in the past few years because of a completely false scare tactic employed by the current administration involving WMDs. Seriously, someone please tell me what's so bad about trying to combat global warming?
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