Hi Jon,
Have you seen this Blog Action Day thing on climate change?
On 15th Oct blogs are being invited to sign up and write a piece about climate change. I'm not sure if it's something you might want to do.
Gavin
It is something with which I think that we should be involved, so I checked out their site. Their mission statement reads:
'More than any other country, action taken by the United States to limit greenhouse gases and build a clean energy economy is needed to achieve a sustainable solution to our global climate crisis.
This December world leaders will gather in Copenhagen to negotiate a global response to climate change. As a world leader in greenhouse gas pollution as well as clean energy technology, the United States needs to take bold action by implementing comprehensive clean energy policies to curb emissions.
Nobel Peace Prize Winner and President Barack Obama has said that climate change is an urgent threat, and now is the time for him to lead the United States in confronting the climate crisis.
This is a chance for people around the world and in the United States to join together in telling President Obama that we want him to lead the United States in taking bold and significant action to reduce greenhouse gasses.
Time is running out, and our planet can't afford to wait.'
Every week now I receive reports on the subject of climate change. Some believe that it is directly linked to man's depredations on the environment; others don't. On the whole the people who deny the concept are apologists for the military-industrial complex, but there are an increasing number of alternative types who like to believe that everything is a conspiracy; the type who wrote articles in alternative magazines saying that AIDS was spread by the CIA rather than by unsafe sex.
But even if you ignore the issue of climate change, anyone with half a brain can see that man's depredations on the environment are reaching a crisis point. We cannot carry on like this because soon we shall reach a tipping point of no return, after which the ecosystem will be irretrievably ruined.
So, don't just sign petitions. Do something about it!
Well, I'm not convinced about Obama deserving a Nobel, but we do need to take action on global warming. Here’s my post for Blog Action Day:
ReplyDeletehttp://selfdestructivebastards.blogspot.com/2009/10/wake-up-humanity.html
Everyone else go make one too!
'...people who deny climate change are apologists for the military-industrial complex'. Including presumably the dozens of climatologists, physicists, geophysicists, economists and environmental scientists who signed the letter to the UN Secretary-General in December 2007, querying the whole basis of climate change theory and denying that any consensus exists. Or is Freeman Dyson a running dog of the Bush-Cheney conspiracy?
ReplyDeleteJudged by ordinary standards the idea of CO2-based climate change is not even wrong: it is so poorly defined that it does not reach the dignity of honest error. The evidence is either ambiguous or plain wrong (see for example the famous PowerPoint presentation that gained Al Gore his Nobel Prize), and the predictions (when they are not so vague as to be meaningless) consistently falsified almost as soon as they are uttered.
There are plenty of real environmental issues (over-fishing; global water shortages) to occupy us. We have no business wasting resources on a bogus issue.
When I wrote "apologists for the military indistrial complex" I meant it literally. I do not have a stance on climate change on a personal level because I have been given so much conflicting information, I don't know what to believe. But the vast majority of peorple who write to me on the subject of climate change, and who disagree with it, are the "my country right or wrong" brigade who call me a `commie bastard` because my political views are different to theirs.
ReplyDeleteI agree Chris, that there are a lot of undoubted and undeniable environmental crises looming, and that whatever the truth of global warming, we should try to do something to save our increasingly beleagured planet before it gets too late.