Monthly Archives: January 2014

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We only have one planet..

Climate change, and how to deal with it, is one of the biggest challenges facing the human race.

People only doubt the human influence on global warming and climate change, because big polluters funded junk science studies to obscure the facts. This phony science came from people like Frederick Seitz, who was also hired by tobacco companies years before to obscure the risks of cigarette smoking. 97% of climate scientists believe in global climate change and our influence on it. On most subjects, in most fields, when even a smaller percentage of scientists agree on a given topic, it’s considered a consensus.

The current climate instability is due to the high amount of carbon dioxide and other green house gases in the atmosphere, a result of human activity. Air bubbles in ice cores from the arctic give a snapshot of the air over time, and they show the amount of CO2 today is outside its natural range, much higher than at any time in the past 800,000 years (the oldest cores they’ve had to analyze). This contributes to natural disasters, like wildfires and hurricanes, and the ice caps are melting faster than scientists expected.

Polluters continue to obscure the facts, influencing the media, paying bloggers and the like, because they want free reign. The nonsensical thing about all of this, is that even if global warming is a hoax–many people understand we can’t dump an ever increasing amount of garbage into our environment, and still have a livable planet. Anyone who has kids or cares about future generations, should want to reduce pollution of all kinds. So what is the fight about? Right now air pollution in many areas makes it hard to breath, increases medical costs and the cost in human lives. Why not clean it up for that reason?