Re: Decline in Snowpack Is Blamed On Warming
Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 8:41 am
Steve,
I can understand how you'd get tired of the doom-and-gloom predictions, but I think the science is quite sound. There are plenty of facts -- hard, numerical, repeatable, not "anecdotal" -- evidence is abundant, and the scientific community is as unified as it ever gets: the planet is warming, it is likely to continue to warm, the cause is emissions of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuel (added to a few other things, like the net destruction of vegetation), and the results -- at least for most people and for lots of natural systems -- are likely to be somewhere between mildly uncomfortable and disastrous. Shite does happen, but if we see that we're the ones heaping it up, it'd be pretty irresponsible not to clean it up, wouldn't it?
If you've got some time, take a look at that New Scientist page I referenced a few postings back. It's really excellent and contains some direct replies to most of the common arguments of the "skeptics."
-B2
I can understand how you'd get tired of the doom-and-gloom predictions, but I think the science is quite sound. There are plenty of facts -- hard, numerical, repeatable, not "anecdotal" -- evidence is abundant, and the scientific community is as unified as it ever gets: the planet is warming, it is likely to continue to warm, the cause is emissions of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuel (added to a few other things, like the net destruction of vegetation), and the results -- at least for most people and for lots of natural systems -- are likely to be somewhere between mildly uncomfortable and disastrous. Shite does happen, but if we see that we're the ones heaping it up, it'd be pretty irresponsible not to clean it up, wouldn't it?
If you've got some time, take a look at that New Scientist page I referenced a few postings back. It's really excellent and contains some direct replies to most of the common arguments of the "skeptics."
-B2