Quote: Originally Posted by taxslave
So should I tell the bank there will be no mortgage payment this month? Somehow I don't think they will care all that much that our industries closed down and put us out of work because somebody thinks starving in a pristine environment is better than working on better methods of extracting the resources that we need.
Then go ahead and tell your kids their future is going to be a lot harsher than ours was, and that their grandkids and beyond may have no future.
Do I need to point out how ridiculous it is to focus on the short-term disruption of switching to a low GHG emitting energy model while ignoring the devastating effects of the current course we're on collectively as a species?
Read my original post and a few of the texts I've listed.
- there is no credible challenge to Anthropogenic Global Warming as Naomi Oreskes found in her survey of the ISI web of knowledge more than five years ago, the whole skeptic movement is almost totally industry funded the same way it was with tobacco and has involved some of the same players on the science side(Fred Seitz, S. Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen)
- According to one of the most experienced and well versed
EXPERTS on climate change if we burn all fossil fuels then a runaway greenhouse is a "dead certainty", his words. In case you don't understand what that means imagine a world with an average global temperature of over 100 degrees C, kind of tough to find a job in that scenario don't you think. That's what James Hansen says we're heading for with our current course of massive construction of coal fired power plants and tar sands exploitation as well as exploring for and consuming every bit of oil and natural gas we can find.
- Climate change is already making the world a much more dangerous and expensive place to live, if you're a homeowner in Florida then the $100,000 deductable on home insurance in the case of hurricane destruction makes living in that state less and less tenable, not to mention the facts of stronger hurricanes. Many severe weather events will increase in strength due to the higher amount of water vapour in a warmer atmosphere. As climate is weather averaged over time, all current weather can be assigned a certain percentage due to Global Warming and the fossil fuel sector is already facing increasing lawsuits over weather related damage and it will increase in the future, so where's the economic future there anyway.
Even without a runaway greenhouse the effects of doing nothing to change for fear of the short-term consequences will result in ecological devastation. Sea level is going to go up no matter what we do now, the only question is how high. Greenland and West Antarctic are losing about 100 cubic kilometres of ice a year each and the breakdown of iceshelves means the acceleration of movement of land bound icesheets into the ocean. With the large scale breakdown of those two ice caps we're looking at an over 30 foot increase of sea level in the future, if the climate gets warms enough the East Antarctic sheet will lose stability and the sea level rise could exceed 200 feet, try and calculate the economic cost of the loss of
all coastal cities and entire countries and states like Florida and Bangladesh.
Pretending this isn't happening or it isn't serious is human, it's easier to just go with the flow for many people and let someone else take responsibility for the consequences in the future... it's also one of least admirable qualities of our species.
Quote: Originally Posted by ironsidesThe important thing is that you feel good about yourself. 
When it comes to this issue all I get is a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach...
