As much as I enjoy you pointless, ego-stroking mental masturbation exercises they are just that. Pointless. There is no denying global warming because we have an overwhelming amount of undeniable evidence; measurements, data, recorded temperatures, core samples etc, etc. Same goes for greenhouse gases. These thing can be, and are, measured. You can debate the extent to which mankind has contributed to the warming but it doesn’t change the fact that its happening and that something needs to be done about it. Therefore your exercise is fruitless. You’re not going to win the nobel prize for denying global warming any more than you are going to win it for denying the holocaust.
The only ones denying global warming these days are the ones who have a financial or political reason to do so. What you’re saying to me when your posing the question “is global warming a red herring” is that you are resistant to change and you do not want things to improve, to be more efficient. Did you know that out of the all the energy that goes into moving a car forward only 1% is used to move the person in the vehicle! 1%! The other 99% is wasted on poor aerodynamics, heat loss, rolling resistance and moving a thousands of pounds of steel around. Does that strike you as efficient? Does there seem to be room for improvement?
I think we can do a lot better and I think we can’t afford to be complacent. The world is screwed up right now and our current practices and available resources just aren’t going to sustain if we don’t change it for the better, make it more effecient, are smarter about it. This is not alarmist, end-of-the-world, Nostradamus, drama queen behavior, it’s facts. I am sorry if it makes you uncomfortable and you don’t want to hear it but it doesn’t change the fact… that it’s facts. Sticking your head in the sand is not going to make it go away. The more you learn, the more you research, the more you travel, the more you see production factories in remote parts of China, you’ll come to the conclusion that there’s a lot of things going on in this world that you wish you hadn’t known about. The world can be, especially the part that involves humans, a pretty grim place. That’s not alarmist, thats realist. Below is some more information. It is meant as a call to action, a means for motivation, not to scare people into ignoring reality although that is certainly the easier choice. I am a very positive, hopeful, motivated and solution focused designer but that doesn’t prevent me from seeing the world as it is and from seeing the urgency in needing to do something about it.
Here’s another resource efficiency issue: “Demand for water is doubling every 20 years, outpacing population growth twice as fast. Currently 1.3 billion people don’t have access to clean water and 2.5 billion lack proper sewage and sanitation. In less than 20 years, it is estimated that demand for fresh water will exceed the world’s supply by over 50 percent. The biggest drain on our water sources is agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of the water used worldwide – much of which is subsidized in the industrial world, providing little incentive for agribusiness to use conservation measures or less water-intensive crops. This number is also likely to increase as we struggle to feed a growing world. Population is expected to rise from 6 billion to 8 billion by 2050.”
“The American Association for the Advancement of Science said that more needs to be done by policy-makers to combat global warming: The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a critical greenhouse gas, is higher than it has been for at least 650,000 years. The average temperature of the Earth is heading for levels not experienced for millions of years.” “Scientific predictions of the impacts of increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and deforestation match observed changes. As expected, intensification of droughts, heat waves, floods, wildfires, and severe storms is occurring, with a mounting toll on vulnerable ecosystems and societies,” the board said.
World temperatures in January were the highest ever recorded for that month of the year, US government scientists said. “The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the highest for any January on record,” according to scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center in Asheville, N.C."
“Forest fires in the Western United States have occurred more frequently, burned longer, and covered more acres since 1987—and global warming is a big part of the underlying cause—according to a research paper published in July 2006 by the journal Science. Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Arizona found four times as many large wildfires occurred in Western forests between 1987 and 2003 compared to the previous 16 years. The more recent fires burned 6.5 more land, the average duration of the fires increased from 7.8 to 37 days, and the overall fire season during those years grew by an average of 78 days.”
“We have to deal with greenhouse gases”, John Hofmester, president of Shell oil co, said in a recent speech at the National Press Club. “From Shells point of view, the debate is over. When 98% of scientist agree, who is Shell to say, let’s debate science?”
…he he