Global warming--not convinced

[KU40]

IMO, it depends how long this recession lasts as to how quickly people will forget and indulge in gas guzzlers again. If the new year brings growth, I'd expect usage to slowly creep up and probably get back to where it was a year ago by the end of next year. Many people that have switched to better FE vehicles will continue to use them regardless of fuel price. However, an ever-increasing world population will always increase demand by some amount.

If the recession lasts through next year, I expect there to be a much slower rise in fuel usage. People may forget a couple of bad months in a recession, but years stick with you.

As for the original debate, I don't think we can accurately depict the amount that humans are causing it until about........100-200,000 years have passed. CO2 levels have certainly been much higher during the course of earth's history, earth's temps have certainly been higher for extended periods, and yet the earth managed to still correct itself numerous times over.

I think sometimes some people just want to feel in control of everything, but the earth is more dynamic than many imagine. Not to mention that many people are so worried about glaciers shrinking but never think about what would happen if we "succeeded" in stopping global warming and cooled the planet. Hmm.......that hasn't worked out so well for humans in the past. 400 years ago we had the little ice age that bought on disease and famine that killed half the world's population, a few tens of thousands of years ago another mini ice age nearly made humans extinct (learned that today on the history channel), and the Kansan ice age, which happened about 400,000 years ago, saw glaciers covering north america as far south as Kansas. Hmm, might be hard to grow corn in iowa then.

IMO, people are just micromanaging things way too much. The earth is 4,600,000,000 years old, and we're analyzing every 1 year as if it's the craziest one in earth's history and spells doom for everything. I mean look at this graph:


There have certainly been 50-100 year periods of rapid increasing temperatures that are similar to the one we're experiencing now.

Statistics comparing previous decades can easily be misleading. But look at the last 5 years in this graph:


I think money plays a very large part in how global warming is fed to the masses. They want to strike fear so that people will buy some groovy new product. While it may be good for the environment, and I'm not saying it's bad to switch to more eco-friendly practices, they are driven more by profit than actually helping the environment. They use global warming as an angle for attraction. If they just said "it helps the environment," who is going to buy it? Striking fear of worldwide calamity in the form of burning to death in heat is a much more effective advertising ploy.