Just another dimension?

Saturday, November 18, 2006
Global Warming -vvw

Two TV stations in Maine have decided to stop doing global warming stories. The general manager said in his e-mail message to his staff that he placed “global warming stories in the same category as the killer African bee scare from the 1970s or, more recently, the Y2K scare when everyone's computer was going to self-destruct". (link to article)

I recently watched the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which attempts to dispel common misconceptions of global warming. Everyone should watch this show because it is rather educational and even though I have always considered myself moderately well-informed in science in general, I walked away from the theatre having to reconsider some "facts" I have taken for granted.

I have read about receding glaciers and breaking ice shelves long before this movie (less familiar with the ocean currents though) but have never really thought about what they might imply. I used to see these as the consequences rather than indicators of the more dire consequences that might follow.

It is not going to be easy to make the general public see the significance of the impact of global warming. Frankly, I think this issue has too much science for the average guy in the streets to digest. The result is an apathetic attitude not unlike the general manager of the TV station in Maine. It's funny he mentioned Y2K because with the Y2K issue, companies spent enormous amounts of money to rectify the problem while with global warming, people just weren't that enthusiastic.

Perhaps Greenland will finally melt into the ocean, halting the North Atlantic Current and bring Europe into a mini Ice Age, killing millions of people. Or maybe we might get the worst case scenario of humans going extinct, which I think isn't really a big deal for planet Earth. What's another species when you're already losing so many every day? Interestingly, someone did mention that if you consider the current rate of species loss, we are actually living in a mass extinction event. It's strange you don't notice when you are not the one getting wiped out.

Anyway, lots of people dying isn't be all bad. Death by natural disasters is a good method of population control, unlike war, which has the undesirable side effect of distorting your demographics.

-- permalink --
Yiheng made 11:09 AM

1 Comments:

You forgot to mention that triggering an Ice Age in Europe would also mean temperate climates descending upon the equatorial countries. Hurray!
By Soqcrates, at 4:25 PM




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