Thursday, August 18, 2011

seriously, now. . .

In my last blog I pointed out that the chances that global warming is NOT real are less than 1 in 200 billion.

Now you could say, "See, there IS a chance that the hot weather in the past two decades is purely coincidental", and do nothing about it.  Unfortunately, the consequences of doing nothing are quite a bit greater than arguing about how many angels can sit on the head of a pin. 
  
The international scientific consensus, ratified in Copenhagen in December, 2009, is that temperatures must not be allowed to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius (about 3 1/2  degrees F) to “stave off the worst effects of climate change.” (Source:  press release from the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen: )  These "worst effects" are truly horrible--droughts across much of the world, floods, storms, heat waves, millions if not billions of deaths.  I think it is no exaggeration to say that failure to take action to stop global warming is suicidal. 

So that got me to thinking about the tragedy of hundreds of people who have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to commit suicide.  Now, as fate would have it, according to Yahoo Answers, about 2% of these people live to tell about it.  So the chances of surviving a leap off the Golden Gate Bridge are a billion times higher than the chance that global warming is not real. 

Now, putting these thoughts together, I would argue that the politicians who are denying global warming are essentially asking us all to leap off the Golden Gate Bridge.  That includes Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, and the whole Tea Party. 

And given the direction of the thermometer, we could easily be at 2 degrees by 2050, so we are talking about this happening during our own lifetimes for most of us, let alone our children and grandchildren.

Seriously, we need a plan and a commitment to convert to renewable energy and electric cars as quickly as humanly possible!



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