All this will do is create a martyr out of him.
Rotting in jail or exiled forever... He fades into obscurity.
But our leaders aren't very bright lately. They seem to think life is like some T.V. episode, complete with the cowboy hats and the clean G-rated endings.
It's easy to focus on the "hole" and "warming" and so on, and point out what dangers we have overcome in the past, but the real dangers are in the interactions.
- The #1 danger is that the hole will stay large when the temperatures go up again in Antarctica. Most of the ice in the world is down there and if it all melts, well, we are in serious trouble. Greenland also has a lot of ice, and it's melting quite fast recently. Of course, politicians look at icecaps melting like an inflation graph or something else that's roughly linear in nature, but the reality is that it's clearly not. The ice reaches a certain point and poof - it all melts.
Btw - they expect the Arctic Ocean to be clear of ice(technically not clear, but a few inches of ice near the pole won't hinder any cargo ship at all) year-round in about 50-60 years. Of Antarctica goes as well, we're looking at the world's oceans rising by 20-30ft. That's not a lot, but it would take out many costal areas in countries that couldn't afford to make proper dikes.
- The more ocean we have, the warmer it(the water) gets. If it rises high enough, all of the various ocean curents stop due to the temperature difference being too small and the planet gets cold. Ie - Ice age. This is the planet's built-in thermostat at work.
So, in a way, this is good - or at least the politicians will tell you. It's going to get colder in 100 years. Unfortunately, it means that large areas of the world(almost all being poorer nations) will be flooded and the carrying capacity of the world, since the U.S. and Europe will be hard-pressed to grow crops, will drop to about 2-3 billion.
That's the real threat here. Not the warming or climate changes, but our food supply's inability to cope with it. Of course, to most leaders who have never spent a single day of their life wanting for food, a food shortage in some third-world country hardly gets on their radar.
http://www.popco.org/irc/popclocks/index.html
The number of useable hectares and the population are listed because some scientists believe that the numbers are about 1:1 in global terms. That is, our carrying capacity is about the number of useable hectares, or about 8.5 billion. Not a huge margin, but enough. Now imagine that dropping to 3-4 billion in the next 100 years.
So, yes, global warming is a huge issue. By all accounts, if we stop it, we will have another thousand or two years before the next Ice Age. If we continue as we are, we will end up with one in about 50-100 years.
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All this will do is create a martyr out of him. Rotting in jail or exiled forever... He fades into obscurity. But our leaders aren't very bright lately. They seem to think life is like some T.V. episode, complete with the cowboy hats and the clean G-rated endings.
It's easy to focus on the "hole" and "warming" and so on, and point out what dangers we have overcome in the past, but the real dangers are in the interactions. - The #1 danger is that the hole will stay large when the temperatures go up again in Antarctica. Most of the ice in the world is down there and if it all melts, well, we are in serious trouble. Greenland also has a lot of ice, and it's melting quite fast recently. Of course, politicians look at icecaps melting like an inflation graph or something else that's roughly linear in nature, but the reality is that it's clearly not. The ice reaches a certain point and poof - it all melts. Btw - they expect the Arctic Ocean to be clear of ice(technically not clear, but a few inches of ice near the pole won't hinder any cargo ship at all) year-round in about 50-60 years. Of Antarctica goes as well, we're looking at the world's oceans rising by 20-30ft. That's not a lot, but it would take out many costal areas in countries that couldn't afford to make proper dikes. - The more ocean we have, the warmer it(the water) gets. If it rises high enough, all of the various ocean curents stop due to the temperature difference being too small and the planet gets cold. Ie - Ice age. This is the planet's built-in thermostat at work. So, in a way, this is good - or at least the politicians will tell you. It's going to get colder in 100 years. Unfortunately, it means that large areas of the world(almost all being poorer nations) will be flooded and the carrying capacity of the world, since the U.S. and Europe will be hard-pressed to grow crops, will drop to about 2-3 billion. That's the real threat here. Not the warming or climate changes, but our food supply's inability to cope with it. Of course, to most leaders who have never spent a single day of their life wanting for food, a food shortage in some third-world country hardly gets on their radar. http://www.popco.org/irc/popclocks/index.html The number of useable hectares and the population are listed because some scientists believe that the numbers are about 1:1 in global terms. That is, our carrying capacity is about the number of useable hectares, or about 8.5 billion. Not a huge margin, but enough. Now imagine that dropping to 3-4 billion in the next 100 years. So, yes, global warming is a huge issue. By all accounts, if we stop it, we will have another thousand or two years before the next Ice Age. If we continue as we are, we will end up with one in about 50-100 years.