Live Ache
I don't bother arguing the undeniable fact of global warming (a.k.a. Climate Change *).
However I do dispute the major causes of it. My personal opinion is that it has less to do with whether or not your car is a hybrid or you recycle paper and more to do with that enormous ball of fire that moves from East to West every day.
In fact burning paper is better for the environment that recycling it, provided the paper was sourced from managed forests.
Needless to say I've been getting increasingly annoyed with the medias obsession of linking every story they can with global warming. I'm surprised that Private Eye haven't come up with an Ecophiliacs corner.
So when I heard about Live Earth I was neither surprised nor impressed.
How exactly is a series of enormous concerts held in front of thousands of people going to help save the environment?
Each concert will require several megawatts of power - are they going to put up temporary wind farms to produce it?
And the crowds will be flocking from all over the country to see it, emitting carbon along the way.
In short it's a somewhat hypocritical statement to make.
*The term Climate Change implies that the climate has at somepoint stayed the same. It hasn't. When you study a bit of geology you very quickly learn that the British Isles alone has had every type of climate going over the billions of years that the Earth has existed.
The climate of the Earth will continue to change long after humans and their SUVs have gone the way of the dodo.
posted by Phill @ 7:01 pm
1 comments
1 Comments:
Half right, half wrong. The climate is affected by variations in the Earth's orbit, warming and cooling over thousands of years.
Nature releases tonnes of CO2 but it also absorbes tonnes of CO2, it is a complex cycle.
As the Earth warms more CO2 is released than absorbed and this CO2 causes more warming through its greenhouse effect. As the Earth cools more CO2 is absorbed than released.
The problem is we are in a warming phase and are releasing more CO2 than happens naturally by burning fossile fuels; fossile fuels are carbon that was asbsorbed millions of years ago. Therefore we are exaccerbating the natural warming.
The additional warming could create an environment hostile to us and so we will go the way of the dodo, though this is unlikely; a drop of around 2% of the available oxygen in our atmosphere would result in us all gasping for breath.
More likely climate changes will happen that would disrupt global farming to such a degree that we would find ourselves running short of food even in developed nations. We should take steps to adapt to the inevitable changes, such as rising seas and changing seasons, as well as try to mitigate our affect on it; lets face it we're slow to adapt so we shouldn't be trying to speed things up.
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