Why I Need A Life Preserver

When Al Gore won the Nobel Prize a few weeks ago, many Bush supporters dismissed it as a political stunt by those liberal Norwegians. Global warming skeptics pointed to a ruling by a British judge that Gore's film was "alarmist" and "exaggerated."

Hmmm.... Given a choice of listening to a whole bunch of guys with PhD's and sophisticated computer models and scientific data out the ying-yang, or listening to a lone guy whose main qualification is that he wears a powdered wig, I think I'd rather trust the fate of humanity with the scientists.

Here is the Gore team's response to the points raised by the judge.

Actually, new findings do show that Gore and all those pessimistic climate change scientists have been mistaken. Turns out they've all been modeling their future scenarios on the assumption that carbon dioxide emissions are increasing 1.3% per year. All the predictions about what will happen to the glaciers in 20 years, how much sea levels will rise in 50 years, and what temperatures will be like at the end of the century have been based on that little number.

Except.... It's wrong.

As it turns out, CO2 emissions have been going up at 3.3% a year since 2000, and they are up by 35% over the levels of 1990. So all that horrible stuff we pessimists thought were going to happen to our kids? Well, they're going to happen to us instead.

Yet amazingly, there are those who dismiss global warming as some sort of ridiculous myth. Well, okay, but what evidence do they have to back up their argument? The best they can come up with is that the climate changes we are already witnessing may be part of a natural cycle. Perhaps, but all the evidence says that the changes are man-made. And trying to argue a point when you have nothing to support your position with doesn't qualify as an argument. It's burying your head in the sand, which is dangerous because sea levels are rising. Of course, if your head is in the sand you won't be able to see that, and you'll end up drowning.

When I was growing up, every globe I ever looked was white at the top. That was the north pole, and it was nothing but ice. All the time. Year round. Had been for millennia. It was a just a fact of life.

This year we found out that this may soon no longer be true. The Northwest Passage opened up this summer for the first time in recorded history. In a few years, the Arctic Ocean will be ice free during the summer months. In other words, no more white at the top of the globes. Speaking for myself, that scares the piss out of me. Hell, it should scare the piss out of everyone. Piss should be cascading through the streets. We should be drowning in vast pools of our piss, it's so scary.

But did it scare our leaders? No, of course not. In fact, they're seriously talking about the absence of Arctic ice being a good thing because now we can get at all that oil down there. Huh? Burning oil is what got us to this point to begin with, so we're going to solve the problem by burning even more!?!?!

If you've been wondering exactly what the term "greenhouse gas" means, it has to do with the size of the molecule and how it reacts to infrared heat. Here's a site that does a good job of explaining it.