Global Warming - Rants and Reason

It's both amusing and frustrating to hear the hysterical right deny the fact of global warming and to rant and rail against doing anything about it.

If we act on the assumption that it's true, then we have to learn how to live our lives while putting less carbon dioxide into the air. This may mean some hard choices - research into and the adoption of alternative energy sources, using more public transit and/or smaller cars, more energy-efficient means of growing food, doing our work, etc. etc. This will require financial hardship in many cases. It is my opinion that big business should bear the brunt of these expenses, since they've been reaping the vast majority of profits from cheap, dirty energy these past 150 years.

Still my burning (sorry) question to you is: WHY ARE YOU SO AFRAID OF THIS?

It just seems to make sense to me. Let's try to live cleaner, more efficiently. Let's try to put less junk into the air. Whether or not global warming is a fact, why would this be a bad thing?

The level of anger and denial on this subject signals a profound fear. Of what, I'm not sure. Fear of losing your SUV? Fear of having to WALK, or TAKE A BUS? Fear of having to turn off your air conditioners? Fear of having to eat less meat and more vegetables? Fear of actually having to do what someone else TELLS you to for the betterment of all?

Why are you so tremendously afraid?

Regarding the idiots who say 'we only have 100 years of recorded temperatures, the earth is millions of years old, that's not enough data,' bear in mind there are scientifically valid ways of extrapolating the earth's temperature thousands of years into the past. To those who say 'there were no SUVs in the days of the dinosaurs,' my reponse is SO WHAT? The earth's climate has changed repeatedly in 65 million years. Tell me how good that was for the dinosaurs. Our interest as a species is to maintain the earth's temperature/climate/geography at the same level is has been during human history. This is the environment in which we came up, this is what we want to maintain. Dinosaurs have nothing to do with it.

In closing, let me refer you to WikiPedia's article on global warming:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

Here's the money quote:

"Only a small minority of scientists discount the role that humanity's actions have played in recent warming. However, the uncertainty is more significant regarding how much climate change should be expected in the future, and there is a hotly contested political and public debate over what, if anything, should be done to reduce or reverse future warming, and how to cope with the predicted consequences."

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