Thursday, January 29, 2009

The Problem with Global Warming

If you think about predictions made this and last year they all seem to say that within five years,  New Orleans will be hit by a super-hurricane at least once per week, Florida will be sunk along with everything near a coastline, and the world will be at least five degrees warmer. That's pretty scary, but around five years ago the same scientists made the same predictions and none of them have come true. Instead people are starting to get bored as they notice that nothing to extreme is happening and the effort to make a change is not worth it. 

Just like after an earthquake, once everything settles down, nobody cares anymore. On that note, the scientists working on earthquakes keep us informed enough that it's in the back of the mind, but never so much that we become desensitized and from that, stop caring. Sadly that's what's happening to Global Warming. When people are constantly bombarded with the same information about Global Warming, they stop caring about it. Sadly this isn't just happening with Global Warming, it's happening with most movements that don't impact us in our day to day lives. Look at Darfur, AIDS, and the wetlands. All those problems still need to be fixed, but they don't show up in the news as much any more because people stopped caring enough to look at or buy something just because those topics are mentioned.

If Global Warming activists want to get people interested again, they need to take a step back. Stop showing everybody the same pictures and not to scale graphs (Al Gore I'm looking at your 100 years on a 700,000 year graph taking up around 2,000 years...) The best thing to do is to relax, and only release information when something noticeable changes, and a .001C change in Antarctica over a four month span doesn't count. Keep lobbying for governmental changes, but stop trying to make any small statisticly insignificant change in a random location's temperature seem like the end of the world.

2 comments:

Cavalcadeofcats said...

Er. You're exaggerating scientists' claims, and then complaining that their evidence isn't sufficient to support it. Fascinating.

Don't blame the scientist, my friend. Blame the media. The media is rubbish with science.

(And - if people don't care any-more - then what's with carbon credits, and the renewed obsession with being "green"? Those are directly related to concerns over global warming, and they're both thriving.)

Kelsey Higham said...

jolly good show