When our children's children, and their children go to school, they'll only be reading about massive forests and Tigers and all those that call forests their home. Just like we are simply reading about Dinosaurs, and other ancient, extinct animals. Can you imagine?
I've never seen a tiger apart from in the zoo, am I bothered? Not really. Will my children(etc) be bothered probably not. Have I ever seen a dodo? No. Bothered? No. I've never been to a rainforest, again I'd probably like to at some point, but it wouldn't really be a blow if it didn't, I mean if you suddenly discovered that there was some sort of foreign habitat that was all gone before you were born, would you suddenly feel a desperate yearning to go and see it? I doubt it.
All this is not to do with global warming either, its to do with human exploitation of land and money, and we can't stop poachers and loggers from poaching and logging by turning off a light bulb.
Animals are becoming extinct all the time always have done always will do. In fact, correction,
living things are becoming extinct all the time so that includes bacteria, ameoba and unicellular fungi. I guess you're not so sympathetic towards them? What is really important is biodiversity. There is no evidence to suggest that biodiversity is decreasing but even if it is, that, like climate and everything, ebbs and flows; there have been numerous mass extinctions in the past sometimes 98% of all life dying out in a century but life has always pulled through and creates new biodiversity.
I'm not saying we should'nt worry about poachers, we should and the number of species on the endangered list is increasing, but the number of animal extinctions hasn't really increased much(its hard to say for plants and others) and those few extra extinctions have been caused partly by the natural ebb and flow of biodiversity and partly by other human factors but not global warming.
One of the animals that gets the most attention is the Polar Bear. I shan't rant on about how some animals like the poly, the tiger, the panda etc get so much more attention because their cute, I shall simply point out that since 1970, Polar Bear populations have
increased from 5,000 to 25,000, thats a fivefold increase.
Some people seem to think that there is something sacred or something about all animals living at this particular time...um, why?
I shall also point out that temperatures in the past are extremely hard to find exactly and normally different studies differ by several degrees. In the so-called medieval warm period, various studies put the temperature above or below current temperatures. A better way to consider it is this: grapes were grown in this time in the north of England and Scotland which, for you non-brits, is pretty much unheard of today and farmers struggle even in the south. This farming was so wide-spread there are even roads and whole communities built on the proceeds of growing this commodity from medieval times.
Many people emphasise the rate of increase of temperature today. In the past temperatures have risen far faster and been far higher than today. One rise in particular experience a rise of more than 5 degrees in half a century in some places, increasing from a temperature already hotter than today.
Obviously further back you go, the harder it is to determine the temperature, but most studies document changes in temperature at more or less the same time. If you compare these to the more accurate carbon records, you notice that in nearly every case, the temperature rises
before the CO2 increases. How can that be? Well when temperatures change, the vast oceans take hundreds if not thousands of years to catch up, because of this, sea temperature lags by about 800 behind air temperature. Oceans contain a lot of CO2 and when the seas warm, they release more CO2 and when they cool they absorb it so when temperatures increase, later CO2 increases. What they didn't tell you in an inconvenient truth is that they moved the graphs around to make them fit.
Since just before the beginning of the industrial revolution, temperatures have been increasing steadily at about the same rate. Strangly though, in the beginning, barely anyone owned a car and there were only a few factories in a few very develped countries yet temperatures were increasing, uniformly, globally at about the same rate as today apart from during the post-war economic boom when hundreds of factories opened and people first had cars widespread and were pumping out tons and tons of CO2, far more than today, because of the dirty coal and oil and the inefficient methods they used. Today, we use far more economically (and ecologically) friendly methods. But during that time, temperatures... dropped. Yes they fell and people were worried then about global cooling and a possible mini-ice age!
Models are notoriously inaccurate and predictions vary wildly and change at the slightest change in figures, the figures being inaccurate anyway. Most models do not take into account solar activity which has been shown to correlate rather better to temperature records. Models are tweaked to give the appearence of drastic warming. Most models have so far been quite wrong in both temperature and CO2 quantities. All predict a higher rate of warming in the troposphere if warming is due to greenhouse gases, all were wrong. Temperatures, as shown by weather balloons, are rising slower if at all in some places.
So why do people do this? Well it starts in government. Governments think they can get more votes by showing they care for the environment and put money into "helping" global warming. They pay scientists to find what thin evidence there is for human-induced warming who do that and scare the public with their "shocking" results. Scientist gets another grant for more "research" from which they conclude... they need more money! See the pattern emerging...? Scientists and government officials work like everyone else: driven by money, influence and power. Supporting global warming due to human CO2 gives them that. The more governments (or the scientists they pay) persuade the public that global warming is all their fault, that it will kill hundreds of people and that polar bears will go extinct, the more the public wants a government thats prepared to put money not into healthcare or education, but into funding the slowing of global warming. For this reason, they can't let contary evidence get out. So they don't grant money to scientists who speak out. Anyone who doesn't believe in global warming by CO2 is virtually branded a heretic preventing open debate and the releasing of all the information to the public who are fed the nonsence that all scientists are at a consensus and there is no evidence against it. They're not, and there is. Other companies are exploiting the situation with the rediculous carbon offsets schemes. Thousands of jobs rely on global warming and its become a world-wide phenomenon. Its like a religion. Just don't get me started on religion...
Don't think I say all this so I'm not guilty, or because I'm lazy or am in denial. I do take steps to reduce my dependence on oil and gas, not because of global warming but because we are going to run out one day and we need time to develop something to replace it.
Also what we really need to do is concentrate on the more pressing issues in the world today: povery, gangs and gun crime, and indeed deforestation, poaching and hunting.
