I was wondering, if 15-20 years from now the government came out and said yeah global warming is a fact. It's caused by greenhouse gases. What would be the economic ramifications. 15-20 years from now. What would be the political ramifications. And everything that was in global warming forecasts come true. Longer and more powerful hurricanes, droughts, death of sea life, and etc. What would happen to the economy? would there just be economic choas, the markets dropping like crazy, or just bleh.
global warming IS a fact. EVERYBODY knows this. even the us government. they just chose to take their current stance for economic reasons as the us government know their days are numbered and china is hot on their heels.
People confuse the term Global Warming (GW) with the act of people being mostly responsible for it. 90% of the scientists on this planet that are responsible for empirical weather research, without a doubt in their minds, have proved that the earth is warming dangerously. The question is not whether the earth is warming or isn't - it is whether the GW is a cause of man and his effects on weather (mostly through his use of substances that produces greenhouse gases), or this is a "normal" warming in the earths climate when looked at from the perspective of eons of weather cycles. nitro
i think pretty much everyone out side the usa understands that burning fossil fuels and releasing cfc's into the environment damages the world and creates holes in the ozone layer etc - leading to GW. like i said, there is scientific proof of this, its just that some people want to burry their heads in the sand on this one and refuse to believe the arguments. some people for example believe the world is only 10000 years old and think the old testament in the bible is 100% factually correct, despite there being hard scientific proof that it is not the case. providing the proof is the easy part. changing peoples emotional beliefs is quite another. like they say - you can take a horse to water, but you cant make him drink.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6269 "It appears that nearly all the rise in sea level since Roman times has happened in the past 100 years, and is most likely the result of human activity." "While there is no proof that human activity is to blame, "I can't think of a natural process that would have started in 1900," he says. All that expensive ocean front real estate is going to end up being homes for fishes not air breathing mammals.
This statement is true, but not for the commonly accepted reasons. From a geologic perspective the earth is thought to have been on average some two degrees Centigrade warmer over the last 500 million years than it currently is. (3.6 degrees F). This is based on the physical evidence of the quantity of coal deposits, limestone beds, etc and the chemical conditions required for their formation, temperature being a major factor in that. If this calculation can be considered reasonable, and the average temperature of the earth is warmer than it currently is, it must be that for this average to exist that the temperature at times has been even warmer than the assumed average. So it would follow that the current warming trend is simply a regression to the mean, and as such is inevitable. So the question on global warming is not whether human activity is causing the warming, but rather is it hastening a new equilibrium temperature for the earth. From this perspective it makes little sense to assume that any action by governments will produce much in the way of good results. More likely it will be a complete waste of taxpayer money trying to stop something that is going to happen anyway. Weather data of any detail has only been collected for a couple of hundred years at most, which isn't even the blink of an eye in geologic time, so it is hard to believe any forecasts based on such a pitifully small sample size relative to the subject at hand(weather on a global scale). Basically humans assume they are more important in the overall scheme of things than they really are, politicians being a notable example. This is not to say that unrestricted pollution and wasteful consumption should not be avoided, but the idea that governments can legislatively influence the weather is absurd.
Anybody care to guess what the effects of warming water temps and increased plankton concentrations would do to the environment. Wouldn't increased plankton concentrations process the greater CO2 levels? It might work the other way: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/08/020812070050.htm