Climate Change - Danger or Hoax

Last night I watched a two hour special on ABC called Earth 2100. It was a documentary laid out as a story about a fictional girl named Lucy born on June 2, 2009. It chronicles her life through ever increasing climate problems that lead to famine, decease and war. By the end of the story it is 2100; she is an old lady, and civilization is in shambles. The show was hosted by Bob Woodruff; I was happy to see him looking strong after his ordeal in Iraq.

The story followed Lucy's life marking the warning signs and then the devastating results of climate change. Each event was marked by statements by environmentalists describing why this would happen. Mr. Woodruff made it clear at the start and during the program that this was a worse case scenario but all of the events could be in our future based on the present analysis of the climate. At the end of Lucy's story she is ninety-one years old and billions had died from famine and pandemics. Organized government had collapsed and surviving towns became something akin to feudal states jealously guarding what supplies or energy capability they had.

It made me wonder just how real this danger is. If it isn't real in a hundred years, is it real in two hundred years? The moral of the show is that we need to work together now to prevent the drastic climate change from happening. We must drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to prevent catastrophe, but are we really in a position that requires us to be so desperate?

I looked online to give the other side of the issue some time. It turns out there are plenty of web sites that dispute the notion that we are headed for a drastic climate change. According to the web site Global Warming Hoax humanity's affect on the atmosphere is insignificant and there are other reasons for causing panic over global warming. They have their own scientists including NASA Senior Research Scientist Leonard Weinstein, ScD; that explain why CO2 will not cause catastrophic melting in the future. They also claim that Antarctic Sea ice is up 43% since 1980. Please check their web site to get more on their side of the story. They may be correct but I find there tone slightly unprofessional. They seem to need to personally attack supporters of the global warming position, especially Mr. Gore and I don't think that is necessary.

I did not do an extensive study and I am just a layman on this issue but one simple idea occurs to me and it occurred to my wife when we discussed it over lunch today. I understand that making the changes requested would take a great deal of effort and a lot of lives would be disrupted, but wouldn't we rather be safe than sorry? The scientists can make their claims and predictions but we won't really know for sure until it is either too late to do anything or we see hard evidence that people were just crying wolf. We are rolling the dice with my grandchildren's lives and I for one would rather have the odds as much on their side as possible.

If global warming were the only problem that would be bad enough but we are also facing the desperate problem of dwindling natural resources. The world population is growing at an alarming rate and the world's resources are straining to support them. This is one issue that cannot be explained away. Going green to protect the planet from climate change will also extend our present resources and create new resources to support our population.

In my opinion the discussion over global warming is irrelevant. The world is changing, the resources are running out and we have to do something.