An idiot's take on global warming

this one is surely gonna crack you all up :)

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Global warming has saved mankind
Climate change is a fact – and we’d be in a deep-freeze without it, says Robert Matthews

If the sight of an 80-year-old undergoing self-flagellation doesn't float your boat, you probably gave BBC1 a miss last night. In his programme Are We Changing Planet Earth? Sir David Attenborough gave himself a sound thrashing for damaging the environment while making all those nature programmes.

Former wannabe president Al Gore is at it too, inviting all Americans to get the flagellation habit by watching An Inconvenient Truth, his new documentary about how we're all to blame for changing the planet.

Both he and Sir David are singing from the same hymn-sheet - and it is the one that harps on about how mankind has sinned by wresting control of the environment from Mother Nature. Its chorus features in the trailer to Gore's film: "Did the planet betray us - or did we betray the planet?"

As a false dichotomy, this is right up there with Dubya's: "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror." The mere fact that Gore and Attenborough are even around to feel bad shows the central flaw at the heart of their guilt-fests: the idea that we'd all be better off if we left the environment alone.

Left to its own devices, our planet would have long since reverted to its preferred state of the last 40 million years: a frigid Ice Age. Fortunately, a new climatic influence kicked in around 8,000 years ago to stop the Ice Age from reasserting itself. It's called H. sapiens. By indulging in the sinful practices of crop-planting, tree-clearing and biomass-burning, we have boosted levels of greenhouse gases and darkened the surface of our planet, thus increasing the amount of sunlight trapped by the Earth.

Of course, we should take care not to over-egg things - but so should the eco-doomsters. Have we changed the planet? You bet. And it's all the better for it.

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=1&subID=514&WT.srch=1

MODS: short article, so posted it in full. are we OK?


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EDITED TO ADD:

About the idiot -
Robert Mathews is Visiting Reader in Science at Aston University, Birmingham, and writes on science-related issues for The Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and Daily Express. Originally trained as a physicist, his academic interests now lie chiefly in the use and abuse of statistical methods by the scientific community. His latest book, 25 Big Ideas: Science that is Changing our World, is published by Oneworld.

And he knows it. Fossil Fuel induced Global warming hasn't been a factor except during, perhaps, the last 150 years. The glacial cycles he is referring to would not be expected to re-occur before a few thousand years from now, at worst case. It is idiots like these who give science a bad name. Probably couldn't hack it at real , competitive science so he took the easy way out to shill for the nazi's.:puke:

How many *brazillion* fossils do you think are under the crust of this planet that could produce the amount of "so called" fossil fuel that we (for lack of better words) suck up every day?

LOL. I looked his book up on Amazon:

What do customers ultimately buy after viewing items like this?

59% buy "Misquoting Jesus : The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why" by Bart D. Ehrman $14.97
41% buy "The Great Transformation : The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions" by Karen Armstrong $18.90
Tells you something about his audience... :hurts:

Deliberate Stupidity from someone who ought to be able to know better.

I mean the factual part not the opinion. It is at least tentatively thought that humans may have changed the climate with agriculture enough to stop a resurgence in the ice age.

The problem comes in with his opinion that it means that climate change is a good thing now. It doesn't follow from the evidence stated.

Ice ages are measured in terms of tens of thousands of years - see "Milankovitch cycles".

Human agriculture is measured in terms of thousands of years.

It's only tentatively thought that humans may have changed the climate with agriculture in the minds of the terminally stupid. Sadly, they're in the Whitehouse...

This issue was brought up in The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery (recommended reading). It sound to me like the usual picking of information that has some truth to it and twisting it to fit a corrupt agenda (a.k.a everything republicans say)

BTW, Welcome to DU moblsv.
:toast: