So, I'm a proponent of both environmentalism and science. I also promote a "proceed with caution" approach when it comes to accepting facts about Climate Change and Global Warming. That said, I believe Climate Change threatens life as we know it--perhaps human existence--and has been influenced in unprecedented ways by human activities.
Enter Australian geologist, Ian Pilmer.
This article introduces Pilmer's view "that man-made climate change is a con trick perpetuated by environmentalists." It continues:
While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years.
The dynamic and changing character of the Earth's climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behaviour.
Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth's evolution.
...He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.
There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.
So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.
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Enter evolution and
Homo sapiens, 400,000 years ago.
Our species has been present through one ice-age (20,000 years ago when ~5 million people inhabited Earth), and as far as I can tell, it was far less impressive than the "Snowball Earth" of 635 million years ago. We are currently riding the tail end of the latest ice-age ("glacial retreat").
Soo... to say that global warming is pretty rad and totally natural, Pilmer is basing his argument on lots of time before humans existed. Flowing further down this stream of thought, if we are to accept Global Warming, we are to accept lots of extinction (which has been predicted... by environmentalists) and possibly the end of Human existence... sorry, that was redundant. Yeah, the end of
Homo sapiens as well as nearly everything else that currently exists is pretty inevitable--just look back in history. Sure, climate changes naturally, up and down, which is also evident.
I haven't read this guy's literature, but based on this article, I've read nothing that provides evidence that humans aren't speeding up the process through Industrialism, etc.
And when you start charging environmentalism as a conspiracy by "urban elites" you've pretty much surrendered yourself as a conniving douche-bag.
Done.
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Sorry these last few posts have been fueled with so much negativity!
As early as early last week, our row of sunflowers finally erupted with massive sunflower faces. Broad, sandpapery leaves hang from the burly, callous stalks that stand erect like lamp posts, and five feet up, burdensome flowers nod forward. The yellow ray flowers burst out from the fragrant brown disk--a shrine to the sun. This signals that we're knee-deep in summer.
