Terry, you told me that you
know this:
You are in error, Ann. Your statement above assumes that global warming is something which humans have either caused or have materially contributed to. This premise is false.
You said that you don't believe that global warming is a problem, if it exists at all. And you say that there is no proof that global warming is a problem, or, if it exists, that it is man-made.
I googled 'global warming' and got 43 million hits. I googled 'global cooling' and got 900 000 hits. I googled 'climate scam' and got 3.3 million hits. No, there is no consensus here, of course, but people find a lot more reason to talk about global warming than about global cooling or climate scams.
Most certainly there are very many sites and very many scientists who claim that there is no global warming, or that humanity has nothing to do with the Earth's climate. But there seems to be many more sites and many more scientists who think that global warming is real, and that humanity has something to do with it.
I know you are critical of Wikipedia, but I still found it interesting that Wikipedia definitely seems to come out in favor of the existence of global warming and humanity's partial responsibility for it:
Wikipedia on global warming I also found a site managed by a branch of the U.S. Government, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The way I read what they say about what we
know, scientifically, about climate change, they are saying that we still don't understand many aspects of climate change, but that we have very good reasons to believe that humanity is contributing to global warming:
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the scientific knowledge about climate change So while I have to agree that I myself don't
know if global warming is happening at all or if it man-made, I have to counter that you don't have more or better knowledge about it than I do, and therefore you can't say that global warming
isn't happening or that it
isn't man-made.
Of course, the fact that there seems to be more believers in than skeptics of global warming does not in itself prove that global warming is real or man-made. History is full of paradigm shifts, where the existing best science was proved to be completely wrong. However, the fact that you belong to the minority in a scientific debate does not in itself prove that you are right.
I made my point about smoking earlier because I think there is an interesting similarity between smoking cigarettes and releasing greenhouse gases and smoke into the atmosphere. In both cases we are talking about producing smoke that wasn't there before and exposing other life forms to that smoke. Like I said in my post on smoking, for the longest time it was denied that cigarette smoking could harm the smoker, much less the passive smoker. This was denied even though there was a lot of circumstantial evidence to the contrary. But in my opinion, just as it makes perfect sense that cigarette smoke is dangerous to the human body, so there is a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that humanity hurts the Earth's biosphere by releasing large amounts of man-made greenhouse gases, soot particles and other pollutants into the atmosphere.
Ann
