Quote:
Originally Posted by Yandros
Sulfur dioxide is an actual pollutant, it can be removed via the use of filters. Carbon dioxide is a necessary part and consequence of all life and all living activities. See the difference?
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As with all things, quantity matters.
Take water, for example:
Neither of those is particularly good for humans, although other species might vastly prefer them over what we consider desirable.
With CO2, nobody is claiming that "CO2 is bad". Only an idiot would think that that's what being said. The issue is that a particular amount of CO2 in the atmosphere might have consequences which could impact the global environment in such a manner that it affects human conditions in a way that most humans would consider undesirable.
Whether the earth warmed or cooled 40 degrees in the next 5 years would not matter to earth itself - but it would matter to
us.
And that's the issue with global warming: a change of only a few degrees over the next hundred years or so wouldn't "matter" to earth, but it would matter to us. The balance would shift just a little, with an effect that would be utterly negligible in the grand scheme of things.
The problem is that in the grand scheme of things, a few tens of millions of people dying, a global economic crash and your seafront property becoming sea property don't matter either.
We're not talking about the end of the world. We're talking about a slightly altered balance which could have some major effects on many millions of people - ultimately unimportant, perhaps, but pretty damn important if you're one of those people.