Quote:
Originally Posted by Libertine
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.
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These same people have also been manipulating the weather for years. Like most other things they say they aren't doing it and those who say they are are labeled kooks.
BEIJING -- Heavy snowfall in northern China is testing the country's disaster preparedness and prompting fresh questions about Beijing's efforts to alter its weather.
A massive blizzard over the past week has dumped some of the heaviest snow in five decades on China's usually arid north, clogging highways and collapsing buildings in seven provinces. The storm, which began Monday, had caused at least $650 million in damage as of Friday afternoon and killed more than 40 people in traffic accidents or building collapses triggered by the snow and ice, the government said.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125814710015847539.html
BEIJING — Unusually early snow storms in northern China have claimed 38 lives in weather-related incidents and caused more than half a billion dollars in damage, the Civil Affairs Ministry said Friday.
Nineteen of the deaths resulted from traffic accidents related to the storms that began on Nov. 9, the ministry said in a news release posted on its Web site.
The snowfall is the heaviest in the area since records began being taken following the establishment of the communist state in 1949, the ministry said. It estimated economic losses from the storm at 3.5 billion yuan (US$513 million).
More than 4.7 million people have been affected by the storms, which have caused the collapse of more than 7,000 buildings, damaged 297,000 acres (120,000 hectares) of crops, and forced the evacuation of 158,000 people, the ministry said.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/can...SdvlY2vWJ-s63g