Many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several "tipping points" that could — within as little as 10 years — make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet's habitability for human civilization. In this regard, just a few weeks ago, another group of scientists reported on the unexpectedly rapid increases in the release of carbon and methane emissions from frozen tundra in Siberia, now beginning to thaw because of human caused increases in global temperature. The scientists tell us that the tundra in danger of thawing contains an amount of additional global warming pollution that is equal to the total amount that is already in the earth's atmosphere.
Al Gore
The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.
Stephen Hawking
Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax.…You need to have fear. You needed to have the fear of starvation. You needed to have the fear of the whole place going to hell in a handbasket. Which — do we have that fear now with global warming?…Then you have to discredit the scientists that say "That's not right." And you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did. That's what Al Gore, the U.N., and everybody on the global warming bandwagon [are doing].
Glenn Beck
It should come as no surprise that there is no shortage of environmentalist exaggeration and half-truth that also "misleads people about climate change". After all, professional environmentalists and climate scientists might lose their jobs if the global warming problem was to ever go away. (...) As a result, everyone in the global warming debate is biased. People can expect that corporations will emphasize research that supports their opinions and goals, while environmental lobbying groups will do the same. Everyone has financial motives, and government-funded scientists and environmentalists acting as if they own the moral high ground is an increasingly tiresome pose.
Roy Spencer
One thing I try to point out to people, and Dick Lindzen has pointed this out in the past, too, is that, as most of you probably know, about ninety percent of the earth’s greenhouse effect is water vapor, then carbon dioxide, methane and some trace gases. The water vapor con-centration in the atmosphere goes up and down quite a bit, but it is self-regulating. Things don’t get too warm before precipitation systems suck the water vapor out again. I don’t understand how we can know how much warming there will be with global warming until we understand how precipitation systems change with warming. We don’t under-stand that, and I have papers from modelers who have said the same thing. Modelers don’t like to talk about what they don’t know. So until we understand these natural proc-esses that remove the earth’s primary greenhouse gas, water vapor, from the atmosphere – which is a self-regulating part of the earth keeping a constant temperature – I don’t think we can predict how much warming there will be due to increasing CO2. It is a mat-ter of faith again, I think. We are not saying that we don’t believe that there can be sig-nificant global warming. As John said, if you add CO2, something has to change. But things are changing all the time anyway. The big question is: So what? How much is it going to change, compared to other things? And what can you do about it?
Roy Spencer
What I have discovered in 20 years of studying the universe, from here to there to everywhere, is that the universe is complicated, and when things happen, it is almost never like ‘A happened and therefore B’. No, A happened and therefore B, C, D and E, but then there is this thing F, and that had a 10% effect, and that prompted G to go back and tip over A, and it is always like this – everything is interconnected. And so a lot of these far-right fundamentalist religion people, and a lot of these people who are anti-global warming, anti-evolution, anti-science, what they do is they take advantage of the fact that things are complicated, and their lives are based on things being simple – if we do this, then this will happen – if we invade Iraq, we will be treated as liberators, if we pray, then good things will happen, and this stuff is wrong. But we have a culture where people are brought up to believe in simplicity, and if A then B. And so when you point out that scientists say the earth is warming, but we had a really devastating winter this year, then these people will say “oh, obviously global warming is wrong”. No, global warming can cause worse winters locally. It’s complicated. But people don’t want to hear “it’s complicated”, and boy, the conspiracy theorists and anti-scientists take full advantage of that.
Phil Plait
Gore, Al
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