This is one of those baffling things that pisses me off a little bit. I may have even wrote about this a while ago, but come on. First of all, if you're generally stupid, continue as you have most of your life and keep quiet. When the discussion of climate warming comes up, all of us plebeians should be united at best. If you happen to work for Shell, BP, Texaco, or any other oil group, then sure, we expect you to defend the dark side. In general, something like 97% of the scientists that study climate insist that we humans and our fossil burning ways are contributing to global warming.
I was just sitting here bored skimming through Facebook and a Yale Environment 360 graph popped up showing the temperature warming since around 1929. The graph shows the temperatures with a color code and slowly the colors go from a bluish brownish hue to a dark red by 2016. I can't help but then go read the comments and sure enough, I swear these guys are getting paid to surface and spew their venom. Best case scenario, you're an unemployed idiot with a computer and you want to troll people to piss them off. Great, you are not only taking my money in government aid, you are also wasting my time by playing your games. Get off the couch and spend your time looking for a job, fool. Who else would dare take the side of being a climate denier? Well, as a population, only about 1 in 8 adults even know or think that 97% of climate experts blame humans.
Add to that we now live in an age where the president seems clinically insane, calling the media fake, throwing tantrums like a child. Worse, he is on the side of not believing scientists which emboldens a bigger part of the population to side with him. George Bush was at least a naïve, religious man who blamed God for mysterious things beyond his understanding. Trump is only interested in money, and anything he does, I believe, serves his own pockets. Him denying climate change allows his companies to operate more profitably, so as bad as that is, at least it makes sense, to me.
But you stupid people who sit on the sidelines with nothing to gain and a planet to lose, why take their side? You will not gain a penny if all the fish disappear, you will not gain a nickel if all the forests are stripped. It may turn out that CO2 is not the evil monster warming the planet, as so many scientists say, but you want to risk it all? I have had the discussions at work, and it's always the same thing, "how accurate were they keeping temp data 100 years ago?" "the earth is always warming or cooling..." "we are about to go into another ice age..." Oh yeah, don't forget "cows make more methane gas than us humans..."
So for these deniers, we do nothing then? We just keep on doing the same thing as chunks of ice the size of Delaware break off around Antarctica? I am not saying I have solutions, although our house is now 85% solar powered? We need something to start to happen. We have much cleaner air because we started doing something about pollution in the late 70's. There used to be pictures of most of the big cities covered in smog and we don't hear about that anymore. Pollutants like CFC's used as propellants in aerosol cans were removed from use. Something similar needs to happen to reduce the CO2, maybe more electric cars, maybe they get subsidized by the government to push their sales over gas burning cars. The government gives plenty of money to the big oil companies even with their billions in profits to continue exploration and discovering new locations and pockets of fuel, that money could be funneled to electric car companies/battery manufacturers to lead to the next generation of batteries that could make electric cars desirable. The only loser long term in this idea is the oil companies, not that they are going away anytime soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment