|
PMM wrote: But I'm finding that this sort of presentation is ultimately counter-productive.
yeah, but sub-editors want to give the most eyecatching headline, not a truthful one. In the Express/Mail world, I've repeatedly found the articles don't even tally with the headlines, which must really piss off the journo who wrote it. And when you peel off the layer of journo sensationalisation, the thing actually being reported is often even less alarming.
As a tangent...
PMM wrote: How often do you hear people say "Global warming? Yeah but back in the 70's, scientists were predicting another ice age"
If I remember rightly, scientists weren't predicting another ice age.
They were. It was based on the huge amount of sulphur emissions from industrial facilities. This would cause greater cloud cover, lowering global temperatures.
They were right. Indeed, there has been serious suggestion that it was European sulphate emissions that fucked up rainfall patterns in eastern Afirca and triggered the droughts of the 70s and 80s.
What they didn't factor in to the cooling scenario was it being countered by the warming effect of carbon emissions, and then reduced to negligibility by legislation that reduced sulphur emissions.
It's yet another of the climate deniers tired arguments 'but they predicted global cooling and were wrong', or 'why didn't the massive increase in carbon emissions after WW2 see a commensurate rise in global temperature'; and like most denier stuff, it's already been covered by accepted science.
There are people advocatin geo-engineering solutions to climate change including firing sulphates into the straoshpere to increase cloud cover. Even though it will cause droughts, and do nothing to reduce CO2 levels and all the other damage they do (acidifying oceans, etc)
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/08/29/no-quick-fix/
http://bristlingbadger.blogspot.com/2009/01/geoengineering-ethically-unsound-says.html
|
