To Think Global Warming Can't Be All Bad?

[afteralongsquawk]

My carefully planted main crop tomatoes are long finished; but the runty little seedlings I dumped on the compost heap are doing great and still producing lovely toms in the last third of Nov!

AIBU to rather approve of this global warming thing?

i also dont have any sympathy for endangered/extinct animals. animals have been going extinct since the dawn of the dinosaurs... i thought this was the natural development of our universe, not something to keep me awake at night!

afteralong - YANBU

Boohoo - we're also animals and will be just as vulnerable to many of the consequences of global warming as the rest of the planet.

oh dear. I hope you are just joking.

Sadly I think too many people really do believe this... and it will make human change too slow to avoid collapse.

Read Jared Diamond's 'Collapse'.

so, yes, YABU

The extinction of some species could literally have devastating effects on the way we live, bees are one of those, unfortunately they are currently dying out.

YABU

OP, you are only joking aren't you?

Mos - same, I never fail to be amazed at the number of people who say they couldn't give a monkeys about global warming but then in the next breath start whining about how expensive food is getting or similar and fail to see any sort of link.

This ain't gonna end well.

I feel it in me water.

Only idiots talk about "global warming" and chortle that it's a great thing for England.

The correct way to look at it is "climate change", and if you want to be terribly parochial about it, floods and freak weather in the UK alone have been pretty devastating in recent years, let alone places which are so low-lying, like Bangladesh.

The only problem is that many animals are not becoming extinct because of the natural cycle of life - man is causing it. Global warming is not causing the extinction of animals, unless the ozone layer becomes non existant and they all burn to death.

However, the world's climate has always changed, getting colder and hotter. And quite frankly it's getting colder and colder here, last winter was -10 degrees and it's expected to be the same this year. Not much global warming going on in this neck of the woods.

Yeah, funny how they have changed it from Global warming to 'climate change' when they realised they couldn't put the cold and freak weather down to the warming of the earth.

I read somewhere that global warming is going to most affect the people least able to adapt and the contributed the least towards it.

Apparently the UK isn't going to be too badly off with some positives from it (unless the gulf stream shifts away from us) and we're also rich enough to adapt to the negatives but places like Bangladesh and the Horn of Africa are quite fucked.

There's a hell of a lot riding on proving that global warming climate change is man-made.

Just think of all the new taxes that were implemented to raise extra revenue encourage people to use less fossil fuels, etc.

I'm still unsure about a lot of the evidence. Not because I don't want to believe we're ruining the planet but because there has been so much of the so-called evidence discredited.

Climate scientists would have been better left to do their jobs than have politicians from the IPCC on their backs, encouraging them to inflate figures and assist with their political agenda.

I'd really seen enough once Al Gore jumped on the money-making bandwagon and I could actually have vomitted when Foo Fighters performed 'My Hero' at Live 8 and dedicated it to Gore.

/Rant

I think the best we'll ever be able to say is that it's probably man made. It's not like we can set up a randomised controlled trial to definitively prove it either way. But the correlation is there, temporality is there and a strong theory for the mechanism of action is there as well - so more likely than not it's man made. Shouldn't we be hedging our bets considering how catastrophic it could be if we wait for definitive proof before acting?

shellyboobs don't want to cause an argument but how did al gore do it for the money? Genuinely interested as we watched his DVD last year in A Level geography and I thought it was quite good .

Global warming is still called global warming. Part of global warming is that in some areas of the world there will be periods with extremely cold weather.

The gulf stream is an example of this. Melting ice caused by global warming could lead to changes in the gulf stream which would lead to the UK becoming very cold.

Whether or not the OP believes global warming is caused by human activity or not, it is pretty low to go about your tomatoes when other people's lives are already being ruined by climate change. The Tsunami was natural, and some pretty sediments caused by it have made some UK beaches look rather picturesque, but I hope that people still think the Tsunami was a terrible catastrophe.

JAMW I mean 'political', sorry.

Shouldn't we be hedging our bets considering how catastrophic it could be if we wait for definitive proof before acting?

Absolutely.

I just think that a lot of damage has been done to the whole argument by meddling politicians who have tried to use CC for their own gains and in the process, encouraged falsification and exaggeration.

VeryStressedMum - sorry but global warming/climate change IS affecting animals and their extinction and right here in Britain - puffin numbers are in decline because the mainstay of their diet, sand eels, are down due to climate change affecting ocean currents and temperatures (the sand eels eat plankton the numbers of which are greatly influenced by these factors).

And (as far as I know), there is no link between the ozone layer (caused by CFCs etc) and global warming (caused by carbon dioxide emissions, methane etc).

well my boys and i have had a nice night out

Shelly - completely agree, the whole issue of climate change, the humanitarian aspect, (i.e. the fact that millions will probably starve as a result of change with weather patterns affecting food production in countries that exist on a hand-to-mouth basis) has been completely lost in the face of politicians using it for their own ends.

JAMW - my favourite bit is when he's got that massive graph and that little lift thing to move him up and down, I think its comic effect is was quite unintentional but I find it hilarious (despite serious subject matter).

The tsunami was a terrible catastrophe but it was caused by an earthquake under the sea bed which caused the tsunami, not sure how this is linked to global warming?
And changes in the Gulf Stream have happened before thousands of years ago which is presumed to have caused the ice age but evidence suggests that it will not happen on the same scale IF it happens at all. If does it won't be for maybe 100 years.
I agree with what shellyboobs said.

Milly wasn't saying the tsunami was caused by global warming, she was saying that to say global warming is a good thing because it makes tomatoes grow in november is like saying the tsunami was a good thing because our beaches looked pretty. I.e. that the OP was being a bit flippant.

Puffins are probably more at risk from over fishing by man than the rise in the sea temperature by global warming.

Yes, that's my point re ozone layer and global warming.

Sorry I misunderstood.