Bump.
Anyone have a new thought on global warming?
Personally, I feel much of the hype around AGW is driven by goal-oriented thinking. The goal is often something laudable, like reducing petroleum consumption or saving wildlife habitat. But since it seems laudable goals alone are not very good at A) convincing people to change their habits or B) getting expensive policies approved or funded, the tact that remains is to make the
status quo look like suicide. "If we all don't stop driving cars right now, we're all gonna die!"
Fear is one of the greatest motivators known since people cease to behave rationally when fear is in play. It's the tactic of the unscrupulous salesman. That's how I see the AGW affecting me--since I will never endeavour to do research in this field, I have only how its perceived effects will affect me through new governmental policies, restrictions, taxes and, of course, the knowledge that since we're all not dead yet, the policies/restrictions/taxes must be working.
P.S. How come we never hear predictions about what the temperature/rainfall/etc will be in like 3 or 5 or 10 years? It seems with the certainty of prediction for 100 years from now, they ought to be able to make a prediction from their models and then test to see how close the model comes to reality.
