emotion and climate change
Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 3:24PM
Robert Twigger

One major concern I have over climate change is that it leads to over emotional reactions to the evidence. Panicky advocates of nuclear power ‘because time is running out’ is one worrying example. They assume, for example, that the news is all bad. It isn’t. Vicky Pope, a scientist at the UKs Met Office warned the recent UN world climate conference in Geneva that recent dramatic Arctic ice loss was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming, as was previously thought. Preliminary reports suggest there is much less Arctic melting this year than in 2007/8. Climate physicist Mojib Latif of Kiel University, Gemany is an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He reported at the Geneva Conference that we are about to enter "one or even two decades of global cooling" rather than warming. He said, “People will say this is global warming disappearing. I am not one of the sceptics, however we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.” The atmosphere that surrounds discourse about global warming is emotional, not objective. All our information about climate change comes from computer models and from real measurements taken in the world. Now some of the most respected models are showing that global warming will decrease, for a while. And Arctic temperatures are confirming this. So the ‘problem’ of climate change is now one of global warming happening not now, but maybe twenty years away. This is not a strong enough reason to embrace nuclear technology as a quick fix ‘carbon emission’ solution. I disagree with any form of unsustainable energy as it seems plain greedy to want more than we ought to have. Those green activists who advocate nuclear power or weather 'engineering' (seeding clouds for rain etc) are committing a huge mistake based on misreading the often subtle evidence for climate change. The right move is directly towards complete dependence on wind, tidal and solar energy rather than setting a terrible example to the developing world by embracing nuclear technology and all its pathological implications.

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