Global Warming

I’m certainly not going to jump on the global warming bandwagon. All this obsession with melting glaciers to me is somewhat suspicious. This is summer. Snow caps and glaciers melt. That is not a sign of alarm. It's called the water cycle.

The concern is when we compare last summer’s level with this summer’s level and last winter’s lever with this winter’s level. Global warming may be a valid concern but it didn’t happen overnight and the trendy obsession with it is almost yuppie like.

The media is driven by sensationalism and the public is gullible and apathetic. On one hand we show pictures of melting snow in summer and sound the alarm about global warming. On the other hand we have some scientists claim that however widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html

These scientists claim that we may be heading for another ice age. So which is it? Make up your bloody mind. The polar ice caps are receding or expanding? It can’t be both.
http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm

OK so they don’t know which but they do say that if man continues his "interference with climate through deforestation, urban development and pollution, we may soon be confronted with either a runaway glaciation or a runaway deglaciation, both of which would generate unacceptable environmental stresses."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,910467,00.html

Conclusion: tree planting is good, pollution is bad. Go to Cypress lookout and see the smog over Vancouver. That is a concern. Vancouver is a relatively small city compared to New York or London. It’s even much smaller than Toronto. Speaking of which, the pollution in the Great Lakes has been a huge concern for many years: http://green.sympatico.msn.ca/canadianpressarticle.aspx?cp-documentid=607567 Nevertheless, smog is a visible concern we can see and be affected by. It reminds me of when I was a kid visiting LA.

As we watch the Olympics in Beijing, the smog is a real factor despite all their genuine efforts to reduce it with bicycles. Now Beijing is a much larger city than Vancouver so it would be logical to assume the smog there would be a bigger concern than here but when you see all those commuting with bicycles perhaps industrial pollution is also a concern we must examine.

The reason I’m so cynical is because of our addiction to oil. The movie who killed the electric car raises some questions about buy outs from large oil companies.
http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/

Tillers Folly sing a song about an electric railway that existed in Vancouver that ran better than any current rapid transit system. Another example of how if something isn’t broken, don’t fix it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqoDtrwW5ws

Surely electric and hybrid vehicles are something we should look at and propane conversions for larger vehicles would be much cleaner. It still doesn’t address the issue of industrial pollution which is a much larger problem but it is a good start. It does also raise the problem of providing that much electricity for large cities but these are problems we can work on. Personally, I prefer Dams to nuclear reactors but that's just me.