Send to a Friend

ETpro's avatar

What science will global warming deniers move on to denying when Earth's climate is very obviously ruined and causing massive disasters?

Asked by ETpro (34605points) May 19th, 2013

We face a rather dismal future now just with the CO2 level (400 PPM) currently in Earth’s atmosphere. If we stopped all fossil fuel consumption today, and switched entirely to clean energy, we would still continue to warm throughout this century, warming enough to threaten human populations and cause mass animal and plant extinctions. Yet instead of stopping or even slowing emissions, we are continuing to ramp them up. The models for the climate over the rest of this century with continued and increasing CO2 emissions are truly frightening. And these models don’t even take into account the likelihood that rising temperatures will trigger the release of 1.4 to 2.8 trillion metric tons of currently ice-trapped methane, a greenhouse gas that is 75 times more harmful in its first year in the atmosphere than is CO2. The ”Profits before people!” crowd brought the USA alone 350,000 deaths a year in defense of profits for Big Tobacco before they finally conceded that smoking isn’t actually good for you and nicotine is actually addictive. When the disaster these same science deniers are enabling through their opposition to anything that might limit Big Coal and Big Oil’s profits finally impacts them so painfully they can no longer claim global warming is a hoax, what will be the next scientific fact they claim is a all lies?

It’s interesting that most of today’s deniers, if they are old enough to have been around when Big Tobacco was waging it’s disinformation and junk science campaign against the very clear science showing the severe health risks of smoking; were science deniers then, too. Same people. Same “Profits before people!” agenda. Just a different set of scientific facts to deny. Today, the scientific consensus is just as solid that the planet is warming rapidly, the CO2 levels in our atmosphere are rising rapidly, and human activity is causing it as medical evidence against tobacco use was back then. We see stark evidence of global warming all around us in
receding glaciers, melting Arctic sea ice, and the increase in number and intensity of extreme weather events.

Just as with tobacco, eventually the mountain of evidence for anthropomorphic global warming will grow so massive that only the truly insane will be able to deny it. But the deniers will move straight on to denying something else science has established. Any idea what it will be? Be brave. Take a SWAG. To be sure, it will be some sort of a profits before people issue.

Using Fluther

or

Using Email

Separate multiple emails with commas.
We’ll only use these emails for this message.