Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could
reach 10 million barrels per day” (Macalister 2010). Over the next few months, this report was
followed by similar ones issued by both the British and German militaries (Schultz 2010).
2. Climate Change
“
The outlook for global warming if the world continues its current path is a lot worse than it was just a
few years ago, says new research from MIT, making it even more urgent to put in place strong policies
to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. The new MIT study, like all climate studies a sophisticated com-
puter model, projects a median temperature rise of 5.2 degrees centigrade in 2100. That's double the
2.4 degree increase projected in a 2003 study, MIT said. The range of temperature increases that are
90% likely stretches from 3.5 to 7.4 degrees centigrade [6.3˚F-13.3˚F].
”
—“Climate Change: MIT Study
Says Temperatures Could Rise Twice as Much,”
Wall Street Journal
, May 19, 2009
With a 90 percent degree of certainty, the world's top scientists believe that our planet's climate
is changing at an accelerating pace, that these changes are caused by humankind, and will have
increasingly severe consequences for our world. Naysayers stress the 10 percent scientific
probability that man is not the cause of current climate changes, but would you board a plane if
you were told it “only” had a 9 in 10 chance of crashing? It is a rare person over the age of
thirty who will tell you that the weather is not quite different now from when they were a child;
if nothing else, certainly far more erratic, though not always hotter.
In addition to mankind's emissions of “greenhouse gases,” good climatologists also look at
a wide variety of contributing interwoven factors, such as solar fluctuations, orbital variations,
volcanic ash, air pollution particulates, and so on. For example, in the winter of 2009-10, a
combination of cooling effects from the Northern Hemisphere's aerosol pollutants (smoke from
coal power plants, industry, cars) and the sun being in a phase known as a “solar minimum”
temporarily counteracted the warming effects of the greenhouse gases across the central latit-
udes of the Northern Hemisphere, helping to give many of those living in the heavily populated
areas of Europe, North America, and Asia a winter that seemed like “the good old days.” This
led many to breathe a sigh of relief, siding with the climate change deniers' proclamations that
global warming is a hoax foisted upon the peoples of the world by a huge conspiracy that man-
aged to corral and censor the vast majority of the world's climate scientists from countries
around the world. However, global scientific weather data for that winter showed composite
temperatures well above average in the far north as well as most of the Southern Hemi-
sphere—areas not subject to the cooling effects from the bulk of the aerosol pollutants emitted
