This has been building up for me for a number of years, but I’ve now decided: I am only going to vote for candidates that actually support doing something about global warming, preferably people who are voting that way and doing things.
As a bleeding heart liberal with a scientific worldview and a humanistic approach to all the other members of my species, we have got to stop pretending that our activities have not caused this rise in global temperature, this increasing volatility in weather patterns, the collapse of various sea-based lifeforms (along with overfishing, of course), the busting up of mountain tops and dumping them in river valleys, etc.
I believe we are an adaptable species: this global warming won’t kill us… at least it won’t kill us all. But it is going to make life much more difficult, less interesting, and less fun. It will become the single most important issue to the entire world eventually – but it will be too late to fix it then. Heck, it may be too late now.
Read this article from Bill McKibben reposted on Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard blog. Then help me figure out who is running in Maryland elections that has a track record on global warming, good or bad. I’ll vote for the good and against the bad. I’ll post what I learn here.
As an evil conservative with a scientific worldview, I will be working on cancelling your vote with mine. 🙂
I have a hard time getting worked up about a less than 1 deg C increase in global temperatures over the past 100 years, even if we assume that it is all caused by mankind’s CO2 emissions. You might also take a look at a couple of papers which point out that “extreme” weather such as tornados and hurricanes are not, in fact, become more common:
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/severeweather/tornadoes.html#history
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/landsea-eos-may012007.pdf
On a less contentious note, I hope things are going well for you!
Luckily we live in different states. Hi Keith! How the heck are ya?
I’m doing great, Jim. I hope you are too. We miss you around here in Cleveland!
Also, Keith, a 1 deg C increase has very significant impacts… and another degree will cause vast changes to global and local ecologies:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/1206_041206_global_warming.html
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2009/08/g8s-2-degrees-goal/