What issues are more and less important than global warming?

Question

What issues are more and less important than global warming?

Answer 1

Islamic fundamentalism is far more important.

What you are having for dinner Saturday night is a little less important - but not much.

Answer 2

To answer your question, I will presume the criteria for judging the importance of a subject is the impact it will have on the future of humanity.

Global warming will be impacting humanity for well in excess of 1000 years. In particular sea levels will rise for more than 1000 years. If we act now and try very hard to reduce our carbon dioxide pollution we can minimize the impact GW will have but we cannot completely escape the changes that it will cause. An impact that lasts of over 1000 years is very large.  Global warming is a relatively unique problem in that the longer we wait to deal with it the worse the consequences will get and the longer it lasts. That quality greatly increases its importance.

Another issue that has the potential to last longer are the side effects from nuclear technology. Here I am lumping nuclear war and nuclear power together. Of the two the impact of nuclear war would be far more severe but would be much shorter in duration lasting "only" for a few hundred years. Nuclear power on the other hand creates nuclear waste that will need to be cared for for on the order of 100,000 years. If at some point in the distant future we forget our nuclear waste and allow it to escape into the environment it will create massive and extremely long lasting impacts.

Wars and political problems that we currently are dealing with, for instance Iraq and Islamic Terrorism, are likely to be very short term in nature as compared to the above issues. Wars also do not affect that many people. The Iraq war for instance is very unlikely to kill any more than 1,000,000 people. That is of course an enormous tragedy but compare that to the potential of global warming, which due to famine and drought is likely to kill billions of people more than 1000 times the impact of even our worst wars. Although war is urgent and therefore seemingly very important, the limited and short-term impact probably less than 100 years makes war relatively unimportant.

The last issue that I can think of is technological changes for example space travel is another issue that has the potential for significant impact over very long periods of time. I would hope that the impact would be generally positive. Of the these issues major technology change is the most speculative and so I think should be ranked the lowest. Wars should be ranked slightly higher.

The impact of nuclear power and nuclear war, could be very severe but also if we are lucky may not ever cause us problems. Global warming on the other hand will create huge changes, which are now unavoidable.

Therefore, due to the very long term, very large, growing and unavoidable impact of Global Warming, it is my opinion that there is no more important issue.