Why is Global Warming such a touchy issue?

Question

I swear if you make one wise crack about global warming being bs (because of all the snow in the NorthWest, ha ha), everyone jumps on you like white on rice. Whats the deal people?

Answer 1

It's just the most critical issue ever caused and faced by the human race, with a large oil industry-funded movement to deny the science with arguments like "it's snowing".  That's all.

Answer 2

Money! One side, oil and coal industry, has too much to lose.

Answer 3

You sound like a moron when you say it and people don't know you are joking?   Its like yelling fire in a theatre.   Just a joke, but some people get upset.

Answer 4

u see idiots around the world are not passionet about the planet and thay do stuff do increase the world's tempreture causing antarctica to melt and polar bears and junk are dying in hot conditions and were trying to stop it

Answer 5

If enough people stuck in denial dely our response, we fight amongst ourselves for dwindling resources and our species may go extinct.  

What kind of person would joke about something like that (let alone expect it to be acceptible)?

Answer 6

Yea, it's like making fun of a persons religious beliefs, isn't it?

Answer 7

Many parts of the North ice cap is melting . This is measureable . Throughout the life of the earth there have been many periods of warming and ice ages .

If this period is just another one of those , there's nothing that could or should be done about it . If it can be proven that this warming cycle is due to human activity , changes must be made real fast , because it will only get worse as time goes by.

The world is in perfect balance . Any great change will effect all of life .

Answer 8

There's sort of a stereotype of people who say that. They're supposed to be morons, country hicks who don't care about the environment. Sorry, but that's what the stereotype is, I didn't make it.

"Well, I live in the north, and it's cold, so the earth can't be warming" is, as you know, quite commonly said.  It's frustrating for die-hard believers in global warming when people ignore science and measurements. Saying things like that reopens their wounds. xD

Answer 9

Great question. A little history to provide perspective:

More than a generation ago a group of well-intentioned people learned that certain bird populations were declining and traced the cause to thinner egg shells. This was traced to birds eating insects that had been killed with DDT. A campaign very similar to the current one about global warming began, with those in favor of birds claiming that only by banning DDT worldwide could the birds be saved. They further claimed that only they were concerned about the environment and anyone who opposed them was willing to destroy the environment. They succeeded, DDT was banned. Today, about half a million people, mostly small children in third world countries, die from malaria caused by mosquitos that had been controlled by the DDT. The birds are doing a bit better, we just traded human lives for the improvement.

What went wrong was a relatively small group of self-righteous people did not understand that they were tampering with a complex system involving insects, crops, birds, bats, humans, diseases and many other players. They focused only on the thinner egg shells of birds.

About a generation ago a similar group claimed that nuclear power was the great environmental danger. Same mantra, "The only solution is to stop building nuclear power plants, only we care about the planet, those who oppose our perfect plan do not care about the planet." They succeeded and no new nuclear power plants were built in the U.S. for a generation. So, coal-fired plants that emit enormous amounts of CO2 were built instead.

What went wrong was a relatively small group of self-righteous people did not understand that they were tampering with a complex system involving power generation, economic development, industry, mining, technology and many other players. They focused only on the nuclear power plants. Had we continued building nuclear power plants at the rate the French have in the interim we would be emitting about 40% less CO2 today.

Why is global warming such a touchy issue? Here we go again. A small group of self-righteous people have looked at the most complex of all complex systems we know, the global climate, and decided that only one of perhaps several trillion factors affecting this system is the problem and must be fixed. They have a perfect plan, the Kyoto Protocols, which has little to do with global warming and much to do with wealth transfer. The stated intent is to transfer enormous amounts of wealth from western industrialized countries to other countries.

The climatologists are correct, the earth is warming. The geologists are correct, the earth is cooling. The warming is a short-term trend (far less than 1,000 years) within a longer-term trend (more than 10,000 years). The self-righteous wealth-transfer afficionados look at a single phenomenon - man-caused CO2 emissions - and claim that this is the sole cause of global warming which will run away and destroy the earth.

This group of the self-righteous may very well be correct; they might have identified the single cause, among trillions of factors, leading to a short-term trend within a long-term trend. They may be right, this short-term trend, about which there is less than 200 years of reliable data, just might be a complete reversal of the longer-term trend, about which there is somewhere approaching half a billion years of data. I am prepared to be convinced.

Those of us who are not willing to bankrupt western democracies based solely on today's self-righteousness fad are demonized. Few of us deny that global warming is true. We just aren't ready for another "fix" in a complex system that is likely to cause more harm than good.

Answer 10

It is just a touchy issue because it is usually tied to someone trying to tell everybody else how they should live which starts to feel like an infringement on our freedom of choice.

If people just said " this is what I personally believe" and never followed up with " and this is what we all should do " it wouldn't be as near a contentious issue.

Instead, most of the time people are trying to push some kind of agenda so emotions tend to get involved instead of just having an academic discussion of the differing facts and points of view. In short if there was nothing to lose by conceding to the other side of the argument there would probably be a lot more concessions on both sides of the debate.

A lot of people in the U.S.A. value freedom above all else.

Answer 11

Both sides are politically involved and prone to exaggeration and over-simplification.  People wind up treating it like a black and white concept, and begin to see people on the other side as enemies.  Both sides are wrong of course.

Answer 12

because if you diss global warming, manbearpig will come after you. Al Gore told me this and he was being cereal.

Answer 13

Same reason stem cells, evolution, and contraception are touchy issues.  President George Bush made them so as a political payoff to his supporters among the Evangelical Christians.  The irony is the Evangelical Christians AND Bush have abandoned the "Global Warming is a hoax and a conspiracy of the Left" position (rather that be regarded as imbeciles).  But an object at rest tends to remain at rest and an object in motion tends to remain in motion, as you can see.

Answer 14

Many people are genuinely concerned about about it in a very serious manner and are still able to make the odd joke about it, like me.  I'm from Ohio and I've made a couple of jokes too, but I've never had someone jump on me about it and it sucks that that is happening.  Some people, I think, just don't want to laugh about it at any time.