Are the global climate changes cause for alarm?

I have been reading Climate Courage by Andreas Karelas upon finding it at a bargain store. This matter of global warming I had come to believe was something which has been blown out of proportion by the media. Could it be a collective hallucination that human industry is causing all these environmental changes? I have a feeling many want to deny the harmful effect humans have on the environment as it's too much of an inconvenience for them to think otherwise. On the other hand, I have been persuaded that some environmentalists are fabricating information to create a sense of alarm. Carbon dioxide has been this great obsession when it's not truly a toxin and I have yet to see any clear evidence that it's worthy of all the media attention and alarmist propaganda about how it's harming the global environment.

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

1490wayb · 56-60, M

it used to be called pollution and yes that is a huge problem...the anarctic and alaska were previously warm tropical areas according to fossils being found.

Neoerectus · M

@1490wayb And all the continents were one called Pangea. Apples and oranges.

Ynotisay · M

@1490wayb Went back 90 million years for that one. Why?

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@1490wayb Pollution is the cause, not a synonym, of climate change, and there is one huge difference between what is happening at the moment and what happened tens to hundreds of millions of years ago.

That difference boils down to one thing, something that's been around as a species for less than 1M years: Man, doing things that would never happen naturally, with huge and totally un-natural effects in total.

If it does turn out the climate is changing entirely naturally, there is absolutely nothing we can do to control it or the devastating impact it would have on us world-wide. Man did live through the Last Glacial Maximum of the present Ice Age, and at least some of the preceding warm phase; but there were far fewer people on Earth, living far simpler (though hard) lives, and it would have have been easier for them to cope with the worst conditions than any of us living now could. The climate changes were natural so much slower than we are seeing, and the people and animals just moved to more comfortable areas.