Monday, April 09, 2007

Global warming? Do the math

In the ongoing struggle to capture the public's imagination with an easily comprehended, and thus powerful, metaphor for climate change, the latest contribution is this article by Lorne Gunter. I suspect most people who have been Gored by the AGW hype thus far will be surprised at the relatively small scale of human carbon dioxide illustrated by Gunter's metaphor of water bottles.

As with all ecomyths, numbers have to be viewed in context. When they are, common sense then prevails and people ask the simplest of questions. And when you ask the simple questions of AGW, you come up a few drops shy of disaster, pending doom or any sense of urgency: precisely why AGW advocates tend to portray their scenarios of despair without any normalizing context.

This weekend was Easter weekend. In Southern Ontario we had snow. Tough to sell global warming when it snows (and snows heavily) on the Easter Bunny.