Richard Alley: Global Warming Optimism
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Get inspired by Richard Alley’s optimistic view on global warming. This world-renowned paleoclimatologist does have some bad news about climate change, although he’ll convince you that we not only have the tools to solve the problem, but we can make money doing it too. See video >>
From Joho the Blog:
[Alley is] an animated speaker. He shows photos of his ice-drilling expedition to Greenland. Is there global warming? Yes. He runs through the evidence. The biggest cause is fossil guels: The typical US driver buys 100 pounds of gasoline per week. We're burning fossil fuels a million times faster than nature created them
Global warming is a natural trend but we're making it much worse. Most of the effects of global warming are negative for humans, he says. Some high-latitude economies will do better. But, it could dry up the grain-belt, kill off a whole bunch of species, raise sea-level and spread tropical diseases. [Ok, overall, I'm against global warming.]
It's hard to make it better but easy to make it worse. Alley hypothesizes that the climate moves by staggering up and down. He shows a chart that shows that in the Ice Age, the temperature staggered but the CO2 level changed rather smoothly. Possible conclusion: Now that CO2 is rising again, we should perhaps expect big swings in temperature. Alley shows satellite photos of the ice sheets in Antarctica. They're melting. These are just small ones. But it's possible the large ones will melt.
Goodbye Florida.
