I think that global warming is one big warm pile of crap. Everyone is all of a sudden all worried about being green and having a small "carbon footprint" (ironic since our foot... and the rest of us are carbon based... I always get a chuckle out of that). Last week there was a big concert, with people flying in from all over the world and people watching on the internet and on TV to watch a feat that uses one heck of a lot of power and fuel and creates a lot of trash to promote being green. Hmm... seems rather counter productive doesn't it.

Global warming is coming... that is why we have to BUY carbon credits. That is why we have to change the way we do business. That is why you should be SCARED TO DEATH because the world will possibly, for sure, end sometime in the very near or semi distant future. It is a call to arms because there is only one thing that we can do: throw more money at the problem to fix it (want to buy carbon credits, or even a device to measure your output?).

But should we care. There are four things to think about before you join the mob and turn into a hippie:

Is GW actually happening?

Supposedly. I don't think that there is any solid science to back it up because supposedly the sea levels are going to start rising dramatically, the winters will get shorter and the summers will be dryer. But "global warming" has been happening for such a short time that we have not been able to detect it. Sure, they show you images of huge ice shelves falling off Antarctica but what do you expect? The continent goes from seeing next to no sun one day to having complete sun six months later. Wouldn't you expect it to grow and shrink?

And of course the graphs showing the fractions of a degree that the world has been warming at for the past years. I have seen graphs that compare the graph of the last 100 years to the last 2000 to prove that GW exists. But how do they think that they can accurately tell us what the temperature was 2000 years ago. Sure, we can tell that there were ice ages pretty regularly, but they want to say that they can compare accurate temperatures with wild ass guesses?

If it is, are we causing it?

Our carbon emissions right? But what caused the temperature fluctuations in the past when cycled in and out of ice ages. Was it SUVs back then too?

Maybe we should understand the past better before we start jumping to conclusions. There are more variables in a global climate than just humans.

If it is happening and we are causing it, is there any reason to think it will be bad for us?

So it gets warmer. Is that really bad? The world changes a bit... some people loose their water front property and we have to change some of the habits that we have made in the past. People are scared of change, but this might not be completely bad. Besides, if global warming keeps up at its current snale's rate, then our great great great grandchildren wont even notice the difference, and we won't be around long enough to see any real change happen. It will just be the way the climate is.

Just because the climate is changing, doesn't mean that it will be catastrophic.

If it is happening and we are causing it and it is bad, are there any solutions out there to fix it?

Will buying carbon credits from across the globe for your factory in Los Angeles really make LA that much better? People are going to continue to consume and the only way that anything is going to change is when the consumer continues to get what they really want, and when the business doesn't see it on their bottom line. And we have been doing that for years now. Cars are cleaner, electronics use less power and technology has allowed us to do more with less. That is the natural succession of business. What can Al Gore giving us sensationalist media clips do that is better than that?