How seriously does global warming affect your private life?

[Alan]

Hi,

How seriously do you take/think about/do anything in your own private life about the issue of global warming? I received this email this week:

[Tamara]

Hi

I don’t think the above action can have noticeable effect on 'practical dimension', but I believe it would be good if parents, when doing it, explain their children why they are doing it. Plus the idea of cooperative efforts, per se... Psychological effect, I mean.
The feeling that you’re doing something positive at the same moment and together with 'all humans' is very strong and works quite well - psychologically. Especially for children and teens.
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[Torsten]

Well, so far global warming has had a very positive impact on my private life: I don't need to change my car tyres, I can sunbathe in the winter and my laundry dries more quickly. Also, I can save on energy and heating fuel. Of course, there is a downside to global warming too...
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[Alan]

Hi Torsten,

I'm intrigued as to how you don't need to change your tyres.

A
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[Torsten]

Well, German lawmakers have literally been forcing car owners to put a set of 'winter tyres' on their cars. However, with the current weather situation why should abide by this? More on this here:
http://www.etyres.co.uk/winter-tyres-law
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[Jamie (K)]

If global warming even exists, it has affected my life positively, because we have had warmer weather longer this year.

However, I don't believe in global warming, at least in the way environmentalists complain about it, because it's just another fad that will be replaced by still another fad later.

Think about this: Thirty years ago, environmentalists were predicting disaster due to global cooling -- and of course the same things that they now claim are causing global warming were being blamed for global cooling. Notice that last year environmentalists were blaming the heavy hurricane season on global warming and President Bush. This year we have had a mild hurricane season, and nobody is bringing up the global warming issue in relation to the mild season. The issue has just gone away. One year we had a particularly cold winter, and even that was blamed on global warming. Back when I used to watch CNN a lot, I learned about other interesting "causes" of "global warming": (1) people eating bananas (environmentalists don't want tropical land to be under cultivation), (2) cow flatulence (some environmentalists don't want people to eat beef). Basically, anything they're against causes global warming, including President Bush, bananas and cows passing gas.

Another fad: In the 1970s environmentalists warned that by 1980 there would be no petroleum left. "Civilization as we know it" was going to come "crashing down". Ten years after that, we were practically swimming in oil.

The environmental movement is basically an apocalyptic religious movement, and as their theories get debunked, their focus changes. They're like the Seventh-Day Adventists and some of the other sects who went up on top of the mountain a couple of times waiting for the end of the world, and when it never came, changed the date. First they claim the apocalypse is coming due to global cooling, but then it starts warming up again. So they claim the apocalypse is coming because the fossil fuels are being used up. The supply of fossil fuels increases, so then they blame global warming. In 10 or 20 years they'll be whipping up hysteria over something else.

The basic formula is this: First they identify a "crisis". No matter what other evidence is at hand, this "crisis" must be blamed on sin. The sinners are the people in the prosperous countries of the developed world, especially the United States. If those people don't stop sinning, "the end of the world as we know it" will come to pass.

People fall into this because the human brain is hard-wired for religion. It's wired to believe in suffering and liberation, sin and apocalyptic destruction. Most people who give up standard religion go to some other religion that has these concepts, such as Marxism or phony environmentalism. The fads of this sort almost alway start in the United States, because Americans have a big tradition of apocalyptic religion. Germans pick this stuff up and run with it, because they've actually had three apocalypses in their history. The first one they merely blamed on their sins, and the second and third ones really did happen because of their sins. This is why the big environmental hysterics tend to be American, and the avid environmental finger-wagging moralists tend to be German.

[prezbucky]

whether we're just in a warm cycle or there actually is global warming... I'll take the warmer temps.
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