I've been reading about the contradictory opinions on the effect of global warming. I'm thinking of pundit scientists popular with the B (movie) administration and oil companies that talk about the advantages of losing the polar ice cap regions. For example, increase in arable land for cultivation and access to oil reserves.
Never mind that we lose the polar bears and countless other species and native peoples who depend on the habitat to survive. Never mind the health problems people throughout the world endure because of emissions and other chemical toxins and gases that we live around - mainly from petroleum derivatives. Never mind that we are destroying one of the richest places (Brazilian rainforest) for medicinal antidotes to our current epidemic crises.
Rhetorically I wonder: why should they care about greenhouse gases if the end result has its advantages, even if philosophically we are against them? In terms of geologic time, the earth, climate, and universe have been going through cataclysmic events since forever.
I wonder this in an effort to build a bullet proof argument as I recommit myself to the fight for our environment. This
NYT article today makes it "seem" like 8 nations finding evidence of possible oil reserves and previous global warming (see, it's normal!) is a good and natural progression in the life of the universe. It seems at least some of these scientists are affiliated with oil companies. No surprize.
Excerpts follow:
Arctic Ocean was once apparently a warm, biologically brewing basin so rich in sinking organic material that some scientists examining fresh evidence pulled from a submerged ridge near the North Pole say the seabed may now hold significant oil and gas deposits.
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This is just one of many findings from a pioneering expedition that in late summer sent dozens of scientists and technicians on three icebreakers - one with a drilling rig nine stories tall - into the drifting, crunching plates of sea ice to retrieve the first long-term record of climate and ocean conditions there. The expedition drilled 1,400 feet deep, retrieving cores of sediment that, with some gaps, span 56 million years. Scientists from around the world gathered in Bremen, Germany, this month to analyze the samples.
They hope that a better understanding of how Arctic climate has varied over the millenniums will help them project the implications of the region's recent warming trend, which many scientists have concluded has mainly been propelled by emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.Just retrieving the samples was "a technical tour de force," said Dr. Richard B. Alley, an expert on Arctic change at Penn State.
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"This could indeed be a promising sign for oil and gas prospectivity in the Arctic Ocean," said Prof. Harry Doust of the Free University of Amsterdam, who is a former exploration geologist for Shell.
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Already, under a provision in the Law of the Sea Treaty, Denmark, Russia and other countries with Arctic territory are sending out mapping expeditions aimed at expanding their seabed claims. The United States, under pressure from some conservative Republican senators who oppose many such international compacts, has not ratified the treaty. But new American Arctic surveys are planned, in part on the presumption that the United States will ratify the treaty soon.