My personal views on global climate change F. Ward Whicker
The peer-reviewed articles in top-flight scientific journals based on real data and measurements that implicate anthropogenic global warming appear to outnumber those that that cast doubt by 10 to 1, and more likely by 100 to 1.
If we continue to have a debate of opinions on this issue, which are easy to find both ways, the public and politicians will probably never buy the concept of going nuclear in a sufficient way. Unfounded fears about nuclear reactors to produce clean & environmentally sound energy are probably enough of a deterrent already. Whether or not it is even possible to ramp up nuclear energy as our primary base electric power source quickly enough to avert the tipping point toward a global environmental disaster seems questionable to me.
I am not a climate scientist, so I cannot make a credible argument off the top of my head that global warming is mainly caused by human-produced greenhouse gases. However, I have read papers in scientific journals for over 30 years on the topic, and was convinced long before Obama’s time that the scientific evidence was overwhelming that the earth is warming and that the likelihood is very high & increasing that human use of fossil fuels is the primary cause. I am actually disappointed that the Obama administration was so slow to become alarmed about global warming and that they didn’t push nuclear power, which I see as the best long-term way to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
I have a high degree of confidence in the 2014 conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Key statements from this panel are: “1.) Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen. 2.) Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-industrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever. This has led to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic drivers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
Having a cabin at 9,000’ in our mountains for > 40 years, I have witnessed increasingly warm winters, more draught, and the loss of some 80% of the mature lodgepole pines in the region through beetle epidemics that used to be controlled by long, cold stretches in the early winter, which we rarely have now. I Page 1