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This page as at 25 Jan '08. I may add more anon.
The Great Global Warming Conspiracy.
The UK government has recently announced that all incandescent bulbs will be phased out in favour of fluorescent replacements.
The replacements will produce a much lower carbon footprint. (Actually, not so much lower as they seem to think - but I want to be sure of my facts on this before pontificating.)
What has been ignored is the massively greater levels of pollution produced by the new bulbs, both in production and in disposal.
The carbon output produced by a single incandescent bulb, or a billion, is not negligible, but it will eventually disperse. The toxic pollution particularly inherent in low-energy bulbs, especially of, for example, mercury, will last not thousands but millions of years.
There is no question now that the planet is warming. There is not a single reputable independent scientist in any relevant field who would disagree.
Whether that warming will be dangerous or fatal to the civilisations of the developed world is (marginally) more debatable.
Whether it will prove fatal to the survival of the human race remains a matter for speculation; many are increasingly pessimistic, and point to the disappearance of a growing number of species. (The UK newspaper, the Independent, has recently quoted as being at risk in the medium term, inter alia: 1 in 4 mammals; 4 in 5 plants!)
However, I would suggest that unless you are well-informed, you will be hard-pushed to name a single species that has become extinct so far because of global warming.
It is pollution that is killing species - recently announced, the River Dolphins in China; habitat destruction is killing species; human greed, murderousness and sheer bloody-mindedness are killing them; human population pressure is killing them most of all: but the most insidious and in the long term the most dangerous of all is pollution.
If you are uncertain of this, tell yourself that you have never been bothered about any chemicals that may be being ingested by your children.
There is no Global Warming Conspiracy, of course; but our frenzy about the climate has the dire effect of distracting us from the pollution that has been damaging the planet since classical times at least (extraordinary levels of lead in the Greenland ice sheet dating from and associated with silver processing in the Mediterranean from as early as the fifth century BC). There is some hope that we will cope with global warming, and in the end it is likely - albeit far from certain - that it will sort itself out, even if it takes the extinction of the human race to achieve that. But the chemical damage which we are doing to the planet is far more problematic - it will take millions of years to clear, and it will never clear completely.
I am grateful that even George Bush begins to recognise the need to tackle global warming: but global warming is getting the press, the funding and the political limelight. We have put pollution onto a relative back-burner at our peril.
Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society and Astronomer Royal, gives us
a 50-50 chance of surviving the present century.
14c.