Public Service Announcement: global warming real

I'm going to dispense with attempts at eloquent writing today. I'm also not going to worry too much about whether this post falls properly under "religion & spirituality". In fact, it does. It does because when people have extreme difficulties thinking rationally, being aware of basic facts about their world, and knowing who are insane charlatans and who are not - it has an impact on one's spiritual progress. That's not to mention that it also effects how we behave, which is a matter of ethics and our well being. Thirdly, there are obvious religious motivations behind many distortions on this topic.  Today, my goal is simple. I am fulfilling my ethical duty to use this tiny little soapbox to make a formal announcement for those who may not be aware...

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Yes - Global Warming is real.
Yes - Global Warming is effected by human activity.
Yes - Global Warming presents real and impacting dangers for our future.
Yes - We can work to do something about it, to at least some degree.
Yes - The above is backed by HUGE amounts of scientific data, across a wide spectrum of disciplines, confirmed by independent researchers, and currently represents the massive consensus of the scientific community

If you're wondering what precipitated this, there is a huge stir going on lately about some hacked emails of some climate change scientists in the UK. To hear the various popular lunatics on talk radio describe it, one would get the impression that all of global warming was a hoax and now it's all come crashing down. Radio entertainer Rush Limbaugh claims to actually believe that global warming is a massive "liberal" conspiracy designed to help them redistribute wealth. Several other similarly witted talk-radio entertainers have formed a small but overly-influential chorus along similar lines.

Well, turns out the emails are pretty much two main emails about very specific matters in very specific studies, not really impacting global warming in general, even if they were showing fraud. More importantly, they don't even actually show any fraud when you look at the real meanings and references of what they were talking about. What's happened is that very opportunistic people have taken some of the wording, which would happen to sound conveniently suspicious if you didn't know any of the context and held it up, misrepresenting it in order to convince people of a conclusion they already believed - that global warming is a conspiracy.  What is sad, is that real news channels (not just Fox) have picked up the story and this feeds into that impression. Now, the UN is even looking into the matter, and you've got quite a lot of people out there buying this nonsensical version of events.

Included in this article is an embedded video by a man named Potholer, who is a 20 year journalist and science correspondent and who makes a variety of quality educational videos about science for the public. This video will give you a quick rundown on the situation. I highly recommend reviewing it...



[See other videos by Potholer on climate change and science]

PS - While I'm at it: YES - we really went to the Moon, Evolution is real, 9/11 was not an inside job, and space aliens did not build the pyramids (or at least, there's no reasonable cause to suspect they did).