Written By: John Poole on December 8, 2009 510 Comments

This was probably the best global warming cartoon I’ve seen. I caught it in yesterday’s USA today which I only read while I’m in the airport for some reason. There should be another guy asking, “But what if it’s true and we don’t do anything.” And then they’ll have a guy on the stage with a list of catastrophic events like ramped disease, hightened natural disasters, and cities under water. That would be funny.

But seriously, forget about all the benefits of climate change mitigation and think about the potential effects of global warming, they could totally ruin us. So basically, the risk of not doing anything is huge and the risk of doing something is, well, nothing. I really have a lot of difficultly listening to flat Earthers cry about some hoax or conspiracy. If we don’t curb climate change and the potential effects that come with it, we’re going to have more problems than Tiger Woods’ marriage.

In fact, a few extramarital transgressions will be the least of our problems because the greatest transgression of all will be too great to reverse – the pollution of the planet. The bottom line is that the Earth is warming. And while you could claim that this is some natural cycle of global temperature, you should first consider that the Earth’s average temperature is 14 degrees Celsius and it has gone up 1 degree Celsius over the past 150 years. That’s a 7% increase – and this is in only 150 years! Geologically speaking, 10,000 years is a nano second and 150 is a negligible amount of time.

The following excerpt was taken from the website of the COP15 conference:

At present the concentration of CO 2 in the atmosphere is about 385 ppm (parts per million). Before industrialization it was about 280 ppm. Analyses of air contained in ice from the Antarctic ice cap show that there is far more CO 2 in the air today than at any time in the last 650,000 years.

Yesterday marked the beginning of the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference which is being held in Copenhagen, Denmark. Many are hoping for the conference to result in an ambitious agreement to reduce carbon emissions involving all countries of the World. In the very least it is a refreshing opportunity for leaders of the World to discuss a threat for which a unified effort is necessary.

I’m personally not going to listen to any nay-sayers of the green movement or efforts to curb climate change because there is very little detrimental results that could come for any approach at reversing climate change – the risk of doing nothing is just far too great.

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Tags: Climate Change, Construction blog, Construction Economics, COP15, Copenhagen, Global Warming, John Poole