Scientist predicted countries would be underwater by now

John	U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked "A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000." ohn Kallies "The warning from 1989 is some kind of good message" is not my point at all. My point is that they've been saying this stuff with the same sensational doomsday time frame and the same rhetoric and the same purse strings for 50 years. We've only been measuring these things for a couple hundred years, and I have zero faith in the objectivity of the money behind the science. Yes, we should do a much better job than humans have since the Industrial Revolution started. But I don't believe the sensational nonsense for a minute. I'd be interested in objective honest information about the carbon footprint of manufacturing and disposing of a hybrid vehicle. Or the environmental impact of simply manufacturing and transporting a windmill. Much less hundred of thousands of them. There's got to be better answers, but the media spin has zero credibility.
Tom	I certainly understand skepticism about media headlines and wanting to get objective data. But what sources would you accept as objective? There are some important observations to make about the posted article. The UN official that they are talking about, Noel Brown, is not a climate scientist. Also, although the wording in the AP article is confusing and easily misunderstood, he was not saying that countries would be underwater by the year 2000. He was saying that some countries would be underwater in the more distant future if trends are not reversed by the year 2000. Perhaps more importantly, the studies that he was trying to cite do not talk about sea level rise in the year 2000. They were talking about the year 2100 and beyond if trends continue. Interestingly those predictions are being backed up by more recent studies. I don’t think your skepticism is bad, but it does seem to be too easy to just dismiss thousands of scientists operating in a multitude of countries as just being paid off or getting funding from sources with the same nefarious goal. Many IPCC scientists, for example, volunteer their time for free. There are also scientists who were hired by people in the hopes of disproving climate change but ended up confirming it. One famous case is that of Richard Muller. He is a physicist (not a climatologist) and was a well known and vocal climate change denier. He was hired by the Koch brothers to study climate change in hopes of poking holes in the science. After studying the data and the science for a couple of years he changed is mind and concluded that not only is global warming happening, it is almost entirely caused by human activity. If all the climate scientists were just worried about their jobs, then you would expect that scientists who worked for the U.S. Government under administrations that were hostile to the idea of human caused climate change, such as George Bush, would have produced reports criticizing the idea of human caused climate change. They didn't do that. They did just the opposite. Can we hold the above scientists as more likely than not of being objective sources? I think your question about the environmental impacts of hybrid cars and windmills are good ones. I think such questions are still up to debate. I do think, however, that it is getting more and more difficult to make an argument that climate change itself is not a serious concern. If you don’t trust the media, you can easily find information from the scientists themselves. If you don’t trust them, who do you trust and why? Did UN Official Say Nations Would Vanish If Global Warming Not Reversed by 2000?