: People dont exist in a box selecting fast moving consumer goods. you seem to have missed out choices you can now make about where to live, what kind of career to pursue what people to associate with etc. I do understand that people are hugely affected by upbringing, that as a child such choices are very limited and that as an adult a person has been highly influenced - but I do not subscribe to the determinist view of man, as helpless of whatever breeze might affect him.: As for the many dieoff links, there is a counter for each on www.cfact.org - yes you can try to brush them aside as 'mouthpieces for corporatism' or whatever, but not without evidence that the research in completely wrong. reading one site and then the other is an amusing excercise in contradiction and confusion. Believing one over the other without scrutinising the actual research is an excercise in faith.
Yes, but I wouldn't describe cfact's environmental replies as convincing in my (qualified) opinion; they smack of axe-grinding; they cite handy figures but no real references or contexts for those figures; they use PATEOTS [1] far too much.
Another minor quibble is the age of the articles; look at them; many of them are pre-El Niņo. Following the analysis of 1997's and 1998's data, more accurate models can be made.
Theories should be built upon observations of the external world; as per the scientific method.
Look at the following experimental data and reports;
http://www.ifrc.org/pubs/wdr/ - The 1999 Human Disaster Report; published two weeks ago. Look also at the key findings of the report.
http://www.wmo.ch/ - The World Meteorological Organisation - the people the UN look to for advice; check the following press release from last December.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/other.htm - the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit; don't be misled by the University; it's a world-renowned centre.
These links are all recent and reliable; they are from the highest level and contain the most recent experimental data. I haven't seen anything on cfact which can stand comparison.
Do you have any up-to-date counterarticles? The corporate boys seem to have been rather quiet since the data came back from last year's climate stations...
Gideon.
[1]PATEOTS; Period At The End Of This Sentence; a method of measuring small amounts in a way that makes sense to the layman; it comes from saying "there's enough acid in a dot the size of the period at the end of this sentence to get Detroit tripping" or words to that effect. The problem is that most laymen still have no idea of what this means; so such a method of statistics sounds impressive but doesn't actually mean very much. The opposite tactic is calling salt "sodium chloride" or calling water "aqua" (the way cosmetic companies do); basically, you should address your terms in an appropriate way to your audience without being patronising.
