2014 UN Climate Change Report: Too Alarmist?

Given that it resulted some climate scientists withdrawing their names from the recent UN IPCC climate change findings report, is the report too alarmist?

By: Ringo Bones

Given that climate change research has been hijacked not only by powerful commercial interests of big crude oil and dirty coal extraction and processing companies but also of political interests funded by “big oil” and “big coal” commercial entities, who’s telling the truth has never been so polarized by not only where your political and religious allegiances lie but also where you lie in the commercial transaction of our still largely polluting energy production means. It has been said that back in 2012, carbon dioxide emissions by all the fossil fueled power plants around the world is 200 times that produced by all of the world’s volcanoes. Given the sobering statistics, is climate change really irreversible and already done its worse as said in a recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report?

Most of us are probably old enough to remember the cautionary tales on the consequence of our runaway fossil fuel burning lifestyle in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth – especially on how Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans back in 2005 might have been primarily caused by our largely preventable greenhouse gas emissions wreaking havoc on the earth’s delicate climate. Even though some heads of states of the leading industrialized countries are announcing their long term plans to wean themselves away from extensive fossil fuel burning to more earth friendly renewable power generating means like wind turbines and solar. But have we already thrown enough carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to have irreversibly damaged our delicate climate system?