GLOBAL WARMING

Obviously, anybody this side of a lunatic asylum would not suggest that all the poisons, automobile omissions, factory smoke, and cow flatulations that go into the atmosphere could be doing any of us any good. Of course, the cow flatulation problem could easily be resolved by mixing substantial amounts of Gas-X in with the hay. But there is apparently a substantial amount of scientific authority (ranging from the scientists at NASA, the Brookhaven Laboratory, and various universities) that cannot merely be ascribed to payments from financially invested corporations suggesting that global warming is more hype than reality. But one thing should be plain to even non-scientific types, and that is, simple arithmetic.

In 2003, there was a monumental heat wave across Europe killing approximately 35,000 people – 2,000 in the U.K. alone. This is an awful and painful statistic. But worse is the fact that many more people die from the cold each winter. In England alone, approximately 25,000 people usually die each year from the cold. In Europe, over the same period that approximately 200,000 people died from heat, approximately 1.5 million Europeans died from the cold. Also, probably because of expanding use of air conditioners, the death rate from heat is continually being reduced.

Logically, the same global warming, whether one believes it is something we cause, or it is just one of those ebbs and flows that happen in the history of the world, at the same time saves many more lives by reducing the greater number of people who would otherwise die from the cold winters. The arithmetic, though cruel and unfair, is simple, and suggests we need more research, and the fact that we should not facilely accept the fact that global warming is a people-created killer – or even is an unnatural phenomenon