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Climate Change: Fact or Fiction
Posted by Walt Vernon on November 12, 2009 at 11:10pm
I know that lots of people do not believe that climate change is happening. Or that, if it is, it isn’t manmade. Or if it is real and it is manmade, it won’t be a problem. Or, that if it is real, and manmade, and a problem, it isn’t worth the cost of doing something about it. In fact, a recent poll found a decline in the number of people in the U.S. who think it is an important issue.
Indeed, at M+NLB, we are not really using global warming in our marketing materials at all, focusing instead on the fact that regardless of the fantasy or the reality of climate change, the law is changing in ways that will affect buildings because some people think it’s real. And, energy prices continue to climb, and, our national security is threatened by our dependence on foreign sources of energy, and we are witnessing the greatest transfer of wealth in human history from energy importing countries (us) to energy exporting countries (Middle East and others). For all of these reasons, we all care about the same thing - helping our clients to save energy from fossil fuels.
But, I want to share with you one thing. A couple of nights ago, I was driving home listening to a show on the National Public Radio station called "Marketplace." This show is a business-oriented show, talking about, often, business trends, and it is something I listen to a lot. Anyway, they had a segment that focused on the growing impact of global warming on real people. It talked about the fact that, over the past several decades, it has been getting slightly warmer on the continental divide, and that, because of that, a certain beetle that used to be controlled by low winter temperatures is now able to survive and is rapidly wiping out the forests that surround many towns in Montana. It says that even people who never believed in global warming - well, now they don’t have time to think about it because they are so busy fighting the impact. It was pretty sobering to me, and there are stories like this all over the world now.
Believer or not, I urge you to take a listen: http://tiny.cc/3gt2z
Or, for another view, take a look at this: http://climate.nasa.gov/
Or this: http://tiny.cc/7v5xT
Or, finally, this: http://tinyurl.com/5oajoz
In the end, again, it doesn’t matter if you believe this problem to be real. From a business perspective, it is clear that many other people do.
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