Carbon Dioxide and Earth's Future Pursuing the ... - Magazooms

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Furthermore, in an editorial in Science entitled “Science and Sustainability,” Leshner (2002)
wrote that:
“One billion people throughout the world have no access to clean water. Two billion
people have inadequate sanitation. Almost 1.5 billion people, mostly in cities in the
developing world, are breathing air below the standards deemed acceptable by the
World Health Organization.”
And things have not changed in the interim.
Where in the world are our priorities? We agonize over a future hypothetical scenario -- CO2induced
global warming, which many knowledgeable scientists are convinced will never occur --
while billions of people suffer from a host of very real energy- and health-related hazards in the
here-and-now.
Why would anyone in their right mind give the governments of the world a mandate to totally
restructure human society to fight a hypothetical problem of vastly greater complexity than the
very real and clearly-identified problems we currently face? Why should we not rather confront
these genuine energy and health threats with all due haste and with every modern tool we
have at our disposal?
Whatever the answers to these disturbing questions might be, it is clear that the current
brouhaha over atmospheric CO2 emissions and imagined catastrophic global warming has
relegated the very real environmental and human concerns of our day to second- and thirdclass
status. This situation is truly regrettable; for unless the more immediate and weighty
matters we have mentioned are forthrightly addressed in a timely manner, whatever earth’s
climate may do in the future will be pretty much a moot point, especially for the millions of
species of plants and animals that will have suffered extinction in the interim, as well as the
millions of human beings who will have died prematurely as a consequence of environmental
problems wholly unrelated to the air’s CO2 content that could have been solved but weren't.
We humans, as stewards of the earth, have got to get our priorities straight. We must do all
that we possibly can, in order to preserve nature by helping to feed humanity and raise living
standards the world over; and to do so successfully, we have got to let the air's CO2 content
maintain its natural upward course for many decades to come. This is the prudent path we
must pursue.
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