Are you guys seriously comparing global warming to a conflict? How can ask someone who just lost a family member to reflect on how their destroying the environment.
Gotta disagree with you on this one, Zé. I don't see climate change/global warming as some environmental mental masturbation exercise for those only with the luxury of college educations and free time.
I see the side-effects to global warming being about the only mankind-induced thing that could make our 1980s concept of nuclear holocaust seem humane by comparison. Forces that we know previously caused the extermination of 80% or more of the world's living species, without the acceleration of mankind's hands as we have today, are not something to take lightly as if some cute and pathetic idea that won't make it out of college campuses.
We can't even begin to conceive of the level of world conflict that would arise under those circumstances...from the mass starvation, the mass exodus of entire regions of the world on a biblical scale. If you can't put the 2 and 2 together of past mass extermination events on earth combined with today's scientific data combined with mankind's history under scarcity of resources, I don't see how anyone can make light of it. The ones who do are more myopic than from just putting their heads in the sand.
If folks call it overhyped, they're just living comfortably numb and in denial. If it hasn't happened in the last 200 years, it just doesn't exist or just isn't possible.
Break out the geological and biological history books on earth for what happened to all the world's species during these past mass extinction events. Look at what climate change has done in the past -- with just a few degrees change of the earth's surface temperature -- regardless of what man is doing today to accelerate it. And then take a look at today's unprecedental polar melting and carbon dioxide levels on earth in the past 200,000 years and then come back and tell me that it's overhyped.
...or just join the party line of the oil companies. As they know best and have nothing to hide.