'Global warming' - the other side of the coin : the feebily trumpeted positive effects of climate change

Abstract

The issue of global warming and the consequential world-wide climate change has been the one which has attracted a great deal of media interest, and a scientific enigma for many years. Much has been made of the negative impacts of this phenomenon to our planet, but little has been said of the positive impacts. In the present article, after briefly mentioning the basic facts of global warming and its effects, the optimists’ view that “global warming may be coming, but if it does, it won’t necessarily be extreme, meriting panic. And, in fact, it might

well be a boon for the environment” has been elaborated critically, in the backdrop of “Medieval Climate Optimum”. The positive effects and the ‘silver linings’ of global warming are compared with the negative impacts and predicted catastrophic consequences of the global warming and the resulting worldwide climate change. From the comparison, it manifests that, the negative impacts of global warming and consequential climate change, which are based on the accurate climatic and scientific data and reliable predictive computer models, cannot be simply ignored. In fact, the negative far outweigh the positives. Thus, the scale of the balance seems to be heavily tilted in favours of negative impacts, which will seemingly prevail. In the present scenario, it seems that the best thing would be to “Hope for the best, plan for the worst and prepare and take all effective measures to combat global warming”.