Thankfully we have never seen a terrorist attack as lethal as the 2003 European heat wave that killed 70,000 people. We fear terrorist attacks because they are intensely isolated in time and place but no terrorist can match the scale of climate change. We fear the detonation of a small dirty bomb in a major city, but global warming is accumulating heat in earth's environment comparable in energy to 4 Hiroshima-size bombs every second. It is not close in overall mass and effects across the globe.
This is not a choice we have to make; we do not have to choose one of the other.
You might choose to read an opinion piece by David Titley, a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral. He compares inaction on climate change, not to a single terrorist attack, but to all of the horribleness of WWI created by short-run and unimaginative thinking.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/03/3...
Climate change has been a major factor in many wars during history. War itself, without the direct environmental problems, is a greater risk than terrorism. One of Titley's best points regarding climate and war, concisely said: "It's all about the water."
Radical Islamists such as those who currently reside in Iran are fanatical to the point of being suicidal. That is why it was unacceptable to all Westerners (with the exception apparently of Obama) for Iran to get nukes. Obama pretends that it isn't acceptable, yet he facilitates their acquiring nukes by incompetence, stupidity, or intention or all of the above. Having a group of people with the mindset of a suicide bomber with nukes is way more dangerous than the small chance of having the temperature go up a degree or two. It doesn't fit the alarmist agenda so even something as obvious as this will be argued by those who worry about non problems as their ignorance and incompetence facilitates real problems.
Terrorism is not, and has never been a serious threat. 9/11 was a fluke, they got lucky. It was an incredible failure of American intelligence and leadership that allowed it to happen. At most, terrorism kills a few thousand people a year. When things start to get bad in 10 or 20 years, global warming will kill tens of thousands. Rising sea levels, unending droughts, crop failures, and super storms, will force massive human migrations. There probably will be wars over water.
The reason we here so much about terrorism is it's a useful scare tactic. If people believe that there could be a terrorist attack at any moment, even if they live in the middle of nowhere, then they won't ask questions about overspending on the military, and won't speak up when the government starts to take away civil rights. Remember all those bullshit terrorist threats the Bush administration alerted us to between 2002 and 2004? They expected us to believe that town like Peoria, Illinois, were on terrorist hit lists.
The potential is for GW to be the biggest threat to life on earth
Terrorists are the greatest threat.
Terrorism is a bigger threat, because global warming is a zero threat, the most CO2 can do is raise warmth to 1 degree C by 2050, (that would be nice) but more likely because the sun is entering a solar minimum phase, we will have cooling which is much more dangerous.
No , Terriost are more of a threat
Is it true that global warming is a bigger threat than international terrorism? How? If not, how is international terrorism a bigger threat? Always wondered about those two. Thanks
