I'ts very interesting to see what people are most concerned about in the world today. And most of these things affect us all in some way or other.

damn i forgot to post a poll. :o

Well, anyway, the options were going to be:

1.Global warming

2.World Economy

3.Conflict

4.Crime

I would have to say global warming myself. But that doesn't mean YOU do.

Global warming is just a lot of hot air, it doesn't exist (at least not in the way the treehuggers claim).

The world economy isn't any worse overall than it has been in a long time, though there are local problems in Europe.

There's never been less wars and conflict than now and what there is doesn't affect me directly.

Crime is bad, but not a lot worse than in the past.

Overall, economics and crime affect me the most but not at a global scale.

The only worries I have about "global warming" is the incredible amount of resources being wasted on it that could be far better spent fighting crime and improving the economy.

I am not a treehugger, neither am I a gas and coal powered maniac. But global warming does exist and in the long term it is the most influential current affair. :-|

I would have to say confilct. I live in the US and it worries me that we are always into other countries affairs, and not worried about our own well being.

Next, I would have to say economics. These high gas prices cause a chain of reactions. First, you can't drive many places which causes stores to lose buisiness. They in turn raise prices, and it just keeps going from there.

I don't think global warming is even the most important of them... what I'm worried about is the environment in general. Now Bush is drilling in Alaska and is going to log the sequioas, because they are a 'fire hazard'... I am worried of the pillaging of the natural world just so some company can make more profits. If the western world wouldn't antagonize the middle east, then maybe our oil prices wouldn't be so high. Well maybe people wouldn't be so pissed if they didn't drive $50,000 mobile fortresses that get half a mile to a gallon. It is a sad state of affairs in the world when people are more worried about high prices than genocide in Africa.

First of all, have you ever heard of a thing called supply and demand? Oil is being produced as FAST as it can possibly be produced. The western world "antagonizing"(as you put it) the middle east has nothing to do with oil prices. The demand is simply to high.


Wait a minute, you just were bashing intervention into other nations, and now your saying we need to worry about genocide in Africa? Your spinning what you just said?

Not only is this true, oil being pushed up in price is a good thing in the long term - it means that our oil won't run out as quickly. Remember once the oil goes away, no more plastic...and that means no more TV, consoles, and of course PC's

[edit:BTW, congrats on 500 posts server_crash :mrgreen: ]

Wrong. The TOTAL effect of human activity on the global climate is so small as to be impossible to measure against the inaccuracy of the data used.

While the climate is indeed changing, that's not because of any human activity but purely due to natural changes that would happen no matter what we did to either accellerate it or slow it down.

For example, the entire benefit of the Kyoto debacle (which will destroy the economies of the countries foolish enough to have comitted to it) will be AT MOST a 0.7 degree drop in average global temperature over a 50 year period.
That's about 3 times smaller than the minimum detectable change over such a period that's statistically significant.

Remember that we're living in an interglacial. That's a period of time between two glacial eras. Such periods can last anywhere from a few thousand to over 20.000 years. We're currently well past the halfway point in one.
The main thing interglacials have in common is wild and unpredictable climate swings. Global average temperatures can varry by as much as 10-15 degrees over a few decades. Other climate factors can varry by similarly large numbers.

You might be surprised that the warmest climate of the last several hundred years was BEFORE the industrial revolution, so before the output of the hated (by the greens) carbon dioxide began in earnest.
The current warming up didn't in fact start until well AFTER the peak of those emissions and have gone down ever since the 1970s in the western world yet the climate isn't getting any colder.

No, I don't worry about the climate insofar as human activity might influence it on a global scale.
Local scale is different, on a spot level human activity can have an influence by changing small scale wind and precipitation patterns but those effects don't translate to larger climate structures.
For example (and an example literally close to home for me), wind turbines will change the wind patterns and thereby the rainfall and temperatures around them for up to several hundred meters. This has led to crops not receiving the amount of rain needed, and thus reduced harvests.