Originally posted by: XMan
Originally posted by: Jeff7
Sure, the world has been around. And yes, it goes through major climate swings.Originally posted by: XMan
It's rather presumptuous to think that the world, which has gone through untold numbers of climate changes in the past millenia, is only now warming up because of mankind. One volcanic eruption puts more pollution in the air than a hundred years of automobiles.
Nature is anything but static.
We tend to like a pretty narrow range of conditions though.
Look at what the Universe offers: From nearly 0K to millions of degrees Kelvin. We like a very very tiny range of that.
Even Earth has a wide range of suitable climates.
We like a fairly narrow range.
That's the concern about global warming - not that it's going to initiate some huge change that's going to render the planet unsuitable for all life, but that the slight variation in temperatures might nudge us out of our "comfort zone." In the grand scheme of things, it's merely an inconvenient truth, not a disastrous one.
My take on it is that we should focus on reducing pollution, and reducing dependency on fossil fuels. They are finite in quantity, and in some cases, the deposits are located in regions of the world where there is excessive political instability.
We can look to nuclear power (fission for now, fusion for the future), and wind/solar instead. Solar and fusion power in the next few decades should be able to provide for a lot of our energy needs, with minimal environmental impact. Wind farms do absorb energy from natural winds, and this can have some small effect on the local ecosystem and weather patterns. Just how small this effect is would require study for each unique location. And fusion would use deuterium from the oceans, or possibly helium-3 harvested from the Moon, with the production of only low-level, short-lived radioactive waste, if any.
The side effect of this would be a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
Everyone's happy.
In other news, yes, ICRS is a troll.
Well, until we find out a means of regulating the solar output of the sun, we will either adapt, or die, to a continuously changing climate. My money's on adapt.
Adaptation by burning fewer fossil fuels?
Perhaps our effect is negligible, but perhaps it's not. I don't know, and neither does anyone else. I don't give a shit about being green. I turn off my lights to save money, not to save the Earth
