global warming?

[villainoust]

First post here in god knows how long.
I was just reading this article on cnn.com Climate risk 'worse than thought-click hereFor the sake of discussion I was just curious what people's thoughts were. Granted, I'm sure the human race has had an affect on climate. I mean how could we not? We've torn down forests, polluted the air-water, etc etc

Comments

[kathhazel]

Before the industrial revolution people cut wood for fires, used charcoal for kilns. As long as another tree grew for the one cut down, the balance remains carbon neutral.

Step forward a couple of hundred years. We have managed to stop the killer smogs from the unfiltered smoke belched out by the chimneys, but we are still using fossil fuels. When you burn a fossil fuel it is no good planting a single tree to compensate as each pocket of the fuel in the ground is formed from the decayed remains of MILLIONS of trees. You cannot possibly plant enough trees to combat the CO2 that this kicks out.

The fastest way to help the planet is to stop burning fossil fuels....but no-one will accept this because they are so blinkered 'it is never going to happen to them', 'there is plenty of time to come up with a fancy technological answer' or just plain and simple 'I don't give a sh*t'. We don't need a fancy techie answer just to open our eyes to what we are doing, and STOP.

It is true that the earth has a natural cycle and that climate change will happen, but this is normally at a natural pace and life has time to adapt and possibly survive, the human race has done it before, but the more we hurry it along the less chance we stand of being able to adapt to the changes and survive it.

I am not in the doom and gloom camp, I am a realist..... enough to know that people will do nothing until forced to by circunstance. Do you have the skills it will take to survive, will your children or grandchildren?

Time and Mother Nature will decide ;)

[instantamish]

I don't believe 'simply stopping' is the answer we're looking for. How would the world look in 20 days after we've simply stopped burning fossil fuels?

Absolute chaos, that's what it'll look like. No cars, no computers - nothing. Stock piles of food requiring refridgeration would go bad and the entire nature of surviving in developed countries would take a drastic change.

Besides that, you'd have wide-spread revolts. Try cutting off someone's power and telling them that they're going to have to just 'tough it through because you're killing the planet.' - it simply won't cut it.

[villainoust]

They didn't say don't use power all together, they just said not fossil fuels. There are plenty of alternative energy sources that we as a society don't invest enough time and money in.

I'm very happy to see that even American's are starting to realize we can't just always drive around hummers and gobble up of fuel. The $3.00 gas set off a few alarms for the average joe causing companies to comply with demands. Gas efficiency and other sources. Hopefully it's coming soon...

[kathhazel]

It would be impossible to stop overnight, I agree, we have a little time to play with but not as much as some people think. It would be fairly easy to convert many of the power stations that burn coal to be wood burning. At least that way you go from carbon heavy to carbon neutral power production and stop things getting worse.

If everyone had solar panels on their roof, there wouldn't be a problem with running a house....even in the northern hemisphere this type of power production generates more electricity than is required by the household, so you have spare going to the grid. In sunnier climates the benefits are even greater. This was a working proposition 15 years ago and the technology has become more efficient since then.

Within a period of months, if people had the will power to do it, we could have a smoothish change over, at least on the domestic front. Then all you have to do is tackle industry....which would actually then have more room to manouvre.

The ONLY thing stopping this from happening is pressure and scaremongering from the power industry.

As far as cars go.....the technology to take them off petrol has been around for over a hundred years but has been burried time and again by oil companies. The industry also makes things worse by making conversions prohibitively expensive.

There need not be chaos if it is thought out properly in advance and implemented sensibly. There need not be any 'toughing it out', that is scaremongering and propaganda on the side of the Oil and Power Industries.

No Oil does not equal a return to the dark ages, or do you think that when the oil runs out we are all going to become totally stupid overnight! I give the human race a little more credit than that.