Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
My point is that there have been climate changes, both up and down, both on the small scale (last 1000 years or so) and the big scale (last 3 million years or so). Only in the last 250 years could any of it be attributed to Man.
Currently, the trend is up. It may or may not be attributable to Man. Or a portion may be. But it's not an irrefutable is, and I feel that the irrefutability is no longer science, but faith. And I don't believe the lives and economic well-being of billions of lives should be controlled by somebody else's faith (or socio-politican agenda, take your pick).
All I've done is point out the limited facts, the limited timeline those facts have been gathered in (as opposed to the scale these things work in), to point out you don't have any certainties to work with. Frankly, I'm being a heck of a lot more scientific than the proponents in this thread.
But even if they are right, technology is steadily moving towards permanent fixes to the problem anyway, almost certainly in the next 50 years (possibly in the next 20). Why the screaming rush to disrupt the world's economy when the cavalry is coming anyways? Unless the goal is to disrupt the world's economy, and global warming is just an excuse.
Paranoid? Anybody remember the 1970's "We're running out of resources, Civilization will collapse before 2000 A.D."? And the Julius Simon bets? It was those mean, capitalist <blank>ers who turned out right.
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Yeah, I'm not terribly off your mark, there. What I want to see happen is an acceleration of the technologies that you mentioned that will be decreasing the carbon impact and as much of a scale back as we can afford. The line of affordability is where the debate should be, in my opinion. And there is one thing that many of the folks on my side-ish of the equation miss, I feel. The advancement of society to a higher tech level has to date required a fairly heavy industrial base to get there. To restrict China and India in their carbon footprint will, in fact lead to more rather than less carbon usage due to being stuck in a lower tech level. It is such a hugely complex problem.