Honestly I was checked out of this one a while ago but, more or less, I don't really care if there's global warming or not. Pollution is still bad, mercury and lead contamination in water, so high you have to limit the amount of fish you can eat or water you can drink in a given time frame unless you have a filter. Smog levels are so high in Beijeing it was considered dangerous for athletes to be there until it rained, washing it away, into water, where it gets absorbed by food and plants. I mean idk.
Is that the kind of environment I want? Not really. I can't hurt to have nature parks and to leave large sections of wilderness intact, if not simply for the hope of a cure popping up from some obscure thing in the rain forest. It sounds great to me.
Furthermore, gasoline is expensive and we have a dwindling supply; fusion is always 50 years in the future, so 50 years of gasoline as of now doesn't look to promising given fusion's track record.
Higher efficiency would not only reduce the virtual price of gasoline, but reduce reliance on foreign oil, if not completely by dropping our usage below 50% of what it is now. We have the technology, we just have to make it more economical. I don't even care if we replace it; half our carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean as is, and much more by things like algae and trees, so if it was half of what it was now, there'd be hardly any increase and the natural degradation of carbon dioxide (30 or less year half life) means most of it would be gone anyways. Besides, I don't much like the oil barons as is, greedy bastards.
Carbon dioxide fixation seems arbitrary to me. Who really cares? At most in 200 years we will have a 1.5 degree spike which will largely be irrelevant assuming we have the oil and gas reserves to last the next 200 years, to meet the quadrupled demand of overly large population in the future, which we won't. It's all a bunch of nothing.
I mean we haven't even burned enough fossil fuels to meet the levels we're at, it's not even physically possible.
We know that the earth has had over 16 times the carbon dioxide levels it does now, and the levels went down. If the ocean releases carbon dioxide (it has over 50 times the amount as in the atmosphere) when it's warm, just like a fizzy soda going flat faster, or expanding in heat, then so too can less be dissolved when it's hotter; more carbon dioxide = more heat = more carbon dioxide = more heat until a runaway greenhouse effect, except every single major life period, Cambrian, Jurassic, etc. shows high levels of carbon dioxide getting lower and lower until a mass extinction, spiking, and then going back down again. The puzzle pieces don't fit or don't seem to matter very much. For all intents and purposes, during hotter periods the climate has been more stable, largely due to the heat and water retention of the increased vegetation. Whatever the case, it doesn't really matter. You don't need to convince people about something ridiculous, the earth burning, to get them to support a generally good idea.
So it's stupid.
Science is not in 100% agreement. NASA scientists don't all agree, IPCC scientists don't all agree, not even within the EPA; there's a broad degree of skepticism regardless of what the media says, and most people are looking into it, realizing there's really no way to tell since we haven't had satellite monitoring or direct measurements of carbon dioxide until just recently. For instance, it used to be believed that carbon dioxide is equally spread throughout the atmosphere, but it turns out it's completely unequal, especially vertically, which means the actual atmospheric composition can't be measured at 11 surface sights by the IPCC; the mid tropospheric levels are much higher than the lower tropospheric levels, but the surface areas are much larger than that etc. Geological evidence suggests changes all the time that completely disagree with expected changes if carbon dioxide levels increase; they literally can't even calculate the reflection of sunlight back into space by clouds, which will increase if water vapor increases due to heat, thus heat causing clouds which then cool back down the earth. They really, legitimately, just don't know what will happen and it's extremely muddied in areas they couldn't even begin to calculate. But honestly, it doesn't matter.
Edited by Manoka, 14 July 2013 - 01:27 AM.
