[quote]DBCooper wrote:
After all, if take all these steps to save the planet and then we find out that all of those steps did nothing, we may not have saved anything, but we won’t have necessarily contributed to the planet’s destruction either.[/quote]
This is only true if we find out all those steps actually did nothing and, economically/thermodynamically, by not saving, you are costing yourself whatever else you could expend that energy on.
We could cool the globe by 2-3 degrees by the end of the decade if targeted efforts were made. The problem is, millions of people would starve, be displaced, or be otherwise criminally treated or neglected in the process. Further the action of pushing the global mean temperature down that drastically could be just as, if not more catastrophic than letting it warm progressively by the same 1-2 degrees over the next century.
Bioethanol is and was an enormous failure and linking fuel demand to food demand created price imbalances that can’t be tolerated by those parts of the world that work a full week to earn a weeks worth of food.
Germany and other parts of Europe are far out pacing us wrt to building windmills and solar panels, but hydrolic fracturing has dramatically reduced the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases emitted by energy consumers in the US to the point where we’ve surpassed our Kyoto goals.
Desertification was believed to be caused by deforestation and grazing it’s links to CO2 and global temperature were tenuous at best (the Sahara was it’s largest during it’s last glacial maximum and was actually a savanna when global mean temperatures were (estimated) warmer than today and CO2 was (estimated) lower). In the process of preventing deforestation grazing animals have been culled and concerted efforts were made to prevent the spread of livestock farming in parts of the world where food is a rarity. Turns out, shade, selective defoliation, and ‘surface texturing’ by grazing animals can enhance water retention convert arid land that otherwise receives enough rainfall into arable farmland. This has been done repeatedly in a rather causal manner. Additionally, the original models calling for a drier, warmer climate have been revised to describe (if anything) a wetter, warmer climate.
It’s well known to any serious greenhouse grower that growth rate, biomass, and yield are optimized by keeping the ‘in house’ CO2 concentrations closer to 1000 to 1200 ppm and the average temperature well above the global mean. Further, the most stably controlled and otherwise arable landmasses are currently covered in permafrost.
Lastly, you aren’t considering what could be construed to be a technological singularity (a la Kurzweil, a point or period of time where technology develops and past which events cannot be predicted). That is to say, the march to 400 ppm CO2 that we see today didn’t start with people born under G.W. Bush or even G.H.W.Bush. More appropriately, it began with the people born under H.S. Truman and D.D. Eisenhower who put two cars in every garage and paved roads from Washington D.C. to the state of Washington. Given the choice of living with 400 ppm CO2 or the Nazis, I choose 400 ppm CO2. Speaking to my initial point, the choice of 400 ppm CO2 or Nazis is a false one that assumes the Nazis didn’t shun Knut Angstrom (No in favor of Svant Arrhenius (the discoverer of the greenhouse effect amongst other things) and start pumping CO2 into the atmosphere to prevent the next global winter.
No one in the 50s and 60s could’ve predicted the world of 2100 much more than anyone from 1980 could predict 2010. Do you think R.M. Nixon thought he would be potentially be displacing the U.S. as the world superpower (and leading emitter of CO2) when he visited China?
