Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at 13:38:50 :
In Reply to: Re: Yep... posted by Derek Bell on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at 10:43:45 :
Global warming has been happening for the past 20,000 years. During the time when people lived in North America, the sea level was 200 feet lower and Puget Sound was full of glaciers. The sea level has been rising and glaciers have been melting in fits and starts ever since. I agree that people have done a whole lot of damage to the Earth, but changing the climate is not the biggest part of it.
Best guesstimates are that we've already burned up about half the accessible oil and coal on the Earth. Whatever amount of CO2 that's put in the air is only going to get twice as bad, at most, by the time we've burned it all up. The Earth can handle it. After the oil and coal are all burned up, people will have to either switch to some fancy space-age power source like nuclear fusion, if anybody can ever figure out how to make it work, or go back to muscle power. Either one will work, but neither one will put any more CO2 in the air. People have probably caused a small blip in the mean global temperature in recent years, but it's not a "climate crisis", mainly because it's self-limiting. The only way to add CO2 to the air is to burn fossil fuels, and there's a very limited amount of such fuels left to burn.
I full agree that we ought to take a lot better care of the Earth than we currently do, but focusing on "climate change", which is mostly a natural phenomenon anyway, is just a distraction, albeit a suddenly-popular one.
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