You're still rejecting the scientific consensus. It's like accepting evolution for every living thing but humans.
Global warming causes trouble in Siberia
- Thread starter YellowSubmarine
- Start date
It's all ok if it leads to counter measures that are all based on reducing human influence. But I've also read about wild "terra forming" ideas proposed by some scientist, and tossed around by politicians (where it gets dangerous), to actively counter act the changes, and that's the wrong way, because we highly probably don't know enough about the system to be able to "control" it.
Ten thousand years ago there wasn't a modern civilization populated by billions of people who depend on the current (or should I say "lapsing") climate regime for their water supplies and agriculture.
You know, the Internet is absolutely rife at this point with explanations of what the basic issues are and why they're issues. People can't even spend a few minutes on Google before coming into a thread like this and essentially spamming it with irrelevant posts? I just don't understand it.
That kind of thinking would lead to all kinds of problems, for example, why bother to protect species of animals from extinction when it is a proven fact that species of animals have gone extinct throughout Earth's history?
Why bother to provide health care to children because it is a proven fact that at some point all humans die?
ETA: Why is it so
hard for people to realize that it is important to try to fix this problem, even if many of the solutions eventually fail?
Actually I own a car with excellent mpg and try to do my part as much as an individual can. No one but the deniers making strawman arguments are claiming we need to go back to living in caves. But you've admitted that you are just here to argue. If this thread was about the color of the sky, you would claim it was green. You contribute nothing of value, just noise.
That would be still silly. Sure, not all change in the climate is man-made, there are many cyclic changes, including the Sun, there are many random changes, as well as gradual ones (the sun heating up as it dies). Human activity is one of many factors. But if you took it out, we wouldn't be talking about climate change, because nothing else accounts for the observed unprecedented change in the climate.
Does that mean that, if possible, we should freeze our planet's development to always remain at the same status quo?
And here's all the money needed to adapt to the climate change: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
Climate change is man made, and man's refusal to adapt (because adaptation costs money) is also man made.
It's much cheaper to stop it or slow it down than to deal with it. Why spend more if you can spend less when your entire argument is "why bother spending anything, we'll adapt"?
We aren't trying to control it, we're trying to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere which is causing the planet to warm up. This is what is driving the climate to change.
It isn't all wacky schemes to cool the planet. Some of it is just as simple as transitioning to different fuel sources so our vehicles aren't constantly blasting more into the air and using renewable resources for energy.
Well that's ok then.
It means that gambling on adaptation, where other options like prevention or amelioration are possible, is incredibly stupid, especially given that climate change's effects become less predictable the farther it advances. We have already watched the reality, in real time, outstrip even the most resolutely worst-case earlier theoretical models many times over.
Of course it's fair to point out that the gamble on adaptation, stupid or not, may well have already been made. But trying to sugar-coat the seriousness of this decision by pretending that what we're witnessing is just like the passing of the last Ice Age is even more foolish.
Let's make some concrete examples, like building huge flood walls to protect New York City, or creating a thorough water infrastruture in Africa, or relocating people on from endangered islands. How is that "gambling" in any way? It's just adapting to changing environmental states, like we've been doing for, well, ever. It's expensive, yeah. But not deadly.
The "gambling" already happened when those solutions -- one and three, at the least -- were made necessary by inaction and denial. Further inaction, denial and vacuous contrarianism is not needed.
But aren't cars in places like Europe and Japan more fuel econmical that US cars? So no one is arguing that one has to stop use electricity or motorised transportation. But if you car can travel further on the same amount of fuel then it is better for the enviroment. Sure one could argue that electric cars are just shifting the emissions to the power planets rather than from an Internal Combustion Enginge(ICE), but surely some of that can be mitigated by adopting greener power generation such as Wind/Tidal/Solar/Geothermal/Hydro to name just a few.
It costs the companies a lot of money to research, develop and market fuel economic, hybrid or electric cars. That's the only reason. And in the US it's especially expensive to market such a change, as it's also an attack on the citizen's freedoms if they are denied driving fuel ineffective cars. That's like denying them to drink alcohol, or denying them to have guns.
The standards were change a few years back. American car companies have to produce cars that get 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. It's supposed to be 35.5 by next year.
We're also seeing some movement on electric cars like the Telsa and most of the well known companies are starting to put out electric models. So it is some progress, we just have a lot of idiots who want to fight it.
The battle over climate change feels like the battle over smoking all over again. At some point people will accept the fact that dumping tons of chemicals into the atmosphere is a bad thing. Just like we eventually accepted dumping chemicals into our body was a bad thing. But it's a rough road to get there because so many have an economic incentive to maintain the status quo.
Having cars with better mpg is no more a blow to freedom than computer companies producing faster computers. The old cars are still available and anyone with the money can buy them. You can still buy a Model T if you have the money and know where to look.
They just aren't making more of them, they aren't being banned from being used.
Isn't that 54.5 by 2025 the average mpg? But aren't many cars in the EU already past the 35.5 target set for the US next year and getting close to the US 2025 target? But perhaps some of that is down to the higher fuel prices in places like the EU so fuel economy becomes a selling point. For example using the current exchange rate between the GB£ and US$, average pump price per litre and using the US Gallon in US$ the pump price in the UK is ~US$6.20/gal
It's the average. I'm not sure about the EU though. I know that gas prices are a lot lower in the US so there hasn't been a push to increase the average. Especially since one of our political parties fights to defend the rights of the oil companies to do whatever they want without limit. Back during the BP oil spill some Republicans wanted the President to apologize to BP for treating them bad despite the spill being their fault due to the safety standards being low. It's really disgusting.