Global Warming: Lets Move On to Solutions
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 05.23.06
The Problem? Almost every time people discuss solutions to global warming on public forums (including TreeHugger), someone will start questioning the very existence or nature of the problem and derail the discussion into yet another "Is it real?" debate.
The Solution? WorldChanging has decided to create a collaborative stock response to these "global warming trolls" so that less energy is spent re-inventing the wheel and more goes toward looking for solutions to the problem.
The Goal? In the future, every time someone questions the scientific consensus on global warming, you will be able to cut & paste a small paragraph that points to a web-page that contains a clear, convincing and documented summary of the real science on the issue. It won't convince all denialists, but at least it can avoid pointless debates and help those that are sitting on the fence make up their minds. Similar things already exist (check out those links, they're good ones), but we think it's possible to make something more reader-friendly. If you want to help this collaborative project, head over to ::WorldChanging: The Debate is Over
well...the question of what to do and how much of it depends on how real the problem really is and is going to be.
At this point it seems that using a Magic 8 Ball is as effective at getting the kind of answers we really need.
This is still no excuse to not try out things as experiments. As doing nothing seems about as bad as doing everything.
"well...the question of what to do and how much of it depends on how real the problem really is and is going to be."
There's a scientific consensus that the problem is real.
"At this point it seems that using a Magic 8 Ball is as effective at getting the kind of answers we really need."
This strongly depends on how you define "answers", but on the general concepts, we certainly are very far from the 8 Ball.
About time!
I feel like I have to keep explaining to people why the world is not flat!
Now if we can just get the media to realize that the global debate on climate change ended a decade or so ago....
I want to know how global warming and plant loss will affect oxygen. A friend who teaches college biology said the greatest threat to our survival is lack of oxygen, the tipping point for global warming is within 10 years from 2006, and humans are mammals with very fragile lungs. In other words, the World War II baby boom generation is the last generation to live out their life expectancy. We are killing our next generation by doing so little for so long.
Great Idea,
as mentioned above it's tiring arguing over something we've known about for so long.
It is time to attempt solution talk.
cheers,
v.
Wanna talk solutions? It needs a double effort, one led by the Govt's that must support big-scale renewable projects, forget carbon and stop dreaming of nuclear panacea. The other has to be done by us, change consumption habits and therefore change industries' products.
But, above all, there must be a strong educational process for the next generations where envionmental issues are treated as an indipendent subject.
The consensus is that the climate is warming. There is not such a strong consensus on the cause. If it is not from human-produced CO2, it's not clear what should be done about it.
But I like a risk/cost analysis approach. Assign a probability to human CO2 being the cause, figure the cost of not controlling the warming, figure the cost of reducing CO2 output.
You can use these numbers to determine the best course of action.
Even a very rough risk and cost analysis, even setting the probability of a human cause pretty low, says we should definitely try to reduce CO2 output.
Global warming is a serious issue and people need to pay more attention to this issue thank god more of my kind people can see that!