tarstarkusz
New Member
Hi, this is my first post and I didn't see an "introduce yourself' sub-+form, so hello to all. My primary interest in this forum is climate change or anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW), though watching creationists would be good for the lols.
I am not the typical skeptic in this area. I accept the evidence and accept the high levels of certainty that the world's experts in the various specialties that are relevant to the topic. My skepticism is that we can (or will) do anything about it.
First barrier is scale. We have problems worldwide that are not as difficult to solve as AGW (which leads to climate change, which I think AGW is a better description), but we are doing absolutely nothing to solve them, or at best are making token efforts.
Second barrier is us, the people. We want our cake and to eat it too and have seconds. We all want to drive personal automobiles, we want to live in single homes on 1/2 to 1 acre plots, we want to waste energy on a massive scale and we aren't willing to stop. We also seem to want a large and growing population. Voluntary methods at population control aren't working and there are severe ethical concerns to involuntary population reduction, or even just stabilizing the population at it's current (already too high) levels.
Third barrier is the exponential rise in energy use. Take coal. It's been used for about 3 centuries at a large scale, yet about 1/2 of the coal that has ever been mined and burned has been mined and burned since the 50s-60s (ballpark). Natural gas is a little worse with about 1/2 the NG ever burned being in the last 40 years or so. Oil is the worst with 1/2 of the oil ever being burned has been since around 1991-1992, despite using oil in large quantities since the mid-late 1800s. In fact, oil use doubled in every decade of the 20th century until about the late 60s. By doubling every decade that means we burned more oil in the 1920s, than we did in all previous decades combined, more in the 30s than in all previous decades combined etc. The big story in this is that given a roughly 30 year time span for equilibrium to be reached, we are enjoying the climate changes today, caused up until about the mid 80s.
So I don't want my first post to be a 20 page rant, so I;d like to know if others here are in agreement with me, or if they believe that we can continue our lifestyles and population without destroying our environment (and I don't just mean CO2, the environmental problems are massive in scale and scope).
Any thoughts?
TT
I am not the typical skeptic in this area. I accept the evidence and accept the high levels of certainty that the world's experts in the various specialties that are relevant to the topic. My skepticism is that we can (or will) do anything about it.
First barrier is scale. We have problems worldwide that are not as difficult to solve as AGW (which leads to climate change, which I think AGW is a better description), but we are doing absolutely nothing to solve them, or at best are making token efforts.
Second barrier is us, the people. We want our cake and to eat it too and have seconds. We all want to drive personal automobiles, we want to live in single homes on 1/2 to 1 acre plots, we want to waste energy on a massive scale and we aren't willing to stop. We also seem to want a large and growing population. Voluntary methods at population control aren't working and there are severe ethical concerns to involuntary population reduction, or even just stabilizing the population at it's current (already too high) levels.
Third barrier is the exponential rise in energy use. Take coal. It's been used for about 3 centuries at a large scale, yet about 1/2 of the coal that has ever been mined and burned has been mined and burned since the 50s-60s (ballpark). Natural gas is a little worse with about 1/2 the NG ever burned being in the last 40 years or so. Oil is the worst with 1/2 of the oil ever being burned has been since around 1991-1992, despite using oil in large quantities since the mid-late 1800s. In fact, oil use doubled in every decade of the 20th century until about the late 60s. By doubling every decade that means we burned more oil in the 1920s, than we did in all previous decades combined, more in the 30s than in all previous decades combined etc. The big story in this is that given a roughly 30 year time span for equilibrium to be reached, we are enjoying the climate changes today, caused up until about the mid 80s.
So I don't want my first post to be a 20 page rant, so I;d like to know if others here are in agreement with me, or if they believe that we can continue our lifestyles and population without destroying our environment (and I don't just mean CO2, the environmental problems are massive in scale and scope).
Any thoughts?
TT