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Wow. Great comments on this strip and global warming and carbon footprint. I gotta say, I'm with LSPMartin on this one.
Global warming happened long before we were here and will happen long after we're gone. The biggest problem with global warming and the carbon footprint argument is that many scientist have staked their reputations on it and many companies have built their fortunes on it. The bottom line is that their reputations and future fortunes are now based on them being right so they're not going to look too hard at data that says otherwise.
Should we try to reduce, re-use and recycle? Absolutely! But, that should always be the case.
As for some supposed green technologies. I'll give you two examples:
Street cars: They're supposed to be green because they run on electricity and have zero emissions and have a high person to vehicle ratio. What they don't tell you: The electricity has to be generated somehow; whether it's coal, hydro, solar, wind, atomic, etc. All these methods have drawbacks. More importantly, the constant track and road maintenance is carried out by construction vehicles. Worst still, when a street car stops to pick up passengers, it prevents cars from passing on the right side. That's 50 to 100 cars idling instead of covering distance.
Biofuel: When you take into account the carbon cost of growing, processing and shipping the fuel, it's actually worse for the environment than pumping oil out of the ground. As for sustainability; biofuel suffers from the same problem as growing other crops. Eventually, the land gets used up and you have to put the nutrients back into the ground somehow.
If you look at any green technology around, you'll find that it's not that green. In other words, Dogbert is right.
" If a significant share of presently productive land is not available by 2050 as a result of changes caused by humans..."
I'm just going to deal with this one because it's so much nonsense, but people believe it anyway.
Look up the biomes of the middle Pliocene era and you'll find that a whole heck of a lot of the land that's currently unavailable for agriculture was actually very fertile. As an example, study how small the Sahara Desert was in comparison to today. Every single desert on Earth was smaller or nonexistant during the middle Pliocene era. In truth, very little fertile land would be underwater. To give you another example: Look up where most of the farm land in the US is, and you'll find that a lot of the water for agriculture comes from the Ogallala Aquifer. Interestingly enough, global warming would actually help preserve and possibly even recharge that aquifer for two reasons:
1. Wetter climates (a result of global warming) would help to recharge the aquifer and would mean that farmers would have to use it less.
2. Increased CO2 levels (along with the wetter climate) would reduce the water lost by plants when taking in CO2, allowing farmers to use less water.
In fact, there are a number of articles pointing to global warming actually being good for agriculture (stating these reasons along with the reduced coverage of deserts).
I would like to say this on fusion power vs. SSP: I think you will be very surprised by the advancements in fusion power vs. the advancements that would make SSP viable that will happen in the coming years.
LSP Martin - there are major threats to humans from climate change that is caused by people. If there were no people how the planet evolves would not be a concern. The objective is not to keep things as they are but to avoid disaster for billions of people that are distributed in nation states with much of the populations concentrated in coastal areas subject to innundiation with rising sea levels. How to feed 9 billion people - roughly 3 billion more than now - by roughly 2050 is very far from being a solved problem. If a significant share of presently productive land is not available by 2050 as a result of changes caused by humans logically most people would choose to change the human behavior that will result in a significant decrease in the potential to raise food and major flooding of large areas that are presently occupied by people. There are numerous other arguments including sustainability and biodiversity. Other arguments that I listen to are the possibility for threshold effects that are presently not forecastable, the unknown unknowns that could pose dangers to human survival. One possible concern is the melting of the permafrost. Vast amounts of methane could be released to the atmosphere if this happens. Other scenarios that I have seen include release of methane trapped in the deep ocean bed. At the very least we need to understand this problem much better than we do.
I am not against fusion research but it appears to be a technology that seems to be always a generation out. Considerable science remains to be done. I would bet on technologies where the science is clear and engineering challenges appear doable. To me space-based solar power (SSP) looks very promising. The sun shines 24/7 and without the atmosphere average power is about 9X locations that are good for solar. SSP apppears to hold the promise to not only be a big part of the solution for clean energy that we need on Earth, SSP would open the door for human expansion into the solar system. A good collection of information on SSP can be found at http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/
Vidbeldavs: Here's my question: What, exactly, is "green"? Is it preserving the world exactly as it is, making sure that it never changes? Well, the problem with that is that even if humans do nothing, the world will EVENTUALLY leave the current ice age, ocean levels will rise, temperatures will increase, etc. We'll actually have to artificially alter the environment in order to keep things as they are now (which is a highly abnormal state for the Earth to be in).
Aside from that, "green" seems to come from the color of cells in plants that produce energy through photosynthesis (leaves, needles, etc). An interesting point is that an increase in temperatures, given our studies of past temperatures/CO2 levels/biomes, would actually cause an increase in not only plant life, but animal life as well.
The sad truth is that some species would die out, but new species would come about as well, and, in some cases, some species would adapt into new species from an increase in CO2 levels, temperature, and plant life. Extinction is a reality of life. No one is trying to bring back the dinosaurs because they think it's a tragedy that they died out (some want to bring them back because they think it would be cool), nor do they want to bring back other species that died out millions of years ago. For some reason, though, humans seem obsessed with bringing back aurochs, Falkland Island Foxes, etc. We seem obsessed with the idea that the way the world was when we came into it, that's the way it's SUPPOSED to be.
For me, I like the idea of sustainability and reduced air pollution (my lungs are bad enough as it is from second hand smoke). I think it's sad that all these arguments over global warming have caused things like the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer and limitations of fossil fuel to fall by the wayside. There are a lot of good reasons to conserve water or try and find alternate fuel sources (I'm a fan of fusion energy, but I don't know much about it... keep in mind I didn't say COLD fusion) aside from global warming, and those are the things we should focus on. People argue about whether or not it's real (and I like to argue about whether or not we even should try to stop it) when it would be so much better to just focus on the other things.
