Will scientists bail us out?

@George Said

Climate change in inevitable volcanoes naturally emit enough carbon monoxide to do the earth plenty of damage, life within the context of the overall universe is cheap, life as we know it could only really come about on earth because of our earth's unusual axis and distance in relation to our sun.

@buffalobill90 Said

Volcanic activity has never been substantial enough to cause global warming as rapidly as human activity has in the last 150 years. Even the Deccan Traps didn't produce enough CO2 quickly enough to do what we're doing.

@crazychica Said

I do feel a bit pissed off because if there was more funding towards renewable energy research and alternatives for transport then the problem might not be so bad. But people want to stick with oil. It's silly. There are good reasons to move away from fossils fuels such as the effect it has on the enviroment and of course getting away from any dependance on foreign oil. With more research we could have transport that is far more enviromentally friendly that was affordable and therefore viable as an alternative. At the moment we still have a fixation with burning things. We really have to move away from that.

@George Said

So we introduce a slight excelleration who cares, if we're destroying it chances are it's beyond repair and why spend the last few hundred years cold and without electricity?



Natural resources in terms of deriving electricity is very location orientated and the problem with that is you cant export and tranfer electricity from these source locations easily if you could then we'd have some kind of perpetual motion satalite in space.

@crazychica Said

I don't see what space power has to do with space satelites.

@crazychica Said
However I can say that Scotland gets a fairly large amount of our power from renewable energy sources and are looking to increase it very soon. I live quite a bit away from my nearest renewable energy power source but I know that a big chunk of what is used to power my laptop has been transported from these sources. Most of them are based on the same thing, the power is generated via turbine just as in a fossil fuel power plant but usually with more efficiency, the major exception being the solar panel which is extremely inefficient, or at least it was 4 years ago when we studied this in physics and tech studies.

@George Said

Perpetual motion because there's no force to resist against an action in space therefore you could have like a space turbine.



Not only does polution help renewable energy sources by making global climates more extreme but there's no way to draw on them to as greater extent as our man made energy sources.

@treebee Said

I actually like the idea of going back to old ways. But thats just because it suits me. The simpler life is the better my brain works.

@buffalobill90 Said

Life may have been simpler for people in the bygone past, but that doesn't mean it was easier. In fact it was far more difficult.

@buffalobill90 Said

It's my prediction that changes in culture and lifestyles won't be radical enough to reduce CO2 pollution sufficiently. People in developed countries won't give up the luxuries they enjoy in order to reduce their carbon footprint enough, and developing countries won't stop developing for the sake of global warming. As always, new technology will be relied upon to compensate for population growth.

The most important developments will be in the following areas: communications/IT, energy production, and climate control.

New methods of communication and networking will make commuting unnecessary for a substantial section of the workforce in all parts of the world. Travelling to an office every day will become a redundant routine as working from home is made vastly more easy and practical.

New energy production techniques, most importantly nuclear fusion, will be cheaper, more efficient and cleaner than fossil fuels. A commercial fusion reactor is already planned for construction in France in the 2040s.

Climate control technology will play a very important part in reducing atmospheric CO2 if the situation becomes too dire. The most feasable idea at present is the use of vast amounts of oceanic algae to scrub CO2 out of the sea and air and store it on the sea floor (this idea is controversial since it could cause eutrophication and megadeath in marine ecosystems across the globe). Other such solutions may present themselves in the future in the form of airborne nanomachines or sequestering carbon in Earth's crust.

Does anyone resent the idea of scientists being relied on to bail humanity out of a climate change crisis? Does anyone prefer the idea of people having to sacrifice modern, excessive lifestyles and returning to simpler ways? Perhaps some people even like the idea of the human population being substantially reduced or completely destroyed by mother nature?