On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 7:44 PM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yes, exactly, if we assume that there will be no bad consequences if > continue to pump out pollution, we are indeed betting out lives >
You're assuming that the safe and conservative thing to do is to immediately and radically cut the amount of carbon injected into the atmosphere, but it's entirely possible and I would even say probable that would be the dangerous and radical thing to do. Coal is much vilified and I don't like the pollution it causes anymore than you do, but the world is not simple and the fact remains that without coal half a billion people in China would not have been lifted out of grinding poverty since 2000; one of the most encouraging developments in this century. Cut out that energy source and they and many many more would slip back into poverty and we would have to face all the social turmoil (like war) that would entail. The fact remains that there is simply no way to keep 7 billion large mammals of the same species alive, much less happy, on this planet without using lots of energy; and the environmentalists ludicrous solution of windmills and moonbeams just doesn't cut the mustard. > and those of our children and their children on that assumption. > Let our grandchildren fight their own wars! In the USA during the Vietnam war the constant mantra was we must fight now so our grandchildren don't have to. Well the USA lost that war, but would it have been any better off today if it had won? I don't see how. I feel that my children's children's happiness is no more important than my own; and I know that my children's children will have very powerful new tools to deal with problems that I do not have. > If we try to keep CO2 levels down to somewhere around where they have > been between, say, 1960 and 1999 > Any reduction in CO2 emission levels made today would take decades to show up as less CO2 in the atmosphere, and longer than that to show up as cooler temperatures if it ever did. > > then we at least know roughly what to expect > If you believe the climate models, and I don't see why you would, and if we obeyed the multitrillion dollar Kyoto Protocol, which seems to be what you're suggesting, then what you'd expect is a 0.11 to 0.21 degrees Celsius reduction in temperature in the year 2100 over what it would have been without the protocol. So I say let our grandchildren find a better solution when they have access to a much much better toolkit and when they may actually know what is important and what is not. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
