On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 05:31:25PM -0500, P. J. Alling scripsit: > On 1/17/2010 4:54 PM, Graydon wrote: >> So far as the whole anthropogenic climate change thing goes, one might >> want to take a photographic perspective on the question and look at the >> old and new shots of Glacier National Park. >> <http://www.livescience.com/php/multimedia/imagegallery/igviewer.php?imgid=626&gid=42&index=0> >> > So can we stop it? More importantly does it make sense to even try? > I've never seen an analysis of either of those questions that didn't > depend on unicorn dust...
It makes sense to try because the hotter it gets, the more violent the weather gets and the drier (as a global average thing; Ontario is likely going to get very wet for awhile) it gets. If it gets much hotter or much drier, nasty things happen like "the Asian monsoon rains only happen some years or shut down entirely". It's hard to keep a civilization going without a consistent food supply. Food supply is one of those things where you just have to deal with the weather. Of course we can stop it. The two primary contributors are CO2 and particulate carbon. The CO2 issue means no fossil carbon extraction and the particulate carbon means no internal combustion engines or blast furnaces. Neither of those two things is actually an unsolved technical problem; getting people to make the switch is way seriously an unsolved problem. (Eg., a couple hundred square km of solar cells could supply most of Europe's electricity needs if they got stuck in the Sahara or the Empty Quarter or similar. Figuring out how to build the cell farm, set it up, and feed an electric grid with it is a solved problem. Figuring out how to do this so you can get permission to build it, move electricity across various jurisdictions, etc. when it's never been done before, is really tough.) -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
