Is there any way to curb global warming without restricting our freedom of choice?
My question is, is there any method that will reduce global warming that doesn't lessen our freedom?
Answer:
The methods proposed to curb or stop Global Warming interfere with our ability to generate the political will to do what is necessary to mitigate the effects of Global Warming.
According to the best estimates we would have to reduce the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions world wide to less than one tenth of what they are today if we are to have any chance of stopping Global Warming or even slowing it down significantly.
Without the use of draconian measures that are unacceptable in a civilized society, is completely unrealistic to expect that we could achieve reductions on that scale in any one country not to mention world wide.
The only alternative left to us is to mitigate the effects of Global Warming.
That will require that we develop a political consensus that will permit us to raise the taxes and fees necessary to provide the money necessary to mitigate the effects of Global Warming.
To mitigate the effects of Global Warming we will have to build dike systems similar to those used in Holland, all over the world to protect coastal areas from flooding.
We will have to upgrade the disaster preparedness systems around the world to handle much stronger and more frequent hurricanes.
We will have to provide supplemental water supplies and desalination plants world wide for those areas that are suffering droughts.
Global Warming cannot be stopped.
The required reductions in fossil fuel use are so large that they are not achievable by methods that are acceptable in a civilized society.
We must begin developing the political consensus to raise money now so that we will have the financial resources necessary to build the dike systems, upgrade the disaster preparedness systems, provide the supplemental water supplies and desalination plants when they are needed.
Humankind's contribution to global warming isn't as great as some would have us believe. What a lot of these people that are crying "Global Warming" aren't aware of is that we are at the end of an Ice Age. Scientists have been able to drill into glacial ice and see the weather patterns for hundreds of thousands of years, and can clearly see that our climate has fluctuated, exactly like it's doing now, over and over again. This is due to a small change in the tilt of the earth's axis (less than one degree). If you look at the Earth's rotation over millennia, you'd find that the Earth is spinning much the way a top does... it's spinning around and around, but the axis is also rotating in small circles. This is why our climate is warming, and why it will cool again in a few hundred thousand years. I'm not saying that we shouldn't take steps to reduce pollution, just that the facts don't support the conclusions that have been thrown around concerning the cause of the recent climate changes. I know this puts me on the same "side" as the corrupt fat-cat Neocons, but I've got too much integrity to form any other opinion with the data that I have.
Start using renewable energy sources for your electricity . From http://altenergy.in/
yes. All the people on glob must wake up at 5 AM and go to bed at 6PM
I think the best way is to sacrifice some of the stuff we do.
NO. Expansion due to population growth, combined with our desire to have MORE of everything is the root cause of all pollution, Environmental Invasion, and resource shortages.
You cannot have significant change without demanding less from the earth. I believe technology can help, but is not the answer.
There are things that people can do voluntarily that will help slow down the effects of global warming but that's all it will do - slow it down.
Even if we introiduced draconian measures and new legislation all that's going to do is delay the consequences.
It's certainly wise to take measures to slow down the effects but something more is needed and this is where science can help.
There are many schemes under investigation that are designed to slow down, stop or even reverse the warming trend - a process known as geoengineering (or climate engineering). Some of these schemes have been trialed at small scale level and shown to work, if implmeneted on an international scale they could have a significant impact in curbing global warming.
Here's a quick overview of some of the schemes...
● Human Volcano
Volcanic eruptions emit large quantities of sulphur dioxide that blocks out some of the heat from the sun. Following the massive eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 the average global temperature fell by 0.5°C. One proposal is to simulate natural volcanoes by firing pellets of sulphur into the upper atmosphere where the particles of sulphur will reflect back some of the solar radiation.
● Sulphur Blanket
Nobel Prize winner Professor Paul Crutzen has put forward a scheme which, like the Human Volcano, uses the principle of sulphur to block out some of the suns rays. Professor Crutzen's idea is to launch rockets into the stratosphere (10 to 50km above Earth's surface) and release one million tons of sulphur. This radical plan could have drawbacks including an increase in acid rain and damage to the ozone layer. At low levels sulphur dioxide is a toxic gas and in the past was emitted in large quantities from factories; ironically the Clean Air Acts, which reduced industrial pollution, removed much of the cooling sulphur dioxide from out atmosphere.
● Solar Mirrors
The US National Academy of Sciences has proposed a scheme that would involve positioning 55,000 gigantic mirrors in space. Each mirror would be 100 square kilometres in area and the effect would be to reflect some of the sun's heat energy back into space. For the time being neither the technology nor financial resources exist to enable such a scheme to go ahead.
● Global Sunshade
A similar scheme to the space mirrors idea involves placing a giant sunshade in orbit between the sun and Earth. British astronomer Roger Angel has proposed creating such a shade some 1.5 million miles from earth, at the point where gravity from the sun and the earth balance. His sunshade would consist of 16 trillion individual glass discs, each one microscopically thin and weighing just one gram. On board each disc would be a tiny camera, computer and solar sails allowing each disc to align itself so as to refract light from the sun just enough so it misses Earth. Angel proposes using electro magnetically propelled launches, each one delivering a million discs into space.
● Moving Earth
Perhaps the most ambitious of all schemes so far proposed is one to actually move planet Earth into a different orbit. It has been estimated that if Earth were 1.5 million miles further from the sun then the reduced heat energy received from the sun would compensate for anthropogenic global warming. Dr Ken Caldiera of Stanford University, an opponent of geoengineering, has calculated that the energy required to move the Earth this far would be the equivalent of 5 quadrillion hydrogen bombs (5,000,000,000,000,000).
● Cloud Seeding
Cloud seeding isn't a new concept and is one that has been tried with some success as a way of bringing rainfall to dry areas. One variation on this theme is to launch a fleet of self-propelled vessels to sail the world's oceans and spray a fine mist of seawater particles into the atmosphere. Marine Stratocumuli clouds form over much of the world's oceans and they're particularly effective at reflecting sunlight back into space. Professors John Latham and Stephen Salter from the UK believe that by increasing the number of such clouds, enough heat from the sun can be reflected back into space to offset global warming.
● Artificial Trees
A school science project provided the inspiration for Professor Klaus Lackner's concept of using artificial trees to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Air passes through the device and hydrogen sulphide absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, each 'tree' could remove 90,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year. The carbon dioxide would need to be permanently stored and the professor believes this could be achieved by drilling holes thousands of metres deep into porous rock beneath the oceans; the CO2 would be injected into the holes where it would permeate the surrounding rock.
● Phytoplankton
Phytoplankton are microscopic marine plants, invisible to the naked eye but visible from space as blooms of green ocean. Like all plants they photosynthesise - taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. Increasing the quantity of phytoplankton will result in more carbon dioxide being absorbed and when the plants die they sink to the ocean floor taking the carbon with them. Professor Ian Jones of Sydney University advocates that by using nitrogen rich urea to enrich parts of the oceans low in phytoplankton their numbers can be significantly increased.
● More About These Schemes
Some of these ideas formed part of a BBC documentary 'Five Ways To Save The World' you can read more about them on the BBC Website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/62... watch the programme trailer http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_... or watch the programme in full from Google Video http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=...
I think it's our governments duties to regulate the choices we makes with taxes or incentives relative to any products influence on our environment. By doing so we still have the choice to buy whatever we prefer. But if we prefer non-environmental friendly products the taxes we pay can at least help repair the damages we are causing. It will also make environmental friendly products more attractive and thereby encourage science and new development of new products.
In the best of worlds regulations like this wouldn't be necessary, but as long as people doesn't care about environment or other people's well beings (and that includes people on the other side of our globe) but only about their own money interests it's the only way to go.
That is exactlly the reason that they need to study it more
Please refer to the website below. They have found a natural way of removing the Co2 that the ocean ommits. They have done this with plankton, it actually eats Co2. We just need enough put in the ocean to work. They are doing more reseach on it now but it has worked in all of their studies so far.
No... the only actual way is to reduce human population by 90% with the remaining 10% living a cave man existence...
Sure. There are lots of ways to reduce energy use, that will save you money. Better insulation, more fuel efficient cars, etc.
But some of this will have to be done by government regulation. In the 1960s the world was headed for a very smoky future, with clouds of air pollution making people sick, and really bad and smelly water that fish simply couldn't live in. Government laws to reduce environmental pollution are responsible for saving us from that. You can look at industrial towns in China for what our future could have been. Believe me, you wouldn't want to live (and die early) there.
This picture gives you the idea.
http://www.epa.gov/history/photos/p01.ht...
Yes, in a free-market economy, you can simply add a tax to things that cause global warming, in proportion to the economic damage they will likely do in the future. This tax can replace other taxes. At present, our taxes discourage things that are good, like making more money and owning a home. If we change over to taxing the things that threaten our great-grandchildren's lives, like fossil fuel, this will encourage the repacement of fossil fuel with renewable resources and non-carbon-emitting enegery sources (such as nuclear).
One obvious political problem with this plan is: who decides how much things should be taxed? It seems to me that the most likely way to make it work is by a board of experts, with oversight by politicians, like the Federal Reserve Board in the United States, or the various World War II rationing boards. If politicians are allowed to tinker with the details, then politcal leverage will be applied, leading to all sorts of special exceptions. This will result in unfairness and perhaps the failure of the process.
Well, if everyone chooses to change their life style then it was a free choice. If, however, changes are forced on us by government programs, then freedom is lost. This (taking away our freedom) of course is the true agenda of the liberal politicians jumping on the global warming band wagon.
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