Quote:
Originally Posted by vernarial
In my opinion, pollution is bad. Even if it makes it a bit warmer for my Canadian buddies. That's what all these global warming emmisions are. Pollution. There aren't any big air polluters here in the valley I live in, but there are still at least a dozen days a year that the schools and alot of parents won't allow the children to play outside because the air is so bad.
The problem I see with the thinking that maybe some global warming might be good is that where does it stop? Someone is bound to say that if a little is good, wouldn't alot be great. Where do we stop? You know those penguins might like to live in a tropical paradise, so let's heat this place up some more. Sure maybe living in a little warmer climate might be better for some, but why pollute our atmosphere to do it. It might be easier if people just moved to warmer climates.
Nature is going to automatically warm and cool the planet in cycles. Sure we should look more fully into the questions of global warming and how it effects humans and how humans effect it. I don't see the need to continue poisoning our atmosphere and planet, just to study what the best temperature is for mankind.
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You may consider CO2 to be a pollutant but scientists do not. The 75 PPM increase in CO2 concentrations that have been observed over the past four decades are a minuscule fraction of the amount of CO2 it would take to make the air poisonous. But the other products of fossil fuel combustion such as nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide
are pollutants and we should be minimizing those emissions as much as possible. The schools in your area are keeping kids indoors because of those pollutants, not because of greenhouse gas emissions.
Obviously I'm not arguing that we should be turning up the thermostat just to see what happens, it would serve no scientific purpose whatsoever. But I am asking the question why should we turn the thermostat down? I wasn't alive before the industrial revolution so I have no basis for comparing our current climate, but I am quite accustomed to this climate and I don't think I want things to be cooler than they are now; Colorado winters are more than cold enough for me. I'm just using myself as an example, and because of me and others like me the world will never be able to agree on how warm or cold the climate should be. There may be a consensus on the fact that the earth is warming, but there certainly is no consensus on whether the earth
should be warming or cooling.
I think albed is right to an extent. The study of the global climate
really needs to be divorced from the politics of climate change. Killing the people who are guilty of politicizing this issue is unnecessary, but calling them out for the opportunists and manipulators they are would benefit us all. The vaunted scientific consensus has brought us no closer to discovering a course of action that would please everybody, but there is no reason why we all can't profit in some way from environmental stewardship. It's becoming less and less likely that the solution is political; carbon taxes won't do the trick, buying carbon credits is a gimmick, and government subsidies for alternative energy have outlived their usefulness. Since the government doesn't hold the key to protecting the environment we should be ignoring the politicians who talk about environmental protection so we can take stewardship of the planet into our own hands.