State of our planet today

[3blake7]

I feel similarly. We have the whole global warming debate, it's a disaster. One side is taking a bad angle while attempting to bring it into the public spotlight, they aren't on the same page, they are miscommunicating, contradicting each other, etc. The other side thinks it's all a giant conspiracy, saying that the evidence has been falsified, etc. The truth is, neither side has it all right. They are both partly wrong and partly right. There's no conspiracy except the conspiracy of the human condition and all these little measures in carbon dioxide reduction are completely misinforming people who haven't done the research. It gives the impression that the problem can be solved with just people doing little things here and there and all contributing. That might work in some cases but not the case of global warming. Global warming would happen even if humans didn't exist. Our carbon emissions didn't cause global warming, a variation in solar radiation did, which melted some ice, which released trapped green house gases, increasing the global warming effect, which melted more ice. Scientists in Antarctica have been drilling out ice core samples kilometers thick. They analyzed the ice and found a way to measure it's age, the temperature of when it froze, the carbon dioxide and methane concentrations of the time. They know over 400,000 years. What the graphs show, is that there is an ice age every 90-100 thousand years and before the ice age, the global warming increases rapidly. Humanity isn't helping but ultimately it's emissions are small. Global warming would happen either way so reducing our own emissions isn't anything to celebrate about. It's like Obama hyping up that he was trying to get China to reduce their emissions. It sends a false impression. People misunderstand, politicians never get that shift in public opinion and nothing ever gets done. What we really need is to be carbon negative, to build carbon dioxide air filtering stations. We also need to come up with an idea to remove methane and reduce the greenhouse effect of our unburnt jet fuel. Reducing carbon emissions isn't good enough, even if we turned off all the machines, we'd still have global warming and an eventual ice age.

 

It's totally worth it too! I saw predictions that there could be enough sea level rise in the next 100 years, to cause over 60 trillion in damages to coastal cities around the world. Carbon dioxide air filtering stations would cost less than 0.1% of that. Not to mention that there would be places on Earth too hot for life, all the climate change refugees trying to get into other countries. The coral reefs could die too and that means the fish that depend on them. That could ripple up and decrease fish populations and cause starvation in parts of the world heavily dependent.

 

Longer term though, I am worried about the environment too. If our population growth continues at 19 births per 1000 people, we will become a giant continuous cityscape. The closest thing to nature will be a smattering of Central Parks. I think we should consider placing an "adapted land tax". Basically only land that is developed is taxed, land that is preserved is tax free. Then we can raise the tax to slow down expansion and preserve ecosystems. That would encourage more high rises, maybe underwater or floating cities and definitely subterranean cities.

 

I hope we get it together in my lifetime, lol

Edited June 30, 2015 by 3blake7