I think man is a cause of warming. Didn't use to think so, but recently attended a talk where the presenter showed how the traditional, hundreds of year correlation between sun intensity/earth orbit & earth temperatures isn't follwoing the pattern this time. By the pattern, temps would be dropping now. And there's no denying CO2 is rising - now 425ppm. I recall it being 280ppm at some point in the past. 1970?
Coal is by far the biggest man caused CO2 source at ~40%. Cars & vans are 10%.
So, should we be trying to stop/lower CO2 emissions? Beats me. Should be be imposing auto power source changes that do nothing to 50% reduce their CO2 emissions from materials sourcing to end life? I say hell no till you fix the coal issue, then lets talk.
CO2 rising is true, as far as I can tell. However, it's still <.5% of the atmosphere. And, in Biology 101 I was taught that plants need/live off of CO2. So, how is higher CO2 levels 'killing' the planet? Certainly there is a point of diminishing return but much of what I have read suggests current CO2 levels are not dangerous and actually lower than they have been in previous geologic ages of the earth. One would certainly expect that CO2 levels would have been significantly higher when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and more of the earth was extremely fertile and significantly lower during Ice Ages, right?
1000% agree on replacing coal as an energy source. What you left out is which countries are hellbent on firing up coal-fired generators? China and India. Not surprising, which 2 countries are absent from any admonition by this administration as they get on their rhetorical high horse about what America needs to do to save the planet. And, by the way, why are those two countries so committed to building coal-fired energy plants? Because, they're POOR and cheap, clean energy has been the fuel to Western civilization's higher standard of living.
As others have just stated, the cleanest (from an global warming standpoint) alternative is nuclear which the climate crusaders are adamantly opposed to. So, that begs the question: if they're against the best and cleanest alternative energy source to replace what is considered the dirtiest, what, exactly is the agenda they're promoting? Is it really cleaner energy to 'save' the planet or it is something completely different?
It's pretty well agreed upon that you can't run today's society depending wholly on solar and wind - they're too inconsistent. Using them as supplementary supplies and backups - absolutely (although they are not without environmental impact to flora and fauna and mining operations and disposal and, and, and). The airport shuttles at Houston's Bush Int'l Airport all run on natural gas, which burns cleaner than gasoline. Since NG is very plentiful, why aren't we developing that technology to plug the gap between gasoline/diesel transportation and all-electric, which, is still in its infancy. Why aren't the climate crusaders calling for development of hydrogen fuel cells, like Toyota has been doing, which, when burned, emits water vapor and is literally everywhere in the atmosphere and doesn't have to be mined by enslaved children? Again, these questions go back to the bigger question on skeptics' minds: is this crusade really about saving the planet or is it something else (and, conservatives tend to infer some agenda infinitely more nefarious than saving the planet)?
One big hangup I have with the whole movement is that the data we have is very limited and nonexistent beyond a few decades. If we're in a 5k or 10k or 50k year cycle, how can we possibly be able to predict/conclude anything? We have NO data of any reliability beyond maybe a 100 years. I just saw an article recently where some 'scientific' body stated that the world's oceans have risen 9" in the past 20 years (or something like that) and, of course, that was ballyhooed as one more indication that the planet needs saving. What they didn't say was the average depth of the earth's oceans is around 12,000 feet. How does one go about measuring the depth of the ocean accurately? And, wouldn't 9" represent .0063% of 12,000 feet - the dictionary definition of a 'rounding error' if I ever saw one. Bear in mind that the climate is an ecosystem that probably consists of 1,000 or more separate variables. How can any scientist look at one (CO2 levels) and confidently predict what the total system's reaction will be?
