Re: Off Topic: NMD/Environment was: (Re: Ada and the NMD)

[Larry Elmore <ljelmore@home.com>]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> In article <iOOl7.11306$592.607182@news2-win.server.ntlworld.com>, chris.danx
> says...
> >Perhaps it's because Northern America is one of the biggest polluters.
> >Something like 25% of all CO2 emissions are produced by Northern America.
> 
> About 17% by the US, and slowly declining (our output is increasing, but not as
> much as everyone else's. See the graph at the bottom of
> http://ens.lycos.com/ens/nov98/1998L-11-17-02.html ).

One should also realize that _all_ man-made CO2 emissions add up to only
a tiny percentage of total CO2 production. Even if _all_ human CO2
production ceased this very instant (including respiration, if you want
to go so far as the kooks who think the only way to "save the planet" is
voluntary extinction of the human species -- there's a couple of web
sites on the subject), it's possible that CO2 levels would still be
climbing. Increased CO2 _might_ be a result of warming, not a cause. We
simply don't know enough yet. It appears from some studies that on a
geologic time scale, CO2 levels are currently rising from an _all-time
low_ over the past couple of million years (the Ice Ages may be
related).

> >If the US doesn't support it and Japan doesn't either then Kyoto is a dead
> >duck.  IMO Kyoto is pants and there are better ways of dealing with lowering
> 
> You are absolutely right. Its a dead duck. Without the US it will be as useless
> as the League of Nations, and it won't have the US. The only reason it happened
> at all was that our VP at the time liked to think of himself as an
> envirionmentalist, and thought a worldwide agreement would be his crowning
> glory. The American electorate sure wasn't impressed. Talking emmision reduction
> in this country is a vote *loser*.

Although when energy usage (and pollution created) is compared with GDP,
the US is one of the most efficient nations on Earth. It's the Third
World where things are getting dire. Poor people can't _afford_ to worry
overly much about the environment, and it shows.
 
> >The recent train of thought is that we have 40 to 100 years before the
> (tale of woe deleted)
> 
> No one is really sure what will happen. I've heard some scientists speculate
> that it could actually touch off another ice age instead of warming things (we
> are probably overdue for one anyway). The only thing I'd be willing to bet on is
> that things don't stay the same, but historicly that wouldn't be a good bet
> anyway. Earth's climate has always changed wildly over time.

Yes, it's a demonstrable fact that climate has changed more (sometimes
in a few decades, maybe only a couple decades) in the far past (in human
terms, not geologic) than even the most dire current predictions of
global warming forecast over the next century. I have no doubt at all
that had the professional Chicken Littles of the world would also have
been carrying on just as loudly if they'd lived 12,000 years ago as the
current Great Warming began. Of course, the disasters that befell the
world (the larger part of the icecaps melting off, sea level rising 100
meters, etc) led directly to what we consider "normal". Warming is
happening now, but whether or not humans have _appreciably_ influenced
it is an open question. What caused the Little Ice Age of the
1600-1800's? And what brought it to an end? I think solar variability
has _much_ more impact than human activity has had, and one really good
volcanic eruption like Tambora, Thera, or the truly monstrous one of
Krakatoa in the far past that split Java from Sumatra would make the sum
total of human influence look puny indeed.
 
> The problem is that we don't really understand the global environmental system
> yet. Given that, trying to fix a percieved "bug" in it isn't likely to be
> productive (although staying the course is likely to be disasterous as well).

Luckily, we're _not_ staying the course (not on a decadal scale).
Technology is improving rapidly, and in the industrialized world, things
are mostly getting better. Some "improvements" are just lying with
statistics, but then so are _some_ of the "dire" events that get highly
publicized. I've read that Germany's claimed reduction in greenhouse
emissions since 1990 is only real when all of current Germany is used as
the basis for comparison. The western part actually went up slightly,
while the economic collapse of the dirty, inefficient heavy industry in
the old eastern part is what brought the sum total down.

Larry