Tim Attwood wrote:
>>>>  The significant increase in CO2 emissions by humans in the last 100
>>>> years and the significant increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere in
>>>> the last 100 years is certainly a heck of a coincidence.
>>>



>>
>> ...which would still mean that humans caused the rise of CO2...
> 
> Yeah, but that doesn't mean that CO2 will continue to climb,
> it probably means that the CO2 levels will stabilize at the new
> slightly higher levels. That's hardly something to panic about,
> and it's not a very good reason to cripple the economy.
> They'd get better results by paying poor 3rd world people
> to plant trees, instead of trying to make it so you can breath
> car exaust.

And when the weather changes so much that the "dry" parts of the planet, 
as per the official standards for that, rise from 15% to 40%, thus 
making it impossible for those trees to grow?

This isn't a simple case of, "Ah, well, it will get a bit warmer, and 
some places where be more tropical." It means that places that are now 
tropical turn desert, places that are desert turn wasteland, and the 
people living there have to either find some other sources for food and 
water, since one won't grow, and you can't find the other any more, or 
invade someone else to get it. And, "some" parts of the world are on 
that edge already, due to where they chose to live before declaring 
themselves countries. A shift of a few degrees can turn thousands of 
square miles from "usable" land into sand in a generation, and result in 
"more" fuel being used to "fix" the problem by pumping in water from 
some place else, assuming you have any place to pump fresh water from in 
the first place (and that is the other issue, making/finding fresh water).

We may not want the consequences of it "stabilizing" at that higher 
level, and many countries probably can't "afford" it. Heck, we already 
have people whining about how building desalination plants, to get more 
water in some parts of the US would be, "too expensive, so lets just 
find some other group of morons, like those people in Owen's Valley, who 
will let us steal it from them instead." Funny though.. If you raise the 
temperature 2 degrees and the result is 20-30% less snow, where they 
hell do you think all the water being pumped from those places is going 
to come from? The only reason there is any is "because of" the snow 
fall. Reduce it and either a lot of your water goes away as rain, 
instead of melting over time, causing erosion and other problems, or you 
don't get as much total, in which case... what do you replace it with?

No matter how you look at the problem, its going to result in money 
getting spent. You can a) invest in solving problems to you use energy 
better, less often, and from cleaner sources, and in the long term 
"make" more money, or you can take the short sighted approach, and pay 
100 times as much to "fix" the problems that show up in 10 years, due to 
not investing in any of it.

California has a similar mess with roads. They have "studied" the issue 
of light rail and getting cars off the road for decades. In fact, they 
have studied it "multiple times". The result has always been, "too 
expensive". Only, the first time it was, $100 million too expensive, the 
next time $200 million too expensive, the next $1 billion too expensive, 
etc., so every time they took the "short term approach" of building more 
lanes, which doesn't "fix" the problem, since you still only have 1-2 
narrow lanes to get on and off with. Result... They are probably 
spending $1 billion a year to maintain the mess, pay for medical 
expenses from health issues from all the cars, etc. But, at least the 
"roads" cost less than a light rail system.

Let me put it this way. Idiots, and the greedy, wait until it costs 
"more" to keep things as they are than it does to fix the issue, and 
then they try to cut as many corners as possible anyway, when it becomes 
inevitable. The cost to tax payers, innovation, business (do to having 
to pay incidental costs or work around the defects in the current 
systems), and to people's health, and other issues, is either glossed 
over, ignored, or classed as "unknown, so we won't bother even making a 
vague guess, since we really don't want the answer anyway". But, as a 
rational person, why would you, me, or anyone else hire an idiot, or 
someone more interested in their "current" bank statement, over the 
future, instead of someone willing to stand up and admit, "This is 
unsustainable, and we need to do something, even if it hurts a 'little' 
right now. Because, if we wait, like we always do with this stuff, its 
going to bankrupt people and destroy entire industries to fix it."?

Nah, lets just pick the same people, over and over, who equate keeping 
things as they are with progress, and watch the bill for solving the 
problem keep going up, until we have to start using a made up word like 
decahedronogazillion to describe how much it will "cost" to fix the 
problems we didn't think where serious enough to piss off some energy 
consortium's special interest lobby with.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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