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If you could stop global warming, would you do it?


I hear they have these machines that can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It's really expensive, but hypothetically speaking I'm not sure it's a good idea anyway. Think of it like this. The human body is a multivariate system, with different parts sending out signals to other parts. This is the reason pharmaceutical drugs never really cure anything. You just block some of the signals, cover up symptoms. The problem usually gets worse because your body is confused and tries to compensate. Dosages have to be increased.

What if the environment works the same way? Carbon dioxide is a signal representing the amount of industry, or economic activity in society, a measure of life and activity. The more we have, the more the Earth has to balance it with natural forces. More trees. It just so happens that trees grow bigger and faster when there is more carbon dioxide, more water vapor, warmer temperatures. It's a self correcting system, as all long lived systems evolve to be.

So what might happen if we take away that feedback. Industry gets to keep growing unabated, and we just won't have the commensurate warming, the commensurate feedback to signal the need for more plant growth. A lot of global warming solutions seem to produce this result. For example, many scientists and geoengineers have reccomended spraying aluminum in the atmosphere to block and reflect the sun, dimming the Earth (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming). This is very bad for plant growth.

A lack of vegetation in the capacity to support our population seems like a much bigger threat than warmer temperatures. We can adapt to warmer temperatures but not to a lack of oxygen producing trees. The Earth probably has some sort of built in population capacity. Certainly we haven't reached it yet, however by trying to game the numbers with artificial technologies, we might be inadvertently lowering that capacity rather than raising it. Humans have a bad track record with this sort of thing. Look at agriculture and soil depletion.

I say let it be. Besides, I'm not the guilty party. I don't want to pay, for the privlidge to stunt tree growth. I want the Queen of England to telecommute. Make her eat GMO tofu burgers. Global warming is the ultimate class warfare, and we're losing.

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I think its already too late. (Just a feeling, no science involved....)

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Humans contribute to global warming with the use of coal, and all of the other chemicals that are involved, but humans don't cause global warming. Climate change is cyclical, going from Ice Ages to global warming, back and forth every several thousand years. This has been happening since the beginning of time.

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We need a like button here. I'd throw you a rep.

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I think anthropogenic global warming is a hoax. You singled out coal. What about fracking? We know what comes out of a coal fired smokestack. We don't know what's in the fracking fluid. It's got to be pretty toxic, and likely to contaminate all the ground water and soil. That's not some hypothetical catastrophe a hundred years in the future. That's concrete observable destruction of the environment right now. And we don't seem to care too much. In fact we're even using global warming to justify it, all because natural gas has less carbon dioxide than coal. But carbon dioxide has got to be the only thing that comes out of a smokestack that isn't bad for us. They can emit mercury, arsenic, benzene, all kinds of soot and things that are really terrible for us, so why are we evaluating "pollution" exclusively in terms of carbon dioxide, a life giving gas that trees breathe? It's sort of a convenient way of excusing all kinds of topsy turvey regulations. We're even going after livestock and natural farming methods like tilling the soil instead of spraying weed killer, for industrial monocrop. That's great for the processed junk food industry, reminds me of a line from Judge Dredd: "Eat recycled food. It's good for the environment and okay for you". The truth is that's an impossibility. If it's not both it's neither.

It's all a little too convenient. We just don't have much reason to trust scientists. We know they don't care about the environment. They completely looked the other way when BP destroyed the Gulf of Mexico, and in fact sought to make it worse by dumping chemicals like Corexit. All these govenment bodies and research institutes were founded by big oil. They make obvious lies about all sorts of things like the Food Pyramid and everything related to nutrition that has brought on an epidemic of obesity, social constructivism and 57 genders, there's always an angle.

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That's why I wrote "all the other chemicals that are involved." I'm not a scientist but I have been interested in climatology since I was a teen. Yes there are a lot of other things that contribute to global warming. You are right.

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