As many of you know there is a lot of environmental issues out there the most popularly being global warming. For those who have been living under a rock the theory states that becuase our "smog" or air pollution causes more light to be trapped in out atmosphere. Or simply put an increase of temperature over a short period of time due to the affect of humans. The other less popular theory is that the sun produces the heat and there is no difference whether we pollute our air or not; there is only a tiny shred of proof for this theory. The proof being that during our economic boom our pollution went up yet the average temperature went down. People who believe in this theory say the earth produces the smog becuase of the heat; however air pollution can still harm us all the same.



Pollution is harmful both to us and the planet; everyone at one time has polluted whether it was in your hybrid (it uses gas after you got past 60) or a piece of trash thrown out the window. Air pollution for one causes the quality of our air to degrade so much its actually visible. The worst part of air pollution is that many factories are near our place of business, our homes, and our family.



(I'm sure there are plenty types of other pollutions but I'm only going to focus on the main types of pollution)

The shear volume of trash we throw out is quite perplexing... as the average American throws out 1,460 pounds of garbage per year. Even though we are only 5 percent of the world we produce 40 percent of the worlds garbage with Canada a close second. Why is this; I believe its the capitalist way of living that we've come so accustomed. Buying things then when a new one comes out we buy that and repeat the cycle.



I'm sure there are a ton more to say but I'll leave that to you to decided what is relevant to this generation.

Do you want to talk about what the problem is, how to solve it, or what effects it has?

Air pollution != CO2.

Air pollution is harmful to our health, CO2 is generally not.

Air pollution (specifically, fine particles suspended in the atmosphere) has a cooling effect on the environment, while CO2 has a heating/greenhouse effect.

Well i made the topic fairly quickly...

And yes to all those K_A

So basically if we can find a way to balance out the heat gained with theheat lost, we could continue polluting without climate change, but if we want to get rid of the negative effects that air pollutants have on the environment, we will also need to remove CO2 pollution to prevent the warming effect.

In the days after September 11 2001 when US airspace was shut down, there was a distinct decrease in the amount of cloud cover of the country due to the lack of jet contrails acting as seeds for the clouds.

Geo-engineering is the field where they look at potential engineering solutions to global warming, such as spraying sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to create clouds of sulphuric acid to reflect sunlight.

This is one of the problems with peak oil - we will be forced to significantly reduce the amount of CO2 we emit into the atmosphere through simple exhaustion, but at the same time the pollution that is created along side this CO2 will be having a cooling effect. Reducing our use of fossil fuels will decrease the amount of CO2 we're presently emitting, but it won't do anything to clean up the excess CO2 that has already been released. We could be looking at a fuel-starved but very hot future (sort of a double-whammy).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoengineering

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Oct 16 2011, 11:37 pm by Lanthanide.

Well the obvious counter to oil would be to all electric cars... Surprisingly during the 1890s - early 1900's electric cars were preferred shocking how oil won over electric.

Yes, it is the 'obvious' counter, but it's not one that's going to work.

It's not shocking at all. Battery technology is only now starting to catch up to the amount of power that can be provided by a full tank of petrol.

I predict that 10-15 years from now the world will be freaking out over Global Cooling, driving the media to sensationalize data in the reverse direction to the past 10 years.

Ever hear of trees? They absorb Carbon dioxide out of the air and replace it with Oxygen.
Obviously the solution is to plant a crap load of trees.

@K_A
Yes but then the problem is shifted to using fertile lands for trees instead of crops thus increasing food prices...

@Lanth
Well instead of oil or electric people will probably go and switch to bio fuels once oil becuase unsustainable thus increasing food prices so electric is probably our best bet once they upgrade it to compete with oil.

@Vrael
I wanted to put that in my post but i had so many other ideas that it would take at least an hour to write.

The real question is, is the amount of CO2 released via human activity sufficient to produce global warming, or is this merely the standard cycle the earth has been going through since forever?

Considering there's the Piri Reis map of Antarctica (which shows the land below the ice very accurately) then it is likely that the cycles of ice age and heat are more rapid than what has been thought, and this current heating is merely part of the cycle.

Regardless of if it's natural or caused by human activity, I'm not worried; the earth has gone through this before and with modern technology we can survive it better than ever.

How ironic, in America farmers get paid by the government to burn crops because the prices here are too low.

Similarly the human population of earth is now significantly greater than anything in history. That means there is much less room for error, and small problems (drought in the US corn-belt, for example) can have disastrous systemic effects on everyone.

Umm can i get some proof on this statement?

@Lant
I agree; with the population exponentially rising and people living for a longer period of time our ways are starting to show its cracks.

@Tempz
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101228181718AAlhXId
Here is a link asking that same question.
Not to mention the burning of the leftover matter in the fields to fertilize the soil (from what I've read it has been proven that this does not work, and creates more CO2 pollution)

Lanthanide is correct.

Aerosols (air pollution) do have a cooling effect on the environment. And while ridding them is certainly a plus to air quality (see Beijing), it really wouldn't help our warming problem (aggravating it, even).

---

Allow me to clarify some points though. CO₂ isn't actually one of the heavy handed green house gasses. Methane and nitrous oxide, however, are. Now these are the gasses we should be worrying about, not necessarily our very dear carbon dioxide. There is something called the clathrate gun hypothesis that predicts that our CO₂ emissions will be just enough to create a positive feedback loop of heating.



This is a common question, and answered quite well in this video.

Isn't your definition of "forever" about 6000 years?

Can't we take the bible, see what it says about the climate in general, and then decide whether we've had warming or not just based on that?

Why do you always have to bring religion into it? ;o

Off the top of my head, the only thing about climate change in the Bible is the Flood, which would have then caused an ice age due to the amount of aerosols released into the atmosphere after the volcanic activity caused by the earth's plates, and the hotter oceans, also caused by undersea volcanic activity. Other than that, there's nothing I can think of.

Because we can't really take any of your contributions to the topic seriously if we all think earth is 4.3 billion years old and you think it's 6,000.

So you're not very much of an anthropologist if that's the only thing you can read about the climate in the bible. I'll give you a hint: anything discussing growing crops, tending a farm etc, tells us about the climate.

And here's you saying that the bible is all very straight forward and clear and easy to understand and yet you miss some of the subtleties that it tells us about the world when it was written. What other subtleties have you missed in your interpretation?

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Oct 17 2011, 9:50 am by Lanthanide.