Global warming

is 1.5 degress in the last like hundred years really a "crisis"? I mean yeh maybe we should wonder why it went up, but who said it was even supposed to be constant? it seems like a small enough change that it could almost just be measurement error.
I think this is what those tv spots were really trying to ask. sure we need to be careful about what we spew into the atmosphere, but there is no cause to just up and shut down the transportation and industry of the whole world just yet, eh?
nor is there cause for an "OMFG" over somebody pointing this out...

I bet you are american. I can't believe I am reading this.

buhatkj, I take it that neither you nor I are clima scientists. But from following the discussion in the media, mainstream and not so mainstream, I learned that it is more or less proven, that the current global warming is man made. "Smoking gun" has not been found, but there are indices in abundance. When studies are done, measurement errors are taken into account. Most nations on the world have aknowledged global warming as a fact.

And those who didn't, do it because of their own agenda. China in order to not to slow down their growth. USA because of massive lobby work of the industry. Bush has time and time again muzzled scientists and edited reports. (I don't have a news item on this at hand right now, but I remember having read this multiple times on different mainstream sites, a web search will yield results) And this is what I believe these spots are about. They simply want to lobby US population into not believing things they read about global warming. Coincidently one week before publishing a documentation with Al Gore on this topic.

These spots are plain stupid as well. What facts do they provide to proof their point? No the glaciers in Greenland is not growing and no the ice shield in the antarcis is not growing either. This is complete humbug. They got a few lines from some report and put them out of context. Pseudo Science for Marketers 101. They are plain mean. They provide idiotic marketing blabla. They make me want to puke. As if anybody wants to completely shut off all power plants and abolish electricity. No one says that, but in the spot they hint that this were the plan. Plain unfair.

The people who did these spots don't believe a single line of it. They just see how much money is on the line for all those upgrades to the factories and plants and all the other cost factors. They are long dead when the effects fully hit us, so why care.

So who am I going to believe? A UN scientific board with scientist from all over the world with no common agenda or the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a lobby think tank, whose sole purpose is to manipulate public opinion in the direction the energy industry wants?
Hm.. Tough decision..

Also buhatkj, this is first about awareness of the problem. If this is reached one can discuss consequences. And these consequences are not shutting up transportation and industry. This has never been discussed in earnest, the spot seems to work already...

Some consequences being discussed are to invest into research of ways to get rid of CO2 and to require filters and other techniques to reduce the amount of CO2.

No, Pirates don't have anything to do with global warming. I am a Christian and the Bible actually tell us to take care of the environment. I do believe we should recycle materials, reduce the co2 emmissions, reduce our dependance on oil and reduce our energy consumption. I am actually thinking on buying a solar panel (maybe the EU or the US with their immense economic power should start giving away those panels for free ;)). On the other hand, global temperature is *not* going to remain constant no matter what we do. Has anyone seen in the History channel the documentary on the little Ice age?

look, i'm just saying, its not panic time yet ok? global warming should not be an election year issue, it should be an ongoing concern, that we deal with in a carefully measured way. sweeping dramatic changes to ANYTHING always result in extremely negative side effects.

ok imagine this, we all are forced by law to buy hybrid cars. CO2 emissions go WAY down, but suddenly, 10 years from now we have all these cars with huge NIMH, or LIPO or whatever battery packs ending up in the junkyard. they rust out, rot, and all that noxious stuff leaks into the soil. what was the NET improvement then? I dunno, but I think we should figure it out before we go off all half-cocked.

I'm not denying global warming, I'm just saying lets take a conservative(as in cautious, not as in republican) approach to this.

the problem with environmental political agendas is the president has just 4 years to make a dramatic impression, or he essentially loses his job. that encourages a lot of stupid, brash, activist policies(like the Iraq war). It is our own rapid industrialization that has harmed the environment in the first place. Nature does things slow, and we need to slow the hell down.

nmow that i think of it, hybrid cars are themselves a half-assed approach to environmentalism. thay still run on GAS! they still emit the same pollution, just a little less of it. We SHOULD be spending our time developing ethanol as a fuel. its infinitely renewable, cleaner by far than gas, and requires no foreign dependence. yet, its too hard to convert all the gas stations, so instead we get hybrid crap.

Infrastructure is a big problem. Building up a new system is extremely expensive. So the next big thing (from what I've read) is "sun diesel". It basically recreates the petrol creation process in a small reactor. You can feed it with virtually any kind of renewable vegetable raw materials. The resulting gas can be used to drive current diesel motors, without any modification. And the sun diesel burns soot free and without the other problems of diesel motors(hightened nitrogen oxides etc..) And the efficiency is way over everything we've got today, in theory. A pilot plant is currently built in southern germany. Nevertheless this too is only a transition technology. But if one makes a plan and actually invests into research here, getting away from fossile resources seems possible.