I thought sco was talking about nuclear.

Getting CO2 back in the box is easy. Just wait for the plants to do it.

I meant its easier by not using coal plants.

I don't believe in any of that coal soot recapture BS. Doesn't matter anyway, those ash ponds are a real issue (with coal).

Right, lets keep some of that black goo for later. Who knows what we'll want it for?

"Its easy to control the output"
Is this correct? My understanding is if you're filtering soot, that's easy, but if recapturing the CO2 that comes from O2 + HxCy --> CO2 + H2O + energy is difficult. Is that not true?

I know I have posted this link before, but this is too good to pass up.

http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/huma...

This is from Smithsonian - and it is Not About global warming. It is about temperatures since the Miocene...and it just happens to show that as humankind evolved (and grew in numbers) two things happened to the climate: it got warmer; the amplitude of weather patterns increased. The graph covers about 9 million years, and neither the use of fire nor the Neolithic revolution (which marked human species success) made a bit of difference.

Global Warming is akin to Geocentric Universe. It is an attempt to say, We Are Important - What We Do MATTERS. Guess what: we are still just a tiny piece of the universe. And the more we know about the universe, the smaller we get.

Jan, happily self-important

"Who cares whether it is man-made or not."
I agree completely. I think their argument, which I reject, is if it's anthropogenic, then we could simply stop doing the activities that are causing the change. I reject that b/c a) everything I've seen suggested is a drop in the bucket, and b) even if we had a 100% solution to stop the anthropogenic components, we'd still have to deal with the costs of the normal cycle of glaciation/deglaciation.

This is sometimes a message board for people who think the world is going to hell, but I am not at all one of them. Solutions happen every day.

Its easy to control the output, it costs 'something' which likes to be described as "enormous costs" -but in truthfulness, rarely is.

If the countries want to develop, they can/should do it responsibly. We did, obviously, or at least we paid for our cleanup where we didn't.

Yes. I think we'll go to it eventually. It would be better to do it sooner rather than freeing all the carbon from all accessible hydrocarbons and _then_ doing the inevitable.

See, I’m not buying that CG. The problem is no one is interested in fixing the problem. The problem isn’t using carbon-based products, the problem is not using cutting-edge technology to dispel the trapped greenhouse gases. The problem is that we rather upend modern man's prosperous and comfortable way of life rather than fix the problem. I have never understood the drama surrounding this issue, myself.Who cares whether it is man-made or not. If it really is a problem than it needs to be fixed either way. What if it isn’t man-made? What good does it do only concentrating on man-made preventions? When are we going to talk about a real solution?
But this is how Marxism works. You create a problem and focus on plans that will redistribute wealth.
If it is a scientific truth that global warming is happening,, then by all means, find a scientific solution, Shut up or put up.

Solutions happen everyday. If the world is going to hell in a handbasket, then tell me why survival rates are steadily going up. It's absolutely true that govts and UN do not help one bit. They have an India who can't afford to provide clean water to their people spend millions on CO2 emission projects. Each society has its unique issues and horses lead carts.

Nuclear would be a big help, but ...ignorance will shut that down too.

Anything to get people to agree to give them power over them.

"We probably build 1 power plant every 4 or 5 years in the US, and China opens a new COAL-BURNING plant every 3 weeks on average"
They'll say US went through this period of industrialization, at the expense of the environment, but US doesn't want them to have the same benefit.

This is why I say it's an enormous problem. There is a ratio of emissions to lifestyle that's hard to overcome. Denmark has a tenth of the emissions per unit GDP of inefficient industrialized countries, but they can't with present technology go more than an order of magnitude. Asking people to live an agrarian lifestyle and have a lower fertility rate is a solution much worse than the problem. I support conservation, but I think it's a drop in the bucket. There has to be a way to have opportunity for an affluent life available to all humans without pushing a huge cleanup cost on future generations.

I do not believe the people who claim man-made
global warming. I remember reading in the 1970's
about a "nuclear winter"; if one lie doesn't work,
they try another.

I just think that if someone has never been out of the cradle of the US, they have zero grounds to speak their mind on ecological issues... its nothing here like it is elsewhere. It's also why Bush (rightfully) said F-You to the Kyota accords. We're (US) is not the problem.

We probably build 1 power plant every 4 or 5 years in the US, and China opens a new COAL-BURNING plant every 3 weeks on average. They are also doing oil & gas, but just in coal-burning, its one every 3 weeks. It's pretty hard to get your head around the air pollution level that causes... its way beyond what we can imagine from our viewpoint.

When I was in the Middle East, people don't bother to maintain (like oil changes) on their cars. They buy new ones, drive them until they die on the road, then go buy a new one again.

In Mexico, the public water supply will be a creek about 10 feet across and 2 feet deep. 500 yards upstream, they are dumping raw sewage into the creek, 500 yards later, they are pulling it out and pumping it to the town. No one drinks the water, there is a thriving bottled-water business despite the fact they can barely afford shoes.

We have a house there (er, my wife's family does), we go and use it from time to time. You can't drink the water, can't wash dishes in it, and you certainly can't brush your teeth in it. You only use it to bathe your body in, but not your hair - use bottled for that too or, well, let's call it brown streaks, but you are blonde.

Is it dirt-poor along the border, no, that's midway between Guadalajara and Mexico City - part of Mexico's industrial zone with 'high incomes'...

The problem seems so enormous that it's easy to want to deny.

Climate Change, nee Global Warming doesn't rise to the level of junk science. It is scammers using pseudo science to sell snake oil.

After reading the opinions of everyone, I have to admit I'm more of a conservationist, than a global warming freak. Maybe that is where my values really are. I've been to the middle east, China, and others, and I was mentally brutalized by the ecological damage and pollution - but that can be controlled, as we largely do here in the US. In China, whatever you may believe, here's the facts - don't walk down the street with a beige suit on, it will be charcoal-black by the time you arrive at a destination a few blocks away. That's just nasty, and its not what I want my grandkids to grow up with. But there is a difference between pollution and global warming. Pollution is just reckless and uncaring of your neighbors (and most of Asia and the middle east is very, very guilty of this).

Global warming, I think is just variance in weather patterns. We are doing a lot of things that probably increase weather severity (look at a picture of the sky over the US from the 1980s or so versus today - but its not smog, its contrails from the 5000'ish commercial jets in the air at any given time). Is that pollution / global warming? No, its a bit of a greenhouse effect from creating obscurity in visibility - its obvious.

What we have in the East Coast though, is really just a change in the jet stream pattern. It varies all the time, and over seasonal changes can be pretty significant. Whether or not Georgia has snow or not, has nothing to do with its latitude, its about where the jet stream curves. When I grew up in Minnesota along the Canadian border, I remember regularly having -45 degree temps. How cold is that? It's not really cold until the vulcanized rubber on your car tires loses its elasticity, that happens around -30, and you develop a flat spot on your tires that will last for about 5 miles down the road wherever you parked it - in your garage, parking lot, whatever. It goes thump-thump-thump as that flat pancake circles around and rigidly hard where the "circular" rubber doesn't curve with the road contact. It doesn't "get better" they just heat up a little from friction and it isn't as bad, until you park the car again.

The last few years in Minnesota (as I watch from the comfort of northern California on TV), it has been relatively mild at home. Maybe -10 or -20. It's not global warming though, it's the shift in the jet stream. It's -40 to -50 a few hundred miles north in Winnipeg.

We do see very pronounced effects of global warming around the arctic circle, its pretty hard to deny. I think humans impact it, but I don't think we cause it. The earth has obviously had cycles in the past, as you don't get oil without vegetation and animal fossil material decaying - and there is a heck of a lot of oil on the north slope... way too much to have always been an ice sheet. In fact, so much, it was probably tropical at one time. We also know there were wooly mammoths there, which are way too large to have survived purely on a scrub brush on the tundra. There would have had to have been a significant amount of vegetation to feed a 10,000 lb animal.

We are also growing as a species at probably an uncontrollable rate, which will consumer a lot of the planets resources. We don't notice this in the US, but we also kind of do. When I was a kid, it seemed like food and gas were cheap compared to the family budget. Now, its a significant part of the middle class budget, which is probably caused by both the fed printing money, and also by population overrunning the resources (just look at a third world country and their inability to afford the scarce resources).

I'd advocate, particularly in the Gulch - that there is nothing wrong, and indeed, noble with being good stewards of our environment - but also realize, we are rather helpless to avoid whatever damage is being done on a global scale by people that don't give a hoot (China, India, Brazil, etc.) To say that America has ownership in it is BS as well.. without our economy and power, we would have fought WWIII, IV, and V by now. Our economy consuming those resources and our resulting military strength has been a stabilizing force in the world and we should be thanked, not criticized.

I do however, do my part to minimize damage - much like my approach to hiking in California's redwoods - leave only footprints behind.

If they want to solve Global Warming (if it existed) all they need do is send all of the waste reports on it and all of the rest of the junk reports coming out of DC to a landfill. Trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere, if we landfill all of the paper; More trees planted to make paper, more stupid reports printed, problem solved. The bonus is our ancestors will reap the benefits of the coal produced from all of the carbon from the paper in a couple of centuries.

Good one. Has anyone figured out if we could just climb up the stack of these, and use the height to put satellites into orbit? Would save all the fuel of the rockets!

IF there is any MAN MADE Global warming happening at all, it comes from all the waste reports created by the people pushing global warming.

If you stand the global warming people next to the anti gun people, there will be no one standing NEXT to each other. They would all have to be STACKED! :-)

The whole issue of warming/cooling has been addressed by scientists as a planet's relationship with the sun. Al Gore made his money and Obama has rewarded his contributors so let's return to good science and common sense. Maybe some CA nut jobs can argue that the earth is flat.

Back at cha from the great REPUBLIC OF TEXAS. The founder of the weather channel who has 30 years experience says that it's all junk; that the numbers they use to prove it are all forced. Furthermore, if we think that we could do anything about it if true, we're fooling ourselves. We need to put a few more centuries between us and the knuckle draggers.

This is one thing that's not Bush's fault, its ALGores.