There are 7 articles on this title. You are reading the article ranked and rated #4 by Helium's members.
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| Adaptation | 38% | 20 votes | Total: 52 votes | |
| Mitigation | 62% | 32 votes |
This is a very important and serious question. Should we adapt to climate change or act in
ignorance and try to mitigate CO2 emissions.
My view is that governments should assist people, farmers and businesses to adapt to climate change rather that spend (waste) billions of tax dollars in misdirected funds on subsidies and R & D related to mitigate CO2 emissions, and I will explain why.
Actually we are, to some extent, doing this already but this activity is not emphasized due to it being largely ignored by the media as it is not "politically correct".
Climate change is nothing new to geologists but it seems to be so for many news media presenters, politicians and radical Greenpeace supporters who are hell bend on sending us back into the caves to live. It is the new eco-religion of the Left and pathway to global power, via the United Nations. To hell with good science. The end justifies the means.
Human beings have successfully adapted to extremes of climate change in the past 50,000 years. They have emerged from the cave to this century exploring the Moon and Mars, and beyond our Universe. So climate change can not be all that bad! Thanks to the amazing technological advances made by the US and Russians over the last 50 years the Western world experiences great prosperity. So we should be confident that all will be OK for the future, but only provided the religious eco-Left are defeated.
I point out that human beings are expert at adapting to climate change. Some of us live happily near the equator (e.g., Singapore), or at high altitudes (e.g., La Paz) or frolic amongst the snow and ice (e.g., Canada and Scandinavia). We are the most adaptable animals on earth. To suggest that we should panic and go into a frenzy just because the United Nations (IPCC etc) tries to scare us by scurrilously predicting an apocalypse due to a piddling 0.7 degree C rise in temperature over the next 100 years is unbelievable! Get real! Do you want to join the lemmings and hurtle over the cliff to economic ruin?
The alternative part of the question is, or implies, that mitigation of CO2 emissions will have some effect on climate change. This assumes that man-made CO2 emissions has some effect on climate .... what? Observable scientific evidence is equivocal.... recorded global temperatures at ground level have shown no change since 1998 and atmospheric temperatures a slight decrease, but the measurements are all fractions of a degree C and who really knows what the margin of error is. All the time the CO2 level of the atmosphere over the past 100 years has slowly increased to the present level of about 385 ppm, possibly largely due to man-made burning of fossil fuels and other human activities
Obviously the increasing level of CO2 in the atmosphere is not causing global warming. Its just not happening. Even if it was, this would be welcomed by people living in the more frigid regions of the world (e.g., Canada, Russia etc) and would help boost food production at a time now when we have grain shortages and possible widespread starvation.
My view is that the more CO2 in the atmosphere the better. May be about 1000 ppm would be ideal but I doubt that we could ever achieve this because any great excess is soon adsorbed by the oceans which cover 70% of the earth's surface. The oceans are a convenient buffer system where massive amounts of limestone and dolomite are continually precipitated as chemical sediments.
So you have a choice between adapting to climate change or operating in ignorance and following like lemmings the religious incantations of the climate change alarmists who if allowed will end up destroying our wonderful Western civilization.
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