True, but even after that, you end up being at the mercy of experts, who (while now at consensus that climate change is occuring and that at least a significant component of it is anthropic) still don’t agree with some of the basic mechanisms and characteristics of current and projected trends. It doesn’t help that people like Al Gore–however well-intentioned–run around explaining what is known about it in a dumbed down, half-wrong manner which (a) gives the impression that we understand more about it than we really do, and (b) opens up lines of contention for critics to pick at. (The critics would pick at something regardless, but when Gore talks about the atmosphere getting “thicker” he’s not doing anybody any favors.)
The truth is that as much as we know, our ability to model and characterize the global climate in a quantitative, accurate way is very limited. (It’s gotten significantly better over the last decade, and even in the last couple of years, but it’s still at an almost embryonic stage.) It has been aptly demonstrated that climate change, beyond what could reasonably expected in nature, is occuring, but the long term consequences are unknown. There is, as the OP notes, a fairly limited amount that individuals can do about it. Reducing one’s personal “carbon footprint” is an effective if small step, but much of the industrial lifestyle that we enjoy is predicated on the production of CO[sub]2[/sub] and other pollutants that are many times what we individually produce. And while it’s not something that most people want to hear, the vast majority of things that (some) individuals do to reduce pollution are of little practical effect. Short of returning to a pre-Industrial lifestyle–something that isn’t going to occur short of the virtual collapse of Western civilization–the public is going to continue to demand energy, manufactured goods, and other amenities in increasing quantity.
The good news is that conservation, recycling, and reduction/remediation of pollution has firmly entered the mainstream of both public and political thought, and this has had a profound influence on technological development. Most modern appliances are signficantly more efficient than their predecessors, and even the biggest gas-guzzling SUV that rolls off the lot today produces a small fraction of a compact car even ten or fifteen years ago. Fossil fuel energy producers are stringently regulated to reduce pollution, and after a long hiatus the consideration of nuclear fission power is coming back into consideration (although with its attendent waste issues).
Assuming that “peak oil” worrywarts are somewhere near correct, the problem of fossil fuels in transportation will force a solution on that front; we’ll run out of petroleum (or, at least it’ll become too expensive to burn up for a Sunday drive) and we’ll have to create an alternative. The biggest issues are finding a new chemical energy medium (barring order-of-magnitude advances in battery or closed fuel cell technology, completely closed loop electric cars will remain impractical for most), building a production and distribution infrastructure, and figuring out how to produce energy in a less polluting way (solar, nuclear, wind, geothermal, tidal, et cetera). Oh, and NIMBY…somebody is going to have to accept having windmills or a nuclear processing facility in their backyard.
So, in short, here’s what you really need to know about global warming (and is the sum total, in brief, of what the experts know about it): we don’t know how bad pumping quantities of CO[sub]2[/sub] into the atmosphere really is, but it’s at least some measure of bad, and we should do everything we reasonably (and perhaps unreasonably) can, short of actually bankrupting the industrial nations which are capable of developing alternative technology. We need to invest in research for those alternatives, encourage the use of energy efficient appliances, processes, and transportation methods. We need to encourage wide scale adoption of attitudes, lifestyles, and technologies via both example and selection of elected officials that will reduce and mitigate continued pollution, and continue to monitor the state of the global climate while developing more accuarte models and techniques. And we need to hope that the situation is not as dire as the most pessimistic polemics claim, while realizing that it is a serious issue that needs to be addressed with urgency, even if we don’t have a good handle on exactly how bad it is.
Meanwhile, practically nobody seems concerned about the depletion of groundwater sources and collapse of underground aquifers. Good luck on keeping your population alive at any temperature once your well runs dry.
Stranger
