OT: I know how to solve global warming

[Atrocities]

When I was a kid we used to have snow each winter, at least 4 ft for a week or two each year. When my mother was young, some 45 years ago, the Columbia river would often freeze during winter and the average snow fall was about 6 feet. The last time we had any snow here was in 96 and it was only about a foot or so deep. We have had a couple of nasty ice stormes though, all of which crept up on us without warning.

It used to rain all summer, now we get record temps each year, this year even a couple over 100 degrees which until 77 was very rare. Since 77 I can honestly say that the weather here has changed dramatically. Thats just about 30 years. If the weather has changed so much in 30 years, image what it will be like in another 30 years.

Many people feel that there is something happening, something that we don't yet understand and I fear we will not until its way too late.

The world is changing, fast, and the question is, are we to blame, or is this mother nature. Hell could this even be end of days or notice of Gods return? I don't want to speculate but the evidence is clear, our world is changing, its getting hotter in areas, glaciers are melting and the season are out of phase as summer starts later, last longer, and winters are either colder or warmer depending upon where you live. Somthing is definately happening and its happening very fast.

[AngleWyrm]

An article that summarizes global temperature changes, from 1977 to 2002.

[Gozra]

Yes the sun has an 11 year cycle and the geological record indicates thatour temps have been hotter and colder and the last sunspot cycle has been the greatest output we have measured and the upcoming cycle is promising to be even bigger. globa warming is not a man induced problem it is a man exercabated(sic) problem. And it is just one alarm bell amoung many that we need to think about. Jared diamond's book 'Collapse' indicates the problems we really need to think about. For the forseeable future climate change is going to be with mankind. Learning to deal with it in a scientific manner would be in everyones best interest. The sun shade artifact is a possible place to start it does two things gets u into space in a big way and possibly gives us a simple mechanical sloution to a growing problem and if we start turning into an icecube it will allow us to have a sloution in place to help that also. Current information that I have found indicates that the output of the sun and disturbences in the High altitude ice crystals seem to have had the greatest impact on global warming. The geological record indicates that large amounts of carbon dioxide appear after the warming has occured whichis consistant with current findings showing the methane and co2 trapped in artic bogs is being released in greater amounts as we speak and what followed was a horrific Ice ages. Us putting Co2 in the atmosphere may modify this effect. And all this can happen in one decade. We live in interesting times.

[Gozra]

No one is disputing we have a warming trend. The earth has been cold for most of it's history. We are at the tail end of one of the picnic times. That is why it is important that we act for future generations. Or climate change can knock us back to the stoneage technologically.

[Raapys]

We're too preoccupied with our human-created problems to worry about anything so abstract as global warming, though.

Isn't much of the problem more that we're cutting down all the forests and such( i.e. the instruments of the removal of CO2), rather than the amount of CO2 we're releasing?

[Cipher7071]

I haven't read every word in this thread, but one thing I didn't see mentioned was the huge amount of building materials that such a project would require. I think we'd be hard put to come up with enough.

[Suicide Junkie]

Cutting forests dosen't help, but the billions of tons of hydrocarbons we dig and pump out of the ground to burn is the big thing.

[NullAshton]

Possible that there is no global warming? One theory is that it's just a regular up-down cycle of the earth, and that the warming is normal.

[Renegade 13]

NullAshton said:
Possible that there is no global warming? One theory is that it's just a regular up-down cycle of the earth, and that the warming is normal.

That's the thing, we just don't have enough data to know whether or not it's natural or if it's caused by humanity.

From what I recall reading somewhere, there's two possible ways the future will go. One, we keep heating up and heating up until we have massive and radical climatic shifts. Two, we heat up until we reach a certain point, at which a sudden and sharp reversal begins. I think there's some geological evidence supporting both sides. Personally, I tend to favor number two. The Earth has a very delicately balanced set of climate parameters. If one of these parameters messes up too badly, the others often compensate. I bet the Earth has some mechanism for cooling down the Earth when it gets too hot (ie: another ice age if we get too hot) and a mechanism for heating up if we get too cold.

From what I can remember, summer's have been hotter, and winters haven't had as much snow in recent times where I live. However, two years ago, we had the coldest day I've ever seen and I think it was the coldest day my parents had ever seen as well. It was -49°C when I got up one morning. Previously, the coldest I'd experienced was about -44°C a few years before that.

Who really knows what's happening? It's all just speculation based upon unprovable initial assumptions.

As for deforestation, well there's some other factors as well. Where I live, in Central BC, almost all the pine trees have been killed by a massive infestation of the Mountain Pine Beetle, a bug that eats the layer of a tree just beneath the bark, killing it. We have hundreds of thousands of acres of dead, lifeless, red trees. In essence, it isn't just mankind who causes deforestation; nature does it once in a while as well.

[Wade]

Well if we advance technologically far enough then we can move the planet away from the sun like the Pupputeer civilization did in the Ringworld series by Larry Niven.