Climate change – a different perspective
Step it Up Seattle
Originally uploaded by serakatie.
There has been a lot of talk in the media recently about global warming and climate change. I recently saw Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth and the evidence presented seemed pretty damning. While graphic and long (but not unnecessarily long) the case, as I see it boiled down to this :
- The average measured temperature is going up and we can prove this (fine by me)
- The average measured content of CO2 in the air is going up (also fine as well)
- CO2 is responsible for the increase in average temperature (whoops, there you go)
Not let me say from the outset I agree with climate change and that we as tenants of the planet will be affected by climate change but there are not too many people stopping and saying is this the correct diagnosis. What if instead of CO2 causing climate change it is actually a symptom?
Huh! Well let me explain. With the exception of nuclear power, every other source of electrical or motive energy comes from or came from the sun. So in addition to all the radiant energy that hits the planet every day. Energy that was stored in the little batteries we call fossil fuels, which were millenia in the making, is also been pumped back out into the atmosphere. We are consuming energy at a phenomenal rate (and going up) and maybe this is what is causing the average temperature to increase, and guess what one of the biggest side effects of the energy generation and consumption is CO2, but it is exhaust.
So there is a lot of talk of reducing CO2 emissions, carbon sequestration is a big one, which I imagine will be a failure if all you are doing is removing the symptom and not the cause of global warming that that is energy consumption. In fact moving to nuclear to reduce CO2 emissions actually make the problem worse. At the moment at least all the energy we are using is or was sun generated. Nuclear isn’t and that could push even more energy into an already unbalanced system.
Don’t forget the rise of the black death was because people though that cats were carrying the disease so they killed all the cats. It turned out that it was rats and they had just killed they’re possible saviours.