Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years
Throwing my hat into the ring here:1) I think that we, as the human population, should actively move toward more efficient, less destructive industry on principle, not just because of the threat of climate change. I think making it about climate change gives too many opportunities for argument derailment. Think about when "tree hugger" was a pejorative term; i mean, who DOESN'T want to hug a tree? I think it's a lot harder for people to argue against the idea of "leave a place as you found it" than to find flaws a data set. It also allows for much broader regulation. For example, we could then start focusing on legislation against pharm manufacturers allowing meds to seep into the water supply rather than just the air pollution they're producing.2) I'm starting to wonder why we're not focusing more on adaptation to than prevention of climate change. I've been watching a lot of TED talks lately (thanks, Netflix!) about the impact of climate change, and the one that I'm thinking of was a researcher who spent time in the arctic studying the wildlife there, and made the case that we should prevent climate change so that we can save arctic wildlife. But I wonder, if we were alive in the age of dinosaurs, would we be saying that we need to clean up the atmosphere to prevent the impact winter that would inevitably kill them? While I love wildlife, I almost feel like it's not our responsibility as humans to tamper with natural processes like extinction. In our prevention efforts, we may also be preventing natural selection and, by extension, adaptation. It could be a reality that we'll face an extinction event that wipes out all other non-domesticated mammalian life. While we can all agree that an Earth like that would suck, we know that, 600 million years from now, EVERYTHING will be wiped out. People speculate that, at this time, humans themselves will either become extinct or will have migrated off the planet. So, my question is, are we prepared to jump ship if Earth becomes uninhabitable? Is it realistic to try to change all 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms of atmosphere, or should we starting thinking about building habitats for space living?