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Eco' Disruption
Mike wrote in message ...
In article , Tumbleweed fromnews@myso ckstumbleweed.freeserve.co.uk writes He would set up a task force to find out which bunch of international terrorists were causing global warming. -- Well, that'll be anyone who uses fossil fuel, directky or indirectly. Which will be you and me typing these messages in, for example. Not me though. Unless I count as using fossil fuels by using up calories which I got by eating food which was delivered to a supermarket by a lorry ... 'anyone who uses fossil fuels'. It is being said time and time again that anyone who uses fossil fuels add to Global Warming. Right? Well that depends whether you think it's their fault they used fossil fuels. An awful lot of people could decide to use an awful lot less, but the fact remains that many things are quite hard for an individual to avoid if s/he wishes to have a "normal" economic and home life. I'm not saying there aren't plenty of practical steps which an individual can take to reduce their impact on the environment, and should. It doesn't really cost that much to use only renewable energy at home - maybe 100 pounds a year, less than 0.1% of a typical household income. Short air journeys are pretty unnecessary and iirc, each flight is about as pollutive as a year of car use by all the passengers - I don't think anyone's got an excuse for that. Can someone please explain to a simple bloke like me, why the temperature of this globe didn't go sky high during the Industrial Revolution and well into the last century? Basically, if the population in Victorian times had been what it is now, we would currently have the unenviable pleasure of living (dying?) in very different environmental conditions. Factories in the Midlands belching out smoke from coal fired boilers. Kilns in the Potteries belching out smoke, Even ships at sea. Take a look at the Grand Fleet when steaming, could be seen for miles from the coal fired boilers. We now have more efficient house heating methods, how often do you see a coal fired chimney smoking on a house. The latter is considerably more important than the former; (if most people now use gas, it's about 3 times "cleaner" than coal - although I don't expect that specifically means CO2). But air and road travel, and other energy uses, the out-of-date power in ex-Soviet/developing countries, and the fact that populations have multiplied, even since the fifties, make up for it. iirc, CO2 emissions have never stopped increasing year on year and the increase was quite dramatic over some of the latter half of the 20th C. Some of the more poisonous gases have decreased in the last 20 years mainly as a result of legislation by European governments. More efficient cars and commercial transport, OK more of it, but look at a motorway hold up, dozens of cars, not much of a smoke screen over it ;-) Are we being conned? Fraid not. There is one other reason that past performance is not necessarily a straightforward guide to the future anyway, which is that environment and ecology are highly nonlinear systems. Hence the room for wide disparity of predicted temperatures depending on whether the scientist was funded by a petrol corporation or not. Warwick Dumas www.members.tripod.com/ecuqe "If Adolf Hitler were here today, they'd send a limousine anyway." - the late Joe Strummer |
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