Global Warming (again)

Hex there is no doubt in my mind that there is a time delay measured in years, but I don't think anyone knows how many years. Its a bit like trying to control a distant spacecraft when the messages take 50 minutes to travel each way. By the time that you have got the message that there is a problem, the spacecraft will have been travelling for another 50 minutes, and a lot could have happened in that time. And even if you take immediate action and send new instructions, the spacecraft will not recieve your message and react for another 50 minutes. Replace 50 minutes by 50 years and you have a big problem.

On a positive note, there is one ideal source of power. But its a very long way off yet. And that is nuclear fusion (not fission like current nuclear power stations). Nuclear fusion is what powers the sun. There is no radio-active waste. The raw material is sea water(strictly the hydrogen in it) and there is no shortage of that. And the amount of power that it releases is massive. A gallon of seawater may produce as much power as 100,000 tons of coal (I don't know the exact figure). http://www.jet.efda.org/pages/content/fusion1.html

 

http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop
Have a look at this.

 

Scary :(

 

It would help if the councils provided more recycling ..we get a newspaper /glass collection once a fortnight they refuse to take cardboard boxes so they have to go in the household bin..where as i know some councils do a cardboard collection as well..our garden waste grass etc is collected once a fortnight..but then their are old clothes bedding etc all these things could be collected..we have to pay extra for old fridges and large items to be collected..recycling has got to be part of the answer..and to plant more trees and maintain the forests what we have left..I live on a main road and you would be shocked how much black stuff is on my windows every week so window cleaning is a must do chore..we are inhaling all that muck !!its from the cars buses lorrys etc !! as i live in a smokeless zone..

 

It must be noisy living on a main road,all the traffic fumes can't be good for you. There is no easy answer to the problem but in the UK the contribution of pollution into the environment pales into insignificance compared to the united states and most of the pcaific rim countries china is the biggest sinner closely followed by india.

 

I can see the point of what PeterS says about there being a time delay. another point is that global warming might work on a switch principle.
Global warming has occurred several times during the last ice age due to natural processes, though probably not as rapid as at present. They think that as the ice expanded and wiped out large parts of the world's forests so the CO2 concentrations increased and the planet warmed up. This then started to melt the polar ice caps, which as a the reflecting ice melts to be replaced by heat absorbing blue ocean causes the earth to absorb a greater proportion of solar energy. So after a certain point of the ice caps melting it becomes a self perpetuating system and it won't stop. So basically the earth heats up to a certain point which acts as a trigger and after that it will carry on no matter what. The depressing thing is we could have passed that point some time ago.

 

Good digger if you look at the statistics on pollution/ person you will find that we leave India and China well behind, though China in particular has the potential to increase its pollution. In terms of our demand on energy and pollution generated/ capita we are up at the top. In terms of exceeding the carrying capacity of our country we are one of the very worst in the world.

 

The amount of pollution per person may be higher for the UK but that is because India and china have excessive populations in terms of filth spewed out per tonne China and India are world leaders, i agree that global warming has been happening since the ice age ended and we may not be able to do much about it

 

iam sorry to be stick in the mud but the counter on shows the increase what about the decrease in population that is happening in the world too if find there are two side of the coin.

 

I was under the impression that the figures on the counter had taken all of the figures into account?

 

that didn't come across properly i thought that the numbers of people dying were taken into account when the counter flips the new population figures out, i heard somewhere that 50,000 people die everyday from hunger alone,surely the people who have put together the population counter and it's frightening number counter have done the math and worked the figures according to the vast amount of births AND deaths.

 

In simple terms, an economist on Radio4 just a few minutes ago said that the planet is already too small for us. Taking all possible energy resources into account (including ethanol from agriculture, wind farms etc) we have half the resources we need for the world's present population to have equal shares.

He then said we have two choices:
1 We cut the population by 50%
2 We cut fuel consumption by 50%

In reality we will do neither. The rich countries will continue to consume most of the energy resources and the emerging countries will continue to resent it. USA is frantically trying to free itself from needing middle eastern oil. So they are looking to their prairies to produce maize which is converted into ethanol. Guess even Bush now knows he can't win the middle eastern war and safeguard the oil.

 

Ethanol is an alternative to oil fuels but why can't it be made more available it costs a fraction of what it costs to produce petrol perhaps the oil companies have lots of influential politicians feeding at the trough? in reality the situation is like an orwellian nightmare with half of the world sitting in comfort and the other half living in poverty, trying desparately to get into the half of the world where they can live free of hunger?

 

Bush decided to make america non dependant on oil in the next 20 years mainly because by that time it`ll likely be too expensive to buy anyway.

Nothing at all to do with climate change, but being a typical politician he makes it seem that way

Bio fuels don`t really make much of a dent either, you`d need to plant fuel crops on every spare bit of land in the uk (about 750,000 hectares) just to provide 5% of the fuel sold on garage forecourts today.

Ethanol from maize might be the same story, alternatives could include pig slurry or algae..

either way you`ll need an awful lot of it to match the volume of the millions of barrels of oil used every day and demand is rising all the time.

You`ll also be using resources planting, growing and harvesting, processing and transporting it to where it`ll be used.

In simple terms it takes power to make power, there is no free lunch. Technically speaking, energy cannot be created.. only converted from one form to another