2011 Was the 9th Hottest Year On Record

All this talk about whether global warming is natural or is caused by burning things doesn't really matter. Why are we looking for a scapegoat? All that matters is whether or not the earth is getting warmer. If it is, whether it's natural or not, we had better start preparing. I have yet to hear a single credible plan about how anyone is going to stop the billions of humans on the planet from burning stuff to survive. Let's face it. It's just not going to happen.

Maybe SUVs will get outlawed in the US. Hooray! I hate the things. Maybe a 70 mpg minimum will be required for any non-commerical vehicle sold in the US (if you tried that for commercial vehicles you'd have mass starvation which could be another 'solution' I suppose). Maybe we'll build a few more nuclear power plants although I think NIMBY will prevent most of that.

Maybe England and Canada and Australia will follow along as they so often seem to do with whatever silly idea the US comes up with. Or maybe not. In any case the rest of the planet representing the majority of land area and population will just laugh and continue to burn things until they run out of things to burn. And yes this includes trees and coal. And those laughable drop-in-the-bucket schemes that the US will come up with wouldn't have delayed the end by much anyway. People are going to do what they must to survive and that usually involves burning things.

So if AGW is true then our species is doomed and there is no way around it. I propose a possible solution. The end will take at least a millenium. That gives us (especially the US) the chance to start putting all the money that would have been spent catching, imprisoning, and executing millions of climate criminals and building hundreds of thousands of nuclear power plants everywhere and cleaning up the inevitable accidents into a new era for the space program.

See how I did that? The greens have their agenda (although they are pretty vague about what exactly that is), and I have mine. Let's start devoting every dollar we now spend on the defense budget into building an interstellar generation ship big enough for a few thousand people to live on. That will be a start. Maybe by the time the end comes in 1000 - 100,000 years we will be fully prepared to live off world and will have colonized other star systems. It is funny that the very thing that allowed us to flourish as a technological species, heat engines which create electricity and do the work that we used to require things like horses or rivers to do, will have become our doom.

While the US and maybe a few close allies could Francify their electricity production by going nearly 100% nuclear and introduce bumper car like transportation systems with electric cars that are powered by nuclear powered overhead wires once they reach the major highways, is the rest of the world going to be able to do that? Maybe eventually but not right now. I think much of AGW is based on the idea that we will essentially never run out of fossil fuels, but nuclear fuel will eventually run out. There is only a finite supply of uranium etc on this planet. So then it's either burn or face massive die offs of just leave the planet. So we should start preparing for that. We have no idea whether intelligent life in the galaxy is rare, but it may be. We should do everything we can to preserve our species regardless of what may happen to this particular planet.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/Irz_TxCZb_Q/2011-was-the-9th-hottest-year-on-record

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