* Posts by Charles Meo

1 publicly visible post • joined 14 Oct 2009

Prehistoric titanic-snake jungles laughed at global warming

Charles Meo

Why argue with halfwits indeed?

Perhaps the science is a bit dodgy, and perhaps cyclic global warming and cooling is just part of the natural order. This is still no reason to ignore a few basic facts:

--our energy technologies are appallingly inefficient and destructive. We should be ashamed as engineers to tolerate this, if for no other reason than the lack of elegance.

--there weren't six billion + humans to be inconvenienced by global weather changes in the Cretaceous or whatever. Moreover, many of these humans are armed to the teeth and already pretty pissed off about unrelated matters.

--We can all guess what will happen if the current system of food production/distribution is upset even a little bit, deranged though it is

--We don't know who the winners and losers will be, and the winners might not be the smug and prosperous readers of this ere mag.

We have a dirty great reactor in the sky providing 6000 times our energy needs but we're too stupid and greedy to use it. Personally I find it ludicrous that there is even an argument about the need to change how we do things now.

I don't think that a tighter carbon emissions regime will necessarily achieve anything much of itself, but if it drives other worthwhile improvements, increases industrial efficiency and reduces ancillary pollution, I don't really care.

But I must confess I agree with the earlier poster who believes it's already too late.