Must we catalyze our efforts to reduce emissions of green house gases and how could we do it?

Answer 1

No, not yet. We need more discussion. We especially need more science about exactly what are green house gases. Is natural earth water vapor a greenhouse gas? Of any concern? Are greenhouse gases causing the global warming trend? On balance, is global warming bad? Some species may change but overall some earth characterisits may be better off, some not? In my humble opinion we need more discussion, debate, scientific input.

Answer 2

A major problem in reducing greenhouse gases is that to do so means making changes in the way we go about our dailylives. Whilst some people are prepared to do this there are many who, understandably, are reluctant to do so.

Herein lies a problem - something needs to be done about the levels of greenhouse gases and we really don't know how quickly we need to act. There's a point in time called the 'tipping point' - it's a point of no return. If we go beyond the tipping point the damage caused to our planet and the atmosphere becomes irepairable. We don't know where the tipping point is, some say we're on the verge now, others say it's at least 50 years away. It's like walking blindfold towards the edge of a cliff, you know the edge is there but not sure how far away it is. The obvious thing to do is to stop but in respect of greenhouse gas emissions we've not stopped, we've accelerated.

There are possible solutions in the pipeline, if they prove to be feasible they could pull us back from the brink. Such schemes are several years away at best. If the decision on how to 'save the world' were left to me I'd go down the route of 'artificial trees'. This is a scheme devised by Professor Klaus Lackner which mimics real trees by sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (it uses hydrogen sulphide to capture the CO2).

This is one of several geoengineering schemes, others include blanketing the planet with a layer of sulphur dioxide, gigantic solar mirrors to reflect sunlight back into space, a global sunshade, artificially inducing marine strato-cumulus clours which are 'shiny' and reflect sunlight, increasing levels of algea and phytoplankton to consume more CO2 and even a scheme to knock earth out of it's orbit and reposition it 1.5 million miles further from the sun.

One or more of these long terms shcemes could be the lifeline that saves the planet and allows us to continue living in the manner to which we're accustomed. But... we need to buy some time and that means we have to take action now to reduce emissions - even if it's just changing a few lightbulbs it all helps.

Here's a webpage which looks at the schemes I mentioned in a bit more details and also looks at simple energy saving tips and the issue of carbon offsetting - http://profend.com/global-warming/pages/combat.html