Global warming, do you think technology will find the answer rather then giving up carbon fuels?

Question

Up till now science seems to have found most answers to our probs, do you think they will find an answer to global warming before it's too late? We won't give up our cars, electricity for lights heat refrigeration etc, gas for heat and fire to cook on. Forget it, it won't happen so it is up to science, do you think they will find an answer?

Answer 1

I believe there is an answer to every problem and global warming is just another problem. There are already a range of options we could take which will help with the effects of global warming. I would put money on it that someone comes up with some way of neutralising the carbon in the atmosphere some time in the future.

Answer 2

The Bush Administration is using the hope for potential future technological breakthroughs as an excuse not to take action on global warming right now. This is a huge mistake. We have all the technology we need right now to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and get global warming under control, it's just a matter of having the will to implement these technologies. We can do that by requiring higher mileage from our cars (even China has higher mileage requirements than the US) and enacting carbon pricing, for starters.

In the long run we'll have to give up fossil fuels anyway because they're a finite resource, and oil reserves are starting to run out. The answer to your question is that we already have the technology to answer global warming, but we will also have to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

Answer 3

Technology is not a beast that thinks, so technology wont be finding any answers. Humans may find a technological answer, perhaps. But the technology to stop global warming exists now, costs nothing and is easy to use. Simply stop using fosill fuels. You do not have to use them. You will not die if you stop using them. Your ansestors prospered well enough without them (if they had not you would not be here). So in that very real sense it is not a problem of technology but of sociology. Are we willing to stop global warming. Do we want to make the move away from fossil fuels. There is plenty of technology out there to replace our dependance on fossil fuels. Some of it is more refined than others, but there are already plenty of very workable solutions. The questions left are far more about how much do we care. Just look at this site and the numbers of people who simply refuse to accept that this bout of global warming is real and is a direct result of human activity, primarily but not only, our use of fossil fuels. Those people and their like, and their freinds in positions of power and authority are the problem. They are the enemy. When billions of humans end up as climate refugees and hundreds of millions die, it will be the GW skeptics who will be to blame. The problem is political ans social not technological.


The sensible ethical solution is to work out how much carbon the planet can absorb annually and use that as the sustainable level of carbon output. Lets be generous to the greedy nations and ignore the history for a bit. Just divide the sustainable level (and lets be conservative here as we wouldnt want to get it wrong) by the earths population. That gives you a carbon amount per parson. Then multiply that by each nations population to give an amount per country. Any country that produces more carbon dioxide than that has to buy credits off any country that uses less than its share. The market will set the price for this trade very quickly. As the price will soon get pretty high other technologies will become comparatively cheaper, eventually we will have a sustainable system. By basing it on a per head of population it will turn out that the worst offenders will have the most credits to buy and the least developed nations will make a nice profit from their excess capacity, money they can us to develop sustainably.

We have the IAEA to monitor nuclear activities globally, why not a similar whatdog to monitor carbon emmissions? Some countries won't agree because they might have to pay for the damage they cause to the planet? Nuke them NOW! They obviously have no respect for anyone else's well being.

Answer 4

A problem can't be solved by the same thinking that created it. Technology and industrialisation got us into this mess in the first place, we need different thinking to get us out of it. Alternative power sources, a radical transformation of industry and a change in our lifestyles is needed. That may not come about while corporations donate millions to political parties. Science can help us find alternatives, but technology has to go in a very different direction to slow global warming enough to save civilisation. A problem with research is that scientists go down established, accepted routes in order to obtain funding. Research has to look at other areas. Free energy inventions are being shelved because the rich and powerful want to keep their power. If they don't make radical changes, nature will take the power back.

Answer 5

Global warming really has nothing to do with what it will take to reduce the need for fossil fuels.

As long as there is no other easily obtained reasonably priced alternative... we will use fossil fuel.

When the best energy source available in England was charcoal... everyone used charcoal. There were hundreds of people cutting trees down and then "cooking" the wood to make the coal. Very inefficient and highly polluting (even compared to 1920's ere coal fired power plants)

Some bright person figured out you could burn oil for heat. Someone else figured out you could use natural gas for light, heat and other things... Pollution level went DOWN per unit of energy.... but people used more energy because it was cheaper.

Economics will solve the excess CO2 and CO production of our current energy demands. Environmental activism is a sideshow.

Answer 6

I think technology will find proper alternatives to our current fossil fuel reliance as we become more solar powered. If businesses allow science to move forward without economics tangling up the pursuit of fuel freedom, we may be able to make some great progress in the next 20 years. It really depends on our us and our future generations to keep the 'green' concern focused in the media. It also comes down to how much it benefits or hurts the consumers pocket and a lot of solar alternatives/energy conservation programs can actually save you money in the long run. Who doesn't want to save money?

Answer 7

Science has already proposed several solutions which if adopted could mean an end to global warming without anyone having to change their lifestyles.

Some skeptics are trying to block progress which is making things worse for everyone and ultimately means the problem gets worse and the cost of resolving it increases.

Here's an outline of some of the proposed schemes...

HUMAN VOLCANO
Volcanic eruptions emit large quantities of sulphur dioxide which blocks out some of the heat from the sun. One proposal is to simulate natural volcanoes by firing pellets of sulphur into the upper atmosphere where the particles of sulphur will reflect back some of the solar radiation.

SULPHUR BLANKET
Professor Crutzen's idea is to launch rockets into the stratosphere (10 to 50km above Earth's surface) and release one million tons of sulphur. This radical plan could have drawbacks including an increase in acid rain and damage to the ozone layer.

SOLAR MIRRORS
The US National Academy of Sciences has proposed a scheme that would involve positioning 55,000 gigantic mirrors in space. Each mirror would be 100 square kilometres in area and the effect would be to reflect some of the sun's heat energy back into space.

GLOBAL SUNSHADE
British astronomer Roger Angel has proposed creating a giant sunshade consisting of 16 trillion glass discs, each one microscopically thin and weighing just one gram. On board each disc would be a tiny camera, computer and solar sails allowing each disc to align itself so as to refract light from the sun just enough so it misses Earth.

MOVING EARTH
Perhaps the most ambitious of all schemes so far proposed is one to actually move planet Earth into a different orbit. It has been estimated that if Earth were 1.5 million miles further from the sun then the reduced heat energy received from the sun would compensate for anthropogenic global warming. It has calculated that the energy required to move the Earth this far would be the equivalent of 5 quadrillion hydrogen bombs (5,000,000,000,000,000).

CLOUD SEEDING
Cloud seeding isn't a new concept and one variation on this theme is to launch a fleet of self propelled vessels to sail the world's oceans and spray a fine mist of sea water particles into the atmosphere, this would produce specific clouds which would reflect some of the solar radiation back into space.

ARTIFICIAL TREES
In the artificial trees air passes through the device and hydrogen sulphide absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, each 'tree' could remove 90,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year. The carbon dioxide would need to be permanently stored and one option could be drilling holes thousands of metres deep into porous rock beneath the oceans into which the CO2 would be injected.

PHYTOPLANKTON
Phytoplankton are microscopic marine plants, like all plants they photosynthesise - taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. Increasing the quantity of phytoplankton will result in more carbon dioxide being absorbed and when the plants die they sink to the ocean floor taking the carbon with them.

Answer 8

Sun, wind, and water can all create electricity. They are all renewable resources. We all need to find our way back to nature and give up on the fossil fuels. Granted, that won't be an easy thing to do. And, I think that over time, clean, renewable energy will have a great impact on global warming and the presence of CO2 in our atmosphere. In OUR lifetime? Maybe not. But maybe in our children's or grandchildren's lifetime. That makes it worth it for me.

Answer 9

They are busy finding alternative ways to produce the energy that is needed for those very things.
If you mean will science invent some super-machine that can patch up the ozone layer...if that were a possibility, our knowledge isn't advanced enough to invent, much less build one. We do, however, have the knowledge to find ways to use alternative energy/heat sources. Such as ethanol, solar power, wind power...

Answer 10

there is so much to this that i am not even going to go into detail. email me if you want the details. but the thing is, it is RIDICULOUS to think that technology will save humanity.....the only thing that can save us is.....OURSELVES AND OUR BRAINS AND OUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOLUTIONS. the world isnt going to end!!!! its been in the same place for billions of years and it aint going nowehere....the earth is simply going to adjust to its changes (such as global warming). WE will be the ones who will have trouble adjusting to these changes because evolution happens much slower for us since it takes us longer to reproduce and adjust. This isn't rocked science. There are MANY SMALL things everyone can do in order to help stop global warming. If everyone put something little in their part that would be the very best! WE CAN DO THIS PEOPLE. WE HAVE THE POWER TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING. IT IS VERY MUCH POSSIBLE TO DO IT!! ITS ALL IN OUR HANDS.