The Fate of the World

Saturday, May 13, 2006

There's not much debate any more about whether or not climate change is occurring. Glaciers retreating, Polar bears migrating, CO2 levels rising, and seemingly more violent and weird storms has pretty much, I think, convinced the public that this is real. However, there is still a great debate about the cause of the climate change. Most scientists think that it's mostly a human-caused phenomenon, but a few don't agree, and think this is just a natural cycle.

The cause has a lot of impact on our day-to-day lives. If climate change is caused by humans then we'll need to do something to fix it (and if it's possible at all it'll cost a lot of money). But if it's a natural cycle then we'll just have to ride it out, but since it wasn't our fault then we won't have to fix it. That is, we won't have to change the way we do things. We won't have to worry about sustainable living since we can keep on burning fossil fuels. At least that seems to be the kinds of mentalities on the two sides of the issue.

So let's say that the large bulk of scientists are wrong. That our burning of oil and coal for the last hundred years has not changed the climate at all. Does anyone really think that we could do this forever? The production of CO2 from burning fossil fuels is a fact. That CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas is a fact (it's the quantity of it that forces change which is debated). Some day this will catch up with us.

And if current scientists are way off then how soon will that day come? Our rapidly increasing global economy is exploding. We consume staggeringly more fossil fuels then we did at the start of this venture a hundred years ago. If the curve continues then we'll produce staggeringly more CO2 in the next hundred years. I'm fairly certain that the only scientists who think we could continue at this rate for another hundred years are the ones currently locked up in insane asylums. I think it's a pretty conservative estimate to say that if the vast bulk of today's scientists are completely wrong then we still don't have more than a hundred years before the problem finally catches up with us.

So the real question is, what's a hundred years to us? We could assume that we will have magical technologies in a hundred years which will solve all our problems, but are we so certain that we'll gamble the lives of our grand children? If every global warming scientist is a crack-pot then it doesn't mean our problems go away it just means we delay them by just two generations. In the most idyllic and rose colored world it's the kids born today that will deal with the problem.

If that's the case then what's the harm in starting to fix the problem today?