Global warming
While it is true that the global temperature is rising and will continue to rise, it is entirely false that we can prevent it.
It is a natural inevitability that will lead to the next ice age, we are mearly speeding the progress.
I will make some concessions though: Yes an ice age is extremely bad for civilised society, Yes we can slow down it's approach if the whole world changes drastically to become "green"
But truth be told there are other things to concern ourselves with such as the possibility of a solar storm which could wipe out all transformers on an entire continent and we could have at most a 19 minuet warning for this.
Where as an ice age will happen and happen soon (in geographical terms) it will be perfectly survivable and I reckon civilisation will pull through it intact (if something else doesn't cause it to come crashing down).
The thing about ice ages is that while known to the general public as a massive drop of temperature which remains constant for a long time this is not the case...
An ice age is actually a period of rapid fluctuation, changing in a matter of few thousand years from glaciers and sheets of ice over northern Europe to savanna grass.
Peck Oil
Ahh peck oil and renewable energy such a fun topic in which no two people seem to be able to agree on figures and arguments are won on the basis of who has the prettiest graph.
First off :No! Peck oil has not happened yet!
The recent drop of supply was due to the American invasion of Iraq causing stagflation.
In fact the price of oil is already recovering.
However the fact of the matter is that peck oil is not only possible it will happen soon (not in geographical terms).
But my main problem with this topic is the alarmists who seem to think that when we reach peck oil we instantly run out.
Where as peck oil is just that a peck the highest possible production of oil in history followed by a decline.
Imagine a world with rapidly increasing oil prices...
I can I see a world were companies seek out alternatives to lower the cost of production, were people walk to the shops because the car costs to much to run for casual uses, were electricity production has moved to alternate sources, were the most popular type of public transport is the electric train.
Also this is world suffering a major global depression but nothing it can't recover from.
"Green"
There is a difference between Eco friendly and green.
It's Eco friendly to plant a deciduous tree, it can support anywhere between 600-6000 insects which in turn feed larger creatures and power the Eco system.
The leaves of deciduous tree are great for the soil etc.
It'd be "green" to plant a coniferous tree in the same spot but not Eco friendly.
Let me explain coniferous trees support under a 100 insects at most and when their leaves (yes an awful lot coniferous leaves end up on the ground anyway) decompose they turn the soil acidic making it poison for most other plants.
"Green" seems to me to be something entirely PR related.
People try and be "green" so they can wear the badge and be popular, in other words "green" is just something that is fashionable.
In many things that try and pass themselves of as "green" pollute in other ways.
Let's take electric cars, Eco friendly?
Well seeing as electricity comes from magic electric cars help keep the environment clean right?
Besides the fact that anything that uses electricity is not Eco friendly electric cars are not Eco friendly for another reason production.
The mining of the zinc necessary for the batteries poisons rivers, any fish in the river, any animals that drink from the river and any plants that grow near the river.
Then there is the tries and any plastics in the car, the mining and smelting of any metal and I could go on.
But it is enough to say that the construction of every single bit of every single component in a car of any kind polluted the environment in some way.
How about bio fuels?
Are they Eco friendly? (I hate the term Eco friendly only slightly less then "green" due to it's overuse and it's misuse)
No they require too much farmland to produce and many third world try and produce them as a cash crop and worse still massive areas of rainforest's are slashed and burnt for the production of bio fuels.
Which brings me to my final topic for this evening.
Sustainability
As hunger and famine stab at many equatorial nations and mankind's demand for energy soars many ask what can be changed to make to make our society more sustainable.
The answer to that is simple nothing.
Our society civilisation will not become sustainable because it is in the midst of a population explosion.
Anything we do exponential growth will make it unsustainable.
We are living things we will expand to fill all available space and stress all available resources.
The problem with humanity is that while we are living things we have removed the usual complete dependence on the Eco system through the wonders of farming.
This gave us the potential to vastly over populate beyond the Eco systems capacity to cope with our activities, combined with modern medicine extending our life span means Eco nightmare.
If each of us were to use a faction of the electricity we do now and the population growth continued even by using method like dams, wind farms, tidal generators, and solar panels we would run out of places to put them and materials to make them out of pretty soon.
The effects of this can already be seen...picture for a moment the plant a vast sphere it's lands criss crossed with roads, sprinkled with small towns and occasionally touched with a large city.
Imagine for a moment the massive patch work of fields and farms that occupy the space between these towns and cities.
Consider the time before farming when 90% of the total land area of the earth was covered in forests.
Our need for farmland has pushed that down to 30% now a days.
Problems are already cropping up such as the aforementioned equatorial nations.
Their problem is caused by a combination of factors: third world debt, poor education, drought and over farming.
(tangential rant/Which is why I never bother with charities that say they intend to teach the poor starving Africans to farm or send over animals.
That's not their problem they already know how to farm it's poor soil, lack of rain, advancing desert and the west's stranglehold on their economy.
Farming only causes the desert to advance faster!
And they wouldn't be in such big trouble if they weren't being squeezed for everything of worth they as a nation own/tangential rant)
Why do they have to over farm in the first place?
Simple it's a combination of desperately needing something to help pay off the third world debt and needing to feed their vast population.
Examine a graph of the world population over history.
Will that graph simply level out?
Or will it behave like graphs usually do after such a spike which is to peck and then descend rapidly back down?
One thing I know for sure is that that level of population increase is impossible to sustain.
