It's the penguins, they've been plotting this for a while.

I thought it was the dolphins trying to reclaim the land.

its an interesting topic. but my chemistry lecturer has put some doubt in my mind as to how serious it really is. requires further study.

The planet is warming up, but we're not really causing that much of it (but likewise, we're not helping).

One of the big reasons is that the Sun has an activity cycle spanning hundreds of years, and we are currently in the increasing phase.

hmm, Chop off the top 10% of the ice, chuck it into space.
Let the rest of the ice melt, water levels will go down due to how ice expands.

I dont see how this wouldnt work but I highly doubt it will.
(About 90% of ice is underwater.)

It has been proven that carbon dioxide builds up naturally, as it did in the past, and that the climate changes. Ultimately it may well result in a massive climate change, or shift, which could be something like another ice age, but I wouldn't know. I doubt anything will happen in our lifetimes. All I know is that we are simply accelerating the process of 'global warming'.

Water levels won't rise because of the North pole, ice displaces it's mass in water, so the melted ice would take the same space as the water it was replacing.

The South pole melting, however, would, seeing as it's actually land.

As for sending it to space, that's a completely pointless endevour as getting stuff into space costs a fortune.

The main problem with melting ice is influx of fresh water affecting stuff like the gulf stream.

However, ice melting is not really an issue in general, it's just everything getting hotter that is, but that's caused very little by us.

The reason we need to switch away from fossil fuels is simple - we don't have much left.

I do not like how you disagree with 99% of data and current consensus right there.

However I think we should at least perpetuate it, despite if it's true or not. Because either way, oil WILL run out. Best to get it sorted with right now.

Vague statements saying it is to do with light and dark sun spots does not culminate into any sort of evidence. It is a current theory which has not been tested over substantial time i.e. we have not been tracking how the sun spots affect our climate for an extended period to say either way.

The waste our society produces (not including CO2 emissions) is a huge menace, we were not supposed to manipulate every part of our world in such a way. Alternatives to our energy and wasteful ways must be sort after in any way possible, even if this "conspiracy" of global warming was true it is worth it in the long run.

Global warming is happening, but the way humans are reacting to it is completely wrong, and the way we say that we're having so much effect is simply wrong.

There is very little we can change by doing things on a small scale, and a lot of people's ideas are completely pointless.

For example;

We would need 20,000 LARGE (100m tall, 55m blades) OFFSHORE (high wind speeds) to, on average, meet the demand of the UK power consumption (this would take up 6000 square kilometres). Bearing in mind that this is the average supply we would also need an ability to provide more power when the wind speeds go down (only way we can feasibly do this is gas). Building this many offshore turbines is also unfeasible, as it's a huge engineering challenge that we're not up to.

If we all moved over to electric cars we would DOUBLE our electricity demand, meaning that electric cars don't really help the whole energy crisis/global warming issue.

So all this cursory bulllshit is pointless. a few wind turbines does <LOOK MA, I AM SWEARING> all. Changing to an electric car just moves the problem elsewhere.

OK, so we should recycle, we should use energy saving bulbs and we should take measures to save energy but we SHOULDN'T say that is going to save the world. The only way we can do anything properly now is to do things on a HUGE scale, I'm talking switch all cars to electric and build masses of nuclear and renewable power plants.

An interesting note about the renewable variation I mentioned earlier, this would actually be fixed by switching to electric cars. Only charge batteries during the high and then replace batteries as needed during the lows.

As for solar activity not playing a part - do a search. (Before people shout about coincidence and causality, that doesn't really apply when the conclusion is highly feasible by science).

indeed. not much i can add to that...
but its fare to say we really aren't helping.

scaring us into using less means fossil fuels last longer, hopefully giving us time to find a suitable replacement! so it really is true that we should cut down.
our effect is negative but minimum. the earth will naturally cycles through stages anyhow... we are already overdue an iceage.



don't know what we will replace fossils with though...Self-Sustaining Fusion?

We can't really extend the life of fossil fuels unless we severely cut down on EVERYONEs consumption.

We also already have some suitable replacements, but they face problems;
Nuclear Fission will last a few thousand years, but we have fate too many "hate the nucleus" morons on this planet that oppose it. Actual nuclear power plant "disasters" are very rare, there have been 2 major ones: Three Mile Island (which nothing bad happened except the reactor became unusable) and Chernobyl (which was not a nuclear explosion, and only happened because the Soviets were idiots and cheapskates).
Renewables are good, but require a lot of development to be completely usable and to provide a sufficient amount of energy. Solar power will probably become more prevalent soon as the equatorial oil-rich countries run out of oil and look to build solar power stations as a new source of income. Wind is currently infeasible to do on a large scale (needs to be a huge scale and to be at sea if you want to do it properly). Hydro has been mostly tapped, though we could start doing tidal barriers (if we did that with the Severn we could get up to 1/5th of our [UK] energy supply from it).

Now, quite obviously, the best thing for us to do is to make fusion reactors, which we are working on. The science is there and we have a ridiculous amount of resources (hundreds of billions of years worth of deuterium, thousands to millions of triterium). Currently our best hope for fusion is D-T reactions, but once we have that sorted, we should easily solve D-D reactions a long time before the T runs out. It's just a huge engineering problem atm.

Nuclear is the way to go, but we're going to have a problem with all the anti-nuclear people (I suggest brain-washing).

Heh, need to do a lot of that, seeing as they had to rename NMR to MRI just so it didn't care people.

Nobody put these forward as good ideas. I only said we need to find solutions, a lot better ones then we currently have. We should at least build a few more nuclear stations as that would make electric cars useful. Even sustainable wood burning is not out of the question.

Edit: Anyone who opposes nuclear can go live in Eire.