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You are correct that we don't understand EXACTLY how this works. But we do have an increasingly good idea, and it is now very widely accepted that increasing CO
by foxylad 10y ago
You are correct that we don't understand EXACTLY how this works. But we do have an increasingly good idea, and it is now very widely accepted that increasing CO2 levels are due to fossil fuels, and that they are going to make life for future generations miserable. And I don't mean a few beach-side swimming pools falling into the ocean miserable - I mean millions of people drowning in a storm surge in Bangladesh, and millions more starving to death in Africa miserable.
So we can either hope that some mysterious feedback mechanism will appear that puts this all right, or we can figure out how to fix this.
And we've actually done this before. In the 1980s, scientists started raising concerns that the ozone layer was being depleted, and an international response reduced our CFC use to levels where we are now seeing the ozone layer recovering. In my cynical moments, I do wonder if the difference between then and now is that the oil lobby is much more powerful than the refrigeration lobby, but actually I think the problem is that reducing CO2 is a much harder problem and so more people just bury their head in the sand.
So you can choose - bury your head in the sand (that's really what dreaming of mysterious negative feedback mechanisms is), or get fixing. I have kids and would hope that their kids have as good a life as I do, so I'm fixing.
- neolefty 10y agoWith CFCs it helped that a single company manufactured 25% of the global supply (according to Wikipedia anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont#Chlorofluorocarbons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont#Chlorofluorocarbons) and when presented with evidence that they were harming the environment, led efforts to find alternatives. CFCs were a great victory, and encouraging when it comes to battling CO2 emissions, but also much easier to curtail both politically and technologically.