Jayesh A Lalwani wrote:
Right, weather change is going to affect us whether it's man made or not
There are, unfortunately, a group of people who think that we can cure anything if we just roll in a big enough army. Yet strangely, they become helpless crying babies when it comes to stuff like this.
I looked out the window this morning and for the first time in 2-3 years saw frost on the ground. The historical average at this location for days where the temperate drops below freezing per year is 30-35. Instead, I've had to fight to keep from switching on air conditioning. And I'm not a person who lives in a subtropical climate just so I can form artificial ice on the walls.
I don't actually care whether all of this is man-made, sunspots, or even Alien Invasion. Or, for that matter, a combination of the above. I only care about the bottom line. Yes, I'm harvesting tomatoes long after the plants should have frozen into mush and my lime trees are happy when they should be threatened. But I'll pay for it come Summer. Which comes awfully early these days. And departs awfully late.
Some things are truly beyond our control. But I fail to see the virtue in measurably altering the atmospheric composition without regard to consequences when that's something we
can control. We went through that before in the 1960s with acid rain. People screamed about how it would be too expensive and cost jobs. You can now make a good living making and installing pollution control equipment and manufactured goods are more inexpensive and (mostly) better-made than they were in the 1960s. Even the "cheap junk" would often qualify as top-of-the-line for the Mad Men.
So I don't buy the Victim card. Even if I did, what good is a job if you can't survive? And in the meantime, where
are all these jobs? Why is it that the same people who wail about job destruction seem to be the ones most in favor of moving them away?
It's a favorite hobby-horse of mine these days to rail against excessive efficiency. Mostly because "efficiency" is so often measured by bean-counters, and if it doesn't look like a bean to them, it doesn't count. But also because you gain efficiency after a certain point at the cost of overload capacity, and that isn't efficient. Still, any sort of effluent is inefficient, and I would hope that instead of endlessly arguing about who shot whom, we could actually spend some time and effort on converting greenhouse wastes into something practical. Or eliminating them. Whichever works better.
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