The thing that relieves my worry about developing populations and their industrial growing pains is that they will not have to “rediscover” a number of industrial processes that took us 100 years to develop. An example is that remote African populations have gone directly to cell phone communication rather than having to build a land-line infrastructure. The more that these populations can benefit from our innovations, the cleaner and shorter their buildup is bound to be. What worries me more are the ultimate intentions of despotic governments, such as China, and what they might do with this cheap and efficient technology to further their ends.

Regarding our own industrial revolution, my doubts about our direct impact on climate change stem from the global cooling that took place between the 1940s and the 1970s when we were producing the most greenhouse gasses. Since then we’ve gotten more efficient and cleaner, and things heated up until 1998, when they started cooling again. I’ll send you a couple of great articles. These seem like farily inconclusive findings to start implementing what some organizations are suggesting in the way of curbing our energy consumption and production, which directly affects global economies.

All that being said, I am fully in favor of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and becoming more efficient in general. I think any business that uses and produces energy strives for this automatically. It’s when the costs of these measures, decided not by the market but by governments, become so prohibitively/punatively high that those poorer countries which rely on the old methods, for now, are devestated economically.

Okay, this is getting to be post-length, so I’ll stop. But you’re the best, and I’ll be over at your blog shortly!!

You are right, it is warm out because the earth is tilted 23.5 degrees toward the sun right now, even though it is 3 million miles further from it currently.

But, what we are faced with now is the question of if 150 years of our fossil-fuel derived industrial revolution, factories, energy, and transportation charging the amount of greenhouse gasses present in our atmosphere, will that ultimately have adverse affects. What we don’t know is that over time (meaning in climate terms) what that will eventually do(climate models are the best guess, and are getting better all the time), and what the effects of having two of the world’s most densely populated/prolific countries (China & India) will do to “catch up” on all the “lifestyle” things that our country has enjoyed over the last 75 years.

Regardless of whether (or is it weather) or not you believe that it is our fossil-fuel based economy is responsible for climate change, what does it really hurt to move away from this source of energy? What harm doe having more fuel efficient cars do? What harm will it be that the house we’re building is using geothermal,high-efficiency wood stoves, and passive solar do?

I love that you bring out these topics, it makes me think and come up with my beliefs in a more salient fashion.

While it is a bit dated now, What’s up with the Weather is a good primer on the current pro/con points on this issue.

And, no, I haven’t seen Gore’s new flick, yet.

Keep ‘em coming!