CO2 in the atmosphere is a good thing. It keeps plants growing flat out. Plants are good. They are the feedstock for the ecosystem. They suck in CO2 and give us back oxygen. It's a good deal we have with them. Okay, we do eat them too, and feed them to our animals which we then eat, but this is a symbiotic process - few corn or rice plants would get a life if we didn't nurture them. Okay, we cut them off before they enjoy their full life cycle, and we even mess with their genes so they can't sexually reproduce. But they do have their day in the sun. Better to be a has been than a never was.
The human job is to put the carbon back in the ecosystem where it belongs, after eons of being gradually buried in accumulating coal, gas and oil deposits.
We are doing a pretty good job. We are preventing an ice-age return. Not causing it.
The era of ice ages began because the atmosphere and ecosystem were stripped of carbon, not to mention oxygen, which has been also buried in vast limestone deposits. Earth has been gradually crystallizing.
We are smack bang in the midst of the ice age eon and happen to be towards the end of an interglacial period which has lasted, as typical, about 10,000 years. We are due to go back into another ice age. It's a race to see whether we can resuscitate the atmosphere with more CO2 quickly enough to keep the plants growing and the Earth warm.
Anyway, even if we lose the race and an ice age returns to bury Europe, Russia, Canada and the USA in vast and deep ice sheets, people can move to the Sahara and build swanky new cities. London and most other cities are too cluttered and impractical. They just grew out of a medieval hodge podge.
There are already big motorways heading south, so 500 million people can move south quite conveniently and quickly.
The Saharan and African people will be glad to be recolonized. It has been a sorry story of mayhem and carnage since the British Empire withdrew. African incomes will go straight up to those of Europe. Africa's population will grow from a couple of hundred million to a billion or two.
There's no need for wars. It's typical of the Pentagon to think that there would be a need for lots of nukes and shooting of people.
Because an ice age would happen fast, people would need to be pretty quick about moving. Already, people should be investing in Africa, not huge new buildings in Sweden, Russia and Britain. Ferries to move trucks loaded with unbolted German, British, Swedish etc factories would ply the Mediterranean from France and Italy to Libya [which is already moving to become friendly, ditching the nukes and making nice], Algeria and Egypt. Large roads to Iraq and the middle east would be busy too, but as seen recently, even the middle east can get pretty cold, with large snow dumps all over the place due to an unusual cold flow down from the north. Texas, other southern states and Mexico would get a new lease on life.
Mqurice |
