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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (54342)	10/4/2013 6:27:04 PM
From: sm1th	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

We have to face global warming head on and do whatever we can to mitigate it. About 30 years ago, there were fears that nuclear war would cause another ice age. Should we start a nuclear war to stop global warming?

To: koan who wrote (54342)	10/5/2013 3:54:02 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

Assuming that its real and dangerous, still doesn't mean "whatever we can" is justified. "Whatever we can", can also be very dangerous. The other reply to your post had a bit of an extreme example (nuclear war to create global cooling), but even a more likely example, such as trying to eliminate most CO2 emissions quickly. Would 1 - Likely fail to reduce the emissions that totally and quickly (even in the countries trying to do so, and some of their reductions will just be driven off in to other countries who aren't making the same level of effort). 2 - Possibly fail to stop global warming or even affect it enough to prevent disaster (assuming the extreme disaster predictions are actually correct which is very unlikely). 3 - Be tremendously expensive and damaging (even if there isn't as huge of reduction, and more so if the reduction is actually forced through. 4 - Reduce our ability to deal with any warming or other climate change that actually happens, because of the wealth and resources used up or never generated because of the CO2 reduction effort. 5 - Reduce our ability to deal with other severe problems (that are actually killing large numbers of people unlike global warming) for the same reason as in #4. In short if global warming is "real and very dangerous". Its still only one problem, steps against it have to consider the costs and tradeoffs, including the resources and effort used against it, not being available to use against other problems.