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1
- #1
zdas04
Mechanical
- Jun 25, 2002
- 10,274
Is Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) a real phenomena? I don't think so, but others do. If AGC is real, is human-generated CO[sub]2[/sub] the driving force? I don't think so, but others do. If human-generated CO[sub]2[/sub] is the driving force in ACC, can it be mitigated? I don't think so, but others do. If human-generated CO[sub]2[/sub] can be mitigated, what are the potential unintended consequences?
My basic question is: Can anyone name a grand-scale human intervention in nature that did not lead to unintended consequences that were on a par with the thing we were trying to "fix"?
[ul]
[li]Soil erosion? bring in Kudzu, Russian Olive, and Salt Cedar[/li]
[li]Wildfires? Fight them and allow a fuel inventory to build up so large that when the forests catch fire today they burn so hot that they sterilize the soil and spread so fast that they can't be contained.[/li]
[li]Hole in the ozone layer? Ban the most effective refrigerant ever developed, ban effective propellants in spray cans, then find that the ozone layer is patchy and has always been patchy and the R-12 and spray cans had nothing to do with the hole (and the original data was fabricated in the first place).[/li]
[li]Floods? Install dams and find that the Grand Canyon is filling in with silt because it needs floods. So do farmlands. I'm not saying that flood control is bad (but many environmentalists are saying exactly that), but we have to accept the unintended consequences.[/li]
[li]Eliminate predators? The prey animals lose their fear and congregate closer to rivers, eating the plants that stabilize the banks, turning rivers into swamps.[/li]
[/ul]
The list goes on and on. Is there a single case where we "fixed" something in nature and find that decades later there isn't something we created that is worse than what we were trying to fix? Before someone points to the Clean Air Act or cleaning up the smog in LA or the fact that the East River hasn't caught fire in decades--all of those things are about people fixing the mistakes that people made, not about "fixing" a natural thing. CO[sub]2[/sub] is less than 2% of the so-called greenhouse gases, the human-generated CO[sub]2[/sub] is less than 1% of that number (virtually all of the CO[sub]2[/sub] in the atmosphere comes from insects on land and krill and smaller sea life), so people are putting 0.02% of the CO[sub]2[/sub] into the air. What are the benefits and consequences of reducing that number unilaterally? Now if we could get the termites and krill to sign on, not to mention reduce ocean evaporation, then you could possibly lower the CO[sub]2[/sub] in the air to the extreme detriment of the plant life on earth.
People frequently say "what if you are wrong and ACC is real? We have to do something" My answer is always "engineers can deal with conditions that develop, our track record with proactive interventions is so bad that that is really the best we can do."
[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
My basic question is: Can anyone name a grand-scale human intervention in nature that did not lead to unintended consequences that were on a par with the thing we were trying to "fix"?
[ul]
[li]Soil erosion? bring in Kudzu, Russian Olive, and Salt Cedar[/li]
[li]Wildfires? Fight them and allow a fuel inventory to build up so large that when the forests catch fire today they burn so hot that they sterilize the soil and spread so fast that they can't be contained.[/li]
[li]Hole in the ozone layer? Ban the most effective refrigerant ever developed, ban effective propellants in spray cans, then find that the ozone layer is patchy and has always been patchy and the R-12 and spray cans had nothing to do with the hole (and the original data was fabricated in the first place).[/li]
[li]Floods? Install dams and find that the Grand Canyon is filling in with silt because it needs floods. So do farmlands. I'm not saying that flood control is bad (but many environmentalists are saying exactly that), but we have to accept the unintended consequences.[/li]
[li]Eliminate predators? The prey animals lose their fear and congregate closer to rivers, eating the plants that stabilize the banks, turning rivers into swamps.[/li]
[/ul]
The list goes on and on. Is there a single case where we "fixed" something in nature and find that decades later there isn't something we created that is worse than what we were trying to fix? Before someone points to the Clean Air Act or cleaning up the smog in LA or the fact that the East River hasn't caught fire in decades--all of those things are about people fixing the mistakes that people made, not about "fixing" a natural thing. CO[sub]2[/sub] is less than 2% of the so-called greenhouse gases, the human-generated CO[sub]2[/sub] is less than 1% of that number (virtually all of the CO[sub]2[/sub] in the atmosphere comes from insects on land and krill and smaller sea life), so people are putting 0.02% of the CO[sub]2[/sub] into the air. What are the benefits and consequences of reducing that number unilaterally? Now if we could get the termites and krill to sign on, not to mention reduce ocean evaporation, then you could possibly lower the CO[sub]2[/sub] in the air to the extreme detriment of the plant life on earth.
People frequently say "what if you are wrong and ACC is real? We have to do something" My answer is always "engineers can deal with conditions that develop, our track record with proactive interventions is so bad that that is really the best we can do."
[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
