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Anyone read scientific american? Their article a few issues back about how humans began affecting the world climate some 4000 years ago was really interesting.
Come on people- we're a population 6 billion strong, consuming and wasting enormous amounts of resources. We're using up the trillions of gallons of oil that have been slowing building up for billions of years, that have been locked in our soil, in little over a century- and Millions of tonnes of that oil we're throwing into the atmosphere as CO2, CO, and who knows what else. Coal, gas, oil, wood- they are all being consumed and a lot of it is released as smoke. In the miniscule time that man has been "civilized", we've had an impact on our world no less than a global disaster has. We've triggered massive dieoffs, endangered and outright exterminated countless other species, altered immeasurably the land around us- changed forest into plain, desert into oasis, swamp into suburbia.
The moment we became creative and intelligent, we began changing our environment to suit us instead of altering ourselves to suit the environment. And by doing so we prospered in our artifice. But alteration did damage. With 6+ billion all altering, changing, destroying (and creating), we've changed the world significantly enough that some very respected scientists are saying we have arrived at a cusp. One that will seriously change the face of our world as we know it. Deserts will be flooded. Plains and forests will become deserts. The sea level will rise and shoreline cities will sink into the ocean. Global warming will have very serious consequences. I have no doubt in my mind though that humanity will survive, although i think it'll be very uncomfortable for a while.
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"Asking a bomb squad if an old bomb is still "real" is not the best thing to do if you want to save it." - denim
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