Is it time to embrace climate change?
Some scientist believe we’ve already created a new geological epoch — and it may not be a bad thing
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/13/is_it_time_to_embrace_climate_change/singleton/
Reading the comments was quite instructive. It seems the clear tilt is against the author. This is the exact same thing I rail against, the subject is so politicized that it is impossible to talk about the subject in a rational manner.
Regarding the idea of the Anthropocene epoch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene), I like it a lot. I have read a couple of places that the observed trends in global warming have stronger ties to the conversion of wilderness to farmland (something that seems incapable of discussion, btw), so I would suggest that the epoch began with the conversion of hunter-gatherers to farmers (though the idea that our ancestor’s hunting prowess was already impacting the environment is persuasive as well). There are simply too many humans to have no impact on our globe, though I am positive that we can have a vastly lower impact at even higher populations (see http://sol-biotech.com/wordpress/2011/10/30/one-trillion-people/). Rather than insisting on driving us back to the stone age, as so many environmentalists seem to insist, perhaps we can discuss ways of minimizing our impact while actually moving forward technologically.
I also liked this comment in the article:
…environmentalists should concentrate on making clean energy cheap by means of technological R&D rather than trying to make dirty energy expensive by means of taxes or cap-and-trade schemes has been vindicated by the political failure of efforts to artificially increase dirty energy prices, proposals that probably would have been doomed even in the absence of the Great Recession.
Too bad the author is so roundly dismissed.
