A Little Opinion About Climate Change
Some people say it's real, some people not. Use data or feelings to convince, it doesn't matter much here. The thing is, climate change is real, even without human intervention. If our history is correct, Earth had a point of climate change in few million to few billion years, one don't remember the "exact" approximation made by people who studied Earth's atmosphere since it was born. All things equal, Earth can be said to be an imperfect closed system, if nothing from the outside, like asteroids or man-made spacecraft, brought back stuffs from the outer space. Of course, imperfect because the energy it got from the Sun (and other source, if applicable), and energy lose to space, probably doesn't equal. Otherwise, materially, we won't expect much change; or only small changes negligible to the huge earth, like small asteroids that burnt to ashes as it drifted along the atmosphere before reaching ground.
Now, the important wording is, even without human intervention, climate change would happen, but on a scale much much larger than our own. So, why are we so scared about climate change? There are a few reasons for that.
Every climate change is probably accompanied by the extinction of large no. of species. If climate change slowly, the body system can adapt to the change. If climate change too fast, extinction of at least some species is probably unavoidable. We are scared that human being cannot respond to such change intrinsically (installation of air con and other cooling mechanism don't count, cause they're extrinsic measures), and hence we go extinct. But mother nature don't care about that -- we can be extinct as long as Earth is still a warm bed to produce more organisms, micro or macro. In another few billions of years, people of the future may discover our remains like we discover the remains of Atlantis; and they probably would think us as aliens that had visited Earth and had gone away! Who knows? Especially if our technology is higher than them, we would think of those tech higher than us as from "aliens" rather than believe they're from an ancient civilization, because we cannot accept there are another species more clever than our species on Earth, but we can accept if they come from outer space. God knows why...
Then, if you're like Alexandar von Humboldt, you're probably scared of the species around us being extinct, excluding human beings. That's environmentalist and protectionist: animals and plants that can't respond fast enough. Though, it's weird to think that if they would die, why don't we? Yes, we have tech as an external measure, but that don't mean anything. At least to one, that isn't usable in the long term, or as a long term measure. Side effects will aggregate to a point where it's no longer side effect, and will swallow us alive.
Ultimately, some stupid people extrapolated some trends to continue infinitely in the future, and assumed Earth would become like Venus... Come on, where do you find so much sulfur to melt in the atmosphere? Carbon dioxide trapping gas? Well, yes, certainly it'll trap quite a lot of heat. Then, how long would it take to heat us up to that point? Is there enough carbon dioxide to trap all the heat from escaping to the universe? Is there enough sulfur compounds to add to the atmosphere to help us trap that much heat? Maybe, maybe not. One don't know. The problem with "stupid" comes from phrasing it too confidently that we 'will'... 'will' my arse.
Ultimately, our largest concern is dealt with. Let's go for secondary concern -- our desire for luxury. Heat makes the environment 'unbearable' (God knows whether our ancestors ever said the sun is unbearable; but we certainly. As we get less and less used to being under the sun, more and more under the roof, shades, inside aircon room, we cannot tolerate a higher temperature than what we're having in the past). We don't want the heat to make us feel bad. OK, that's another meaning.
Then, preservation. Dang it, 'preservation' again. See, the nature is changing, but we stupidly tried to hold on to the present, to freeze everything in the constant and don't let anything change. We want to live in the now! If temperature rise, the ice in the Alps would melt, and people can't go ice-skating anymore, so we want to preserve it. That's another form of luxury that climate change threatens.
OK, that's probably what one could think of now. May add later if something comes up. Remember to Like and Subscribe.