Originally Posted by rickair7777

Plenty of utter ignorance on both sides of that debate.

The real problem with climate science is that NOBODY has any experience with analysis and prediction of the potential for long-term changes caused by man on anything like a planetary scale. We're in uncharted territory, so when people make assertions about what *will* happen in X number of years, it's very easy to show that they don't have any empirical data or any model that's known to be accurate for extrapolation at that scale.

I'm not trying to assert how accurate or not the predictions are, we simply don't know. I'm pointing out why it's so hard to get all of society on board with severe, life-altering austerity in the hopes of averting something which we cannot accurately predict.

For that reason any viable solutions will need to keep human and political realities front and center... basically going to need to allow people to keep their lifestyles and economies while getting rid of excess CO2.

Otherwise a lot of people will just live their lives and take their chances. I'm mostly one of those, because I'm an engineer and the global warming advocates are so emotionally vested in fringe technology and politically infeasible austerity that they're sabotaging their own efforts. Wholesale nuclear power (using safe, standardized modern core designs) is the only conceivable way of getting there by 2050. Added benefit is that if necessary you can build extra nuke plants co-located with industrial scale carbon-capture systems to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere (all proven technology). That may be necessary to reverse the inertia of climate change; it may not be enough to stop putting CO2 in the air. But again we won't know for sure until we get there.