Quote Originally Posted by TomOfSweden
I'm not so sure about that. I think 2007 will be the year when we stop thinking about how to avoid global warming, and instead have a debate about how to deal with it. Because it will get warmer, with or without human interferance.

Surely nobody thinks the temperature will be stable if we stop burning fossil fuels?

Yeah, I wouldn't say the temperature will stop changing, or sink back toward a 1900 AD level, even if we stopped all fossile fuel burning right now. The effects of what has happened are certainly long-range, there is a very long "braking distance" even if mankind would, let's say, stop consuming oil and lower the use of coal to 50% tomorrow (that's a very unrealistic scenario of course!). And i don't deny there is a natural change which might be pushing the temperatures up. But after years of attempts to mitigate and ridicule the whole question, the point that "the greenhouse effect" and man-indúced climate change are real and to be reckoned with is, I think, firmly anchored both in people's minds and in serious political and scientific debate.

Solutions? I don't have any easy ones. I used to be hardcore against civilian nuclear energy, but at the present we seem to have very few alternatives if we want to remain a high-energy society and, for instance, not pull down many industries and shelf the networks of modern pc/telecommunications that this site, among others, runs on. Even more so 'cause we can't really tell China, Brazil, Thailand or India that "your'e not supposed to strive for the kind of hi-tech civilization or automated industries that we enjoy here in the west", can we?)
Going on to use oil and coal to milk out electricity is senseless, and the supposed alternatives (wind power etc) are just not in the league to give the amount of energy the world needs: maybe they might begin to get there in forty years, but not now...) There are a number of very good reasons not to want nuclear plants in the long run, but at present it's not easy to avoid an effort to upgrade and expand nuclear power technology. Sorry, we can't afford to be without it (but also, I think, we need a much more powerful research effort to find operative new sources of renewable energy)