Which will win: Global Warming or Ice Age?

the use of Smog reduction/ Acid rain reduction/ Carbon Monoxide reduction technologies actually increase CO2 emmissions by a huge ammount.

Cars in the 1960's produced less CO2 than they do today.

Simple as this - Gasoline is a carbon based fuel - when its burned it will produce a carbon based exhaust.

If it is Carbon and one atom of oxygen is CO

If we catalyze it and make it carbon and 2 atoms of Oxygen its CO2

The same goes for other fossil fuels

Kind of Ironic, really.

Well, not really... it's better to have CO2 than CO. CO will wind up just combining with O2 in the air into CO2 anyway, and then we have less O2. That's worse.

hmm i looked that up - you could be right though in that case the CO2 would actually be the same since it takes the same amount of O2 to produce the CO2 from CO in a catlyst as it does in the atmosphere.

heh so my whole other post is meaningless - ignore me =p

How can humans adapt to not having any food to eat? Plants can't take the sudden change in environment and will die.

Modern civilization is really just one big house of cards. All the higher parts depend on the lower parts to hold them up. Pull out one of the base cards, in this case agriculture, and the whole thing falls apart.

When the Bread Basket of the United States is a desert, what will you eat? The wheat, corn, oats, rice, etc that we eat today is highly specialized. When it dies, what will you replace it with? No grain equals no farm animals. No beef, no chickens, no turkey, no pigs, etc. So now everyone is trying like crazy just to find enough food to feed themselves and their families. Do you think they are going to bother going to work at say, a power plant to make sure you have electricity? Will they go to work at the distillation plants to make your gasoline?

So now, no food, no electricity, no gas. No economy. Millions of people trying to move to areas that are still green. The people who live there probably won't welcome them with open arms. I imagine they will try to protect what they have for their families and pandemonium will ensue.

But on the bright side, cockroaches will do just fine.

It was better than "The Core".

My god, the science in that was *so* crap!

I'll let this speak for itself

Well theres a few presumptions here -

First off even if 90% of the human race starved and died , civilization would most likely survive. The genie in the bottle for the survival of civilization was writing. The population of the world was vastly smaller 2000 years ago than it is today yet somehow they managed to pass us down civilization.

Second - we currently produce many more than enough calories to feed everyone on the planet now- The problem is economics and distrubution. Even if the agriculture was severly hampered there would be enough calories to keep more than the above mentioned 10% alive.

Last I never said the issue was huge , duanting and scary - I merely disagreed that it would be the end of the human race.

Becuase it wont.

I personally thing that global warming will be much less severe than all that, though it will be very harmful. What I expect will happen is technology will secure ways to cultivate food to keep us alive, while we lament in History books that we brought much of our hardship on ourselves.

by creating Soylent Green.

I heard something way back in the 70's, so by now it has probably either been proved right or wrong by now, but hey, when has knowing what you are talking about ever been a requirement for posting in the forums. Anyways there was some evidence that during the last ice age the arctic ocean was actually ice free. The theory was that all that open water provided a moisture source for the snow that made all those huge glaciers that covered everything. So, my idea is that global warming will melt the arctic icecap which will cause increased snowfall up north which will then create glaciers putting us into another ice age. I really don't care if this theory has holes big enough to drive a truck through; it makes for an interesting scenario.

Also by the time anyone figures out if the warming is natural or man made, it will be too late to do anything about it anyways.

Thank God for human-produced "greenhouse" gases and global warming. So far, these factors have interrupted the 11,000 year cycle that would have thrown the world into another glaciated cold period, beginning five to six hundred years ago - when the "Little Ice Age" indicated the beginning of the climate shift. Fortunately, as we descended deeper into that climatological trough, human- and cattle-generated emissions increased as populations grew and technology made up for the expected gradient shortfalls in thermal energy, both in the sea and in the troposphere.

So far we have avoided an ice age through the prodigous use of carbon and oxide producing fuels like wood, coal, and oil. But these fuels are beginning to run out. Unless we develop other dirty fuel sources over the next couple of hundred years, we'll have to depend on clean energies such as wind, solar, fuel cells, and coal gasification. And then the return of the great ice sheets of 12K, 23K, 44K, 58K, and 70K years ago will be inevitable.

Our path is clear: We must find better and more extensive ways to pollute in order to avoid the icy extinction of human civilization.

Nah, plenty of methane trapped in the mud at the bottom of the ocean. Wouldn't be hard at all to release large quantities of that. Methane is like 10 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2.

So no prob there.