Pirate's Cove

USA Today tells us how technology can halt the weather

In the 1890s, New York City was swamped — not by a storm but something smellier, horse manure.

Horses, the primary mode of transportation, dropped more than a million pounds each day, causing a sanitation crisis. No one found a fix, and some estimated the streets would eventually be buried several feet deep.

Then, “shift happened,” says Harvard chemist Daniel Nocera. The automobile arrived, and almost overnight, it replaced horses and cleaned up the streets. Hailed as an environmental savior, it solved a seemingly insurmountable problem.

What a difference a century makes. Cars are now known contributors to the modern-day scourge of climate change. Their heat-trapping emissions have helped warm the planet beyond its natural variability. So sea levels have risen, and drought, heat waves and hurricanes have intensified — as USA TODAY explored in a year-long series, “Weathering the Change.”

“Scourge”. How, exactly, do they know it’s beyond the natural variability? The Modern Warm Period is not as warm as the previous warm periods during the Holocene.

As in the 1890s, society is once again looking for the Next Big Fix — whether high-altitude wind kites, “plug and play” nuclear reactors, giant synthetic trees to absorb carbon dioxide or sulfate aerosols to cool the planet. Next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, two concepts will be on display: Toyota’s hydrogen fuel-cell car, which emits no greenhouse gases, and Ford’s hybrid, powered partly by renewable energy.

Yet will technology deliver this time? Or will inertia push the planet, already struggling with higher temperatures, to a cataclysmic breaking point?

Good grief, hysteria much? Anyway, here’s the difference: someone came up with a big idea for the automobile as an awesome idea, and wanted to make some money. They weren’t trying to be environmental saviors (and poop all over the streets was not an environmental issue, but a health issue. Poop, in case Warmists missed it, is natural). With Hotcoldwetdry, market forces are generally not driving any new tech, the wacko groups and government busy-bodies are. Often by legislation, regulation, and coercion.

Still, change is bubbling up. Dozens of states now require that a portion of their electricity come from renewable sources.

That’s what I mean: government requirements. Which, by the way, artificially increase the cost of living for citizens.

There’s not a lot of time to make changes, says climate scientist David Archer of the University of Chicago. He says research suggests dire changes could occur if the Earth warms 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) this century.

“We’re halfway there,” Archer says, adding the planet could reach that mark as soon as 2040 if carbon emissions continue their current climb. “This is just the fire alarm. This is not the fire,” he says, adding it will become costlier to cut emissions the closer the flames come.

More hysteria.

At some point someone will come up with a super awesome idea that actually works, because they want to make money. Right now, it’s all nags nagging away.