DGDevin wrote:
"Don Klipstein" wrote in message
...

However, there is still the matter of how much warming this has
caused and will cause. It appears to me that the advocates of
existence of man-made global warming are overestimating degree of
its existence, and degree of existence of "positive feedbacks"
necessary for this to be an actual problem.

Even if you're correct, taking the possibility of manmade climate
change seriously (and thus reducing the use of fossil fuels) has some
significant benefits such as not sending countless billions of
dollars to nations which don't seem to like us much, reducing
reliance on a strategic resource which could be cut off at an
inconvenient time, reducing air pollution in general (which is
desirable on its own merits), and promoting the development of clean
energy technology which will be a highly valuable commodity in the
future. Wouldn't it be lovely one day to be able to tell OPEC to get
stuffed?

These benefits are insignificant when compared to the consequences of
turning the clock back several hundred years. You would have us light the
night with whale oil (a renewable resource), confine transportation to five
miles per hour, and communication at the speed of the pony express. We'd
even have to give up Velcro.

There are new problems with your scheme. Had you asked a New Yorker in 1900
what traffic would look like in a 100 years when the population exceeded
five million, he'd ask where would we get enough horses and what would we do
with all the horse ****?

As for OPEC, I'm pretty sure they don't ship any oil to Somalia, Sudan,
Burma, or the Arctic. Those are the kinds of communities we'd have without
fossil fuels.