You, and probably the grand majority of developed world.

I largely have for seven years, though not for environmental reasons.

along these lines, ray kurzweil has one idea about that:

"We are going to have plenty of food from vertical agriculture, where we grow plants, fruits, vegetables and meat in computerized factories by artificial intelligence; hydroponic plants tended by intelligent robots to create fruits and vegetables, in-vitro cloned meats, basically just cloning the part of the animal that you want to eat, which is the muscled tissue.”

I always tend to look at that stuff with a jaundiced eye...partially because predicting technology is such a tricky game, and partially because I *want* to believe it so badly.

Although I was reading the other day about this, so...

that's exactly what kurzweil's talking about!

he's a genius!!1!!

That was a cool article.

You're definitely right about technology, which is something I think the hardcore global warming activists don't give enough leeway to. Still, it can't account for everything, especially when some are pushing for such urgent solutions. Though I can think of a way or two to make a dent in electricity and transportation pollution, it seems more daunting to do that for meat growing.

But hey, if Kurzweil's on to something, it'd be awesome to have another Norman Bourlaug in that field...

a cap and trade bill would certainly get everybody to take it seriously. no?

The people would be placing enough weight on it to collectively pass a bill, so....

i just saying, that most people only think of that plan's effect on energy costs... maybe it could get people to consume less Lamb & Beef.

Exactly. Proposing any Cap & Trade or other AGW legislation now is crazy. Many people can't pay their energy bills today, the inevitable price increases that would come from AGW regulations placed on energy producers would bury some families.

what? i'm talking about these major polluters in the food industry raising their costs and the result being people not buying those foods that pollute most.

people are not going to starve or go w/o power that weren't already w/o power and starving.

Lotta cool graphics in that article. On the subject of the Midwest flooding causing all sorts of humidity, here's I-29 north of Omaha:



Normally, you can't even see the river from there.

that's nuts.

I wouldn't worry too much, guys. God wouldn't let all his people drown.

Oh, wait ...

he's God, but he's a jealous God.

NO GODS BEFORE ME.

(Which is, mind you, the basis of American democracy).

she'd better be wearing panties, the hussy.

There's in an unfortunate amount of screed in this, but:

****

Science getting settled
Lawrence Solomon Aug 26, 2011 – 11:37 PM ET | Last Updated: Aug 27, 2011 10:08 PM ET

New, convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun — not humans

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory cre dence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

The mobilization to rally the press against the Danes worked brilliantly, with one notable exception. Nigel Calder, a former editor of The New Scientist who attended that 1996 conference, would not be cowed. Himself a physicist, Mr. Calder became convinced of the merits of the argument and a year later, following a lecture he gave at a CERN conference, so too did Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist in attendance. Mr. Kirkby then convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber — he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.”

But Mr. Kirkby made the same tactical error that the Danes had — not realizing how politicized the global warming issue was, he candidly shared his views with the scientific community.

“The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century,” Mr. Kirkby told the scientific press in 1998, explaining that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth’s temperature.

The global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the Danes’ groundbreaking theory.

Yet this spectacular success will be largely unrecognized by the general public for years — this column will be the first that most readers have heard of it — because CERN remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success. Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” The CERN study and press release is written in bureaucratese and the version of Mr. Kirkby’s study that appears in the print edition of Nature censored the most eye-popping graph — only those who know where to look in an online supplement will see the striking potency of cosmic rays in creating the conditions for seeding clouds.

CERN, and the Danes, have in all likelihood found the path to the Holy Grail of climate science. But the religion of climate science won’t yet permit a celebration of the find.

The question isn't "Does the sun influence life on earth?" That's an obvious answer kind of question. It's "Do human behaviors exacerbate or influence certain conditions?" The two are certainly not mutually exclusive.