Just don't get climate denialism

Amazing people argue over this; I guess denial is not just a river in Egypt... Let's just think about this simply for a minute. About two hundred and fifty years ago we began to turn to the use of fossil fuels for energy. In so doing, we no longer were limited to using the current crop of hydrocarbon bonds produced by plant photosynthesis (burning wood for fuel, or oil derived from animals that had consumed the plants), but were able to tap into the hydrocarbon bonds that had been sequestered under the Earth from millions of years of plant growth.

As we use coal, oil, gasoline and natural gas, these bonds are broken yielding energy. The bonds were created when the plants drew CO2 from the air and water from the earth and used sunlight to put the hydrogen from the water together with the carbon from the air, releasing oxygen back to the air in what we call photosynthesis. When we burn the wood or the coal or the oil the process is reversed; Oxygen is taken from the air (if you want to put a fire out deprive it of oxygen) and water vapor, CO2 and energy are released.

So, in the last 250 years we've been poring millions of years worth of carbon back into the atmosphere. Even the climate deniers  admit we've used up around half, maybe more, of the global oil supply; it's all downhill from here in terms of oil supplies (also known as Hubbert's Peak, after the guy who first recognized this and explained it back in 1956: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory). While we have plenty of coal and natural gas for the time being, we also have a problem. All that carbon has been collecting in the atmosphere faster than plants can take it out— especially since we are collectively cutting down more forests, and using more fossil fuels as the rest of the world moves through industrialization and seeks the same affluence as the U.S. and western Europe, with the majority moving to urban centers. The result: there is twice as much carbon in the atmosphere presently as has been the highest level in the last 650,000 years (!!) that we can measure (http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence).

This results in climate change, only the beginnings of which we have seen (think, Hurricane Sandy every year), due to the greenhouse effect of all that carbon in the atmosphere. When sunlight hits an object on the Earth, the wavelength changes, and some of the energy is released as heat (that's why you feel pleasantly warm in the sunshine compared to the shade). The energy that is reflected back is of a lower wavelength and does not get radiated back out into space, but gets bounced around in the atmosphere by all that extra carbon, warming the atmosphere and the surface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect).

Frankly, anyone who still thinks the science to back human caused climate change isn't there might as well believe the world is flat (http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence). The increased heat is leading to mass species extinction (this is already happening), large portions of current agricultural areas will become desert, low lying cities will be building dikes (New York City, Miami, Bangladesh, the Maldives etc.) and many areas will have to be abandoned, increasing competition for diminishing resources-- or, we can get our s___ together, cooperate for our mutual benefit, and embark on a crash program to save the planet as we have known it, by switching to alternative energy sources that lack these problems, i.e. renewables: solar, wind, tidal, wave, geo-thermal, pumped storage-- the technology is available, but as yet our leaders lack the political will to go against the entrenched lobbying power of the energy industry in its current configuration. The same PR firms that were hired to deny the connection of smoking and cancer are the ones churning out the supposed doubts about climate science.

Nuclear is a nonstarter because the energy necessary to mine, refine, transport the fuel, build the reactor, store the highly hazardous waste, and decommission the radioactive reactor at the end of its useful life, make it the most expensive form of energy available, even setting aside the considerable safety concerns from: spent fuel, terrorism, and the hazards of plant operation-- reactors are typically sited near a body of water, either rivers or the ocean, and thus susceptible to hazards from climate change caused flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis from earthquakes as in Fukushima. Mistakes/accidents can lead to areas contaminated with radiation for hundreds of generations (the half-life of plutonium, in mx fuel is on the order of 250,000 years). So nuclear is out.

Really, the Earth is teaching us how to be proper stewards, and we better listen. If we don't get the message we're history. If you think this is all going to make Jesus come back, I wonder what choice words he'll have to say to those who destroyed their beautiful world, rather than cherished it and each other with gratitude. Yeah, I think there were a couple parables about that, something about reaping and sowing...