(02-10-2019 10:42 PM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-globa...SKCN1PZ0QU
Climate change is the top security concern in a poll conducted by the Washington-based Pew Research Center, followed by Islamist terrorism and cyber attacks while respondents in a growing number of countries worried about the power and influence of the United States.
In 13 of 26 countries, people listed climate change as the top global threat, with the Islamic State militant group topping the list in eight and cyber attacks in four.
Worries about climate change have increased sharply since 2013, with double-digit percentage point increases seen in countries including the United States, Mexico, France, Britain, South Africa and Kenya, according to the poll of 27,612 people conducted between May and August, 2018.
The largest shift in sentiment centered on the United States, it said, with a median of 45 percent of people naming U.S. power and influence as a threat in 2018, up from 25 percent in 2013, when Barack Obama was U.S. president.
In 10 countries, including Germany, Japan and South Korea, roughly half of respondents or more saw U.S. power and influence as a major threat to their nation, up from eight in 2017 and three in 2013, the poll showed.
Well, if it is truly the number one threat, they why are we wasting so much time and money and effort on essentially feckless efforts to deal with it? If we all change out our light bulbs, and India and China do not change course, then we're still in the soup in 100 years regardless.
We need major efforts. But simply enacting requirements to make changes that are not physically or economically feasible is no way to solve the problem.
We somehow have this notion the JFK said put a man on the moon within the decade and suddenly and magically and mysteriously a space program appeared and did so, and therefore all we have to do is put some unattainable goal in place and we can achieve it is pure hogwash.
Number one, that isn't what happened with JFK and space. When he gave the, "Why does Rice play Texas?" speech, we already had a space program, we already had astronauts, several of them (I believe three) had already flown in space, most of the stuff that got us to the moon was already under design, and we already had two competing programs (one NASA and one an Army skunk works under Werner von Braun) aimed toward the moon by probably the mid-1970s at the latest. So he didn't invent something out of nothing. What he did was pick the NASA approach (go directly to the moon) over the Army skunk works approach (build a space station first, and go to the moon from the space station, which would take about 5 years longer), to the dismay of a couple of my cousins who were working on the skunk works project at the time.
Number two, even if he had, that would be no reason to believe we could do it again. This problem is vastly different from that one. We are nowhere near as far along finding a solution to climate change as we were on space travel in 1962. We don't even know the dimensions of this problem, or even whether it is a legitimate problem or not. I tend to believe that it is at least potentially a major problem, big enough that we really do need to do something about it, but that we need to take intelligent steps to address it rather than panic-driven insanity.
We need quantum leaps in technology--either that or massive genocide--to come anywhere near making a significant reduction in carbon emissions. I'm no fan of genocide, so I am hopeful that we will develop the technology. We had quantum leaps in technology in the space program, but those didn't come overnight. Most were well underway before JFK gave his speech. We had been working on most of them for 40 years or so before they happened. And forcing us onto unproved technology before its time is a sure recipe for disaster.