Quote:I saw a piece recently on Discovery Channel I believe, about the solar system. In this show according to NASA, due to the proximity and constant barrage of UV rays from the sun the Earth will eventually look like Venus. The narrator was quite blunt about this information. Also stated the only way to prevent this from happening would be to move the Earth farther from the Sun. I really wish I could have stayed to see the end of the show as the next segment discussed how to move the Earth. Darn work.


Now before you climate change zealots attack me from all sides, I am not saying we should all go pour lead in our water supply because there is no hope and we all are doomed anyway. My question is how much in the grand scheme of things does man have on the overall effect of climate change? It is also difficult to take a climate change advocate like Al Gore serious when he has a carbon footprint of a small town.

As I've said before the sun is account for in the computer models. I took an environmental modeling class as a undergraduate and we used various equations based on the Laplace Transform equations to model ecosystem. For instance we had problems where given a particular contaminant in a underground storage storage leaking at a rate of X per day, known soil porosity, bulk soil density, depth of contaminant, etc etc we had to determine the differential rate of in contaminant flow if X was applied....that's a really rough example but they use these simulations in all types of fields. Petroleum Engineers and geologists use them frequently to assess the structure, shape,density of the sea floor when drilling. They need to be able to account for wind, pressure, depth, waves, etc etc. What I'm trying to say is that modeling the climate is very similar.


Also humans have impacted the Earth in a multitude of ways already...we are large scale ecosystem engineers. We've influenced weather (acid rain and precipitation patterns), disease migration, the permeability of large and expansive areas which affects the flow of water, affected biodiversity on a global scale (plants and animals), various biogeochemical cycles, the ozone layer, the flow of rivers, lakes, and more....so it wouldn't be so naive to think humans cannot affect the Earth in massive ways.

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