re: Wal Mart is leading the charge on global warming

Climate change is real, as it’s a natural process with the Earth.

The planet is currently in a warming cycle, after having experienced a cooling cycle(Ice Age) in the last period. Humans’ impact on this cycle is questionable at best. The worst case scenario would have been a world where developed countries had little interest in waste/energy losses, similar to the US prior to the 1970s. At this point, even with China and India currently giving a questionable level of shits about their output, the engineering and science of industrial processes and energy demands in most of the developed world are already becoming quite effective at dealing with excessive energy and mass waste. Even if human impact was troublesome on the climate, it’s very likely that in just 50 years the damage can be stopped and even reversed, just from technology advances.

If humanity continues on its current path, it is only a matter of time until the level of manipulation they can exert on the environment becomes large enough to encompass the entire planet, ie from chemical engineering on the industrial scale to geo engineering on the planetary scale. It would be from this that any hopes at setting up shop on other planets would come.. if we want to do any terraforming.

The media has completely blown this topic out of proportion. Awareness is good, but have faith in the scientists and engineers making the world a better, more efficient place.