Climate Solutions

It is all very well to be sceptical about a solution to the excessive production of green house gases which cause global warming, especially as most nations are either paying lip service to making reductions or are in fact increasing their emissions. Here are some of my suggestions to help resolve the problem.

Most workers in the western world have broadband connexions at home and most employers can afford to supply their workers with a laptop PC. So why not limit the amount of time an office worker can spend at their work place to two or three days per week. This would reduce the amount of commuting to and from work and reduce the carbon emissions from buses and cars etc. Workers would be less stressed and happier as a result.

Use information technology to reduce significantly the amount of paper communications . I see no need to be sent a standard paper statement by anybody. The internet can be used for this. Paper statements should only be sent to those who are breaking their overdraft limits, missing their credit card repayments or are overdue for invoice settlement. For everyone else, an annual hard copy should suffice. This would reduce the need to waste energy to produce and deliver paper communications.

Give staff more flexible or longer holidays to allow them time to go by train or ship to their holiday destinations instead of using the aeroplane or a car.

Tax fuel for cars more heavily, but pledge the extra tax to make public transport quicker and cheaper. Improve the public transport system before penalising motorists so that they are encouraged to use more fuel efficient means of transport rather than being forced and, thereby, voting against governments that favour public rather than private transport.

Make hiring cars much cheaper so that travellers who have to use a car for a special journey will rent a vehicle rather than possess one. This combined with more effective public transport will encourage the use of trains and buses rather than privately owned cars.

Tax portable phone "give aways" this will discourage the overproduction of such devices.

Discourage built in obsolescence and make manufactured goods more expensive but of higher quality so that we replace them less often and consume less energy.

Use nuclear energy rather than wind energy which needs back up fossil fuel power stations to provide energy when the wind blows to weak or too strong.

Persuade everyone to limit their families and manage human fertility to achieve a substantial reduction of the world's population. I see this as the only real solution to climate change, starvation, disease control and social and environmental degradation. I am totally opposed to any form of coercion and to achieve this for the third world we would would need to improve living standards considerably. We will also need to and appeal to the general population to ignore the blandishments of religious leaders who are opposed to contraception. If, we do not reduce our population nature will, eventually, do it for us and millions will starve to death rather than living out their lives in relative comfort.

We should produce a contingency plan to geo-engineer a solution to global warming. The engineering should stop, however, when we have eliminated the effects of the emissions , if that is now possible.

The global warming deniers should consider the following. If man is not responsible for global warming and nature alone is controlling the climate, then what are we going to do when the Milankovitch cycle causes the earth to cool down to begin the next ice age? What are we going to do, in 8,000 years time, when most of the northern hemisphere is covered in one kilometer of ice? Where will the billions of people migrate to? Or, will the climate change deniers, of that future time, propose a geo-engineered solution to pump a trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?