Question: Is there any way you could stop global warming?

Jean Bourke answered on 15 Nov 2012:

Ok this is not my area so if anyone of the scientist knows otherwise feel free to correct me!

We cannot stop global warming. We can alter its rate. The earth goes through periods of heating up and cooling down, many factors governing these are out of our control. It is also a perfectly normal process and one that living things can deal with by adapting and evolving in response to the changing environmental pressures.

However, problems arise when these environmental changes happen too fast . Nature cannot evolve to keep up with rapidly changing temperatures, it cannot cope. Sometime this does happen naturally (or seminaturally) such as meteor strikes or massive (and I mean massive) volcanoes. Such events can cause mass extinctions (e.g. dinosaurs). What is happening now is that our activity has effected the rate of warming and there is a risk that it can speed up even more. This means that many species will not be able to cope and will die out. We will survive but our lives and our relationship with the world around us will be(and indeed already is) significantly altered.

We can try and slow it down and rebalance things. Change is inevitable but it needs to come at a reasonable pace. Possibly the most important thing we can do to help to try and stop adversely effecting the atmosphere and generally polluting (again nature can’t cope with random chemicals it has not evolved to deal with). We need to change how we live: reduce, reuse and recycle!