As far as the whole fuel thing...
As far as the whole global warming issues, I could not honestly state if it is because of all the polutions or because of underground volcanos becoming more active. There are so many different reports out there that are very plausible. One group of scientist say this and another say this, and they of course are all "experts". LOL...ironic.
Here are a few thoughts for you to chew on. Keep in mind, these are my own thoughts, taken out to the Nth degree, I don't have long term studies and whatnot to back up these thoughts, but I think it's good to consider "what if", and take it to the worst possible situation.
Given the fuel thing. Fossil fuels are non-renewable. Well, that isn't completely true, but it takes millions of years to renew them. So for our purposes, they are non-renewable, and should be considered limited in supply. Once the supply is gone, that's it. And nobody knows really, how much is still in the ground. They just found more in the Gulf of Mexico. And technology has advanced to allow us to extract more from the ground that we could a generation ago. Supplies that were out of reach are now accessable. So for now we have managed to keep on exploiting these resources, and we will be able to continue to do so for a while yet. But nobody knows how long, and given the rate of increase in demand around the globe, it's tricky to judge. But we in the US use far more petroleum products than the rest of the world combined, so we are the biggest abusers, if this use can be considered abuse. Meanwhile, nations like China and India are demanding ever more and more, and with their populations, this will have take a big toll on world supplies.
But what happens when they run out, if we haven't developed other fuel sources? We continue to be heavily heavily reliant on oil and coal, and even much of our electicity is generated from burning these fuels. We have NOTHING else at this point that could actually step in and take the place of fossil fuels, if the supply should suddenly run out next month. So what does this mean?
First, it means that our transporation shuts down. Completely. Nobody goes anywhere, if they can't get there by walking, or riding a bike, or a skateboard, of if they managed to install solar panels on the roof of their car. We stay put. This is an inconvenience. We can't get to work, or to the grocery store, or to go visit Aunt Matilda. Bummer.
But it gets worse. A huge majority of the population of our nation lives in large cities. This is probably true around the world. People who live in cities are removed from food production. Cities don't have the space to grow crops and raise livestock. City folk are COMPLETELY dependent on shipments of food to keep the supermarkets stocked, so we can eat. When the fossil fuel supply runs out, we have no way to ship enough food supplies into the cities to feed even a small percentage of the population on a level that will enable them to survive.
This would hold true for smaller towns and those living in the countryside. Most people in the US today are completely removed from food production, and have no idea how to grow or raise or hunt or fish or slaughter food sources. Some people do, but the vast majority do not.
So even tho food may be growing in the Bread Basket States, very very little of it gets to anybody. The food rots, and within a couple weeks, people are dying of starvation. Dying by the thousands, and tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands, and even millions. And nobody can get anywhere, to get to the food. And as the supplies dwindle in the first couple of weeks, things get violent as people get desperate, and it all escalates. And the cities are full of rotting corpses, and disease is rampant for those who somehow manage to survive. Population centers become uninhabitable because of this, and water sources are contaminated by disease, and probably people can't access them anyway, without an energy source.
So this is what we can expect, if we suddenly run out of fossil fuels without an adequate replacement for that energy source.
Now lets discuss the global warming issue. There is no dispute about global warming. It is happening. Sure, there are natural cycles that the earth goes thru, and there are natural events that can contribute to it, but it is undenyable that human activity, and especially human generated pollution is contributing enormously to this problem, and making it happen far far more quickly than it would happen on its own. It is happening so quickly that the earth and its inhabitants have no time to adjust and adapt to it.
A vast percentage of the population lives on the East and West coast. More so than live in the interior states. So with global warming, the sea level begins to rise, and coastline is lost. This could cause entire cities to become unliveable, as they flood. In addition, the warmer sea temperatures cause fish to die off, eliminating another source of food. So now these coastal populations need to relocate. But how do you relocate a city of several million (think New York, Los Angeles, etc.)? Where do they go? How are they housed? maybe they end up in the interior states, living in tent cities and refugee camps.
But things are heating up. This summer, here in Northern California, we had a heat wave hitting around 120 degrees for over a week. How do millions of people living in a tent city deal with that? How do they get enough water to get thru it? How do you deal with sewage and other sanitation needs?
And in the meantime, weather patterns are getting crazy, due to global warming. This doesn't just mean everything is getting a little warmer. It means some places get colder in the winter, and hotter in the summer, and storms get more and more powerful (think Hurricane Katrina and worse, over and over). Global Warming actually means weather patterns of all kinds are getting more and more erratic and intense. So now we have refugee camps, tent cities in the midwest, housing all the people from the coasts. And summer rolls around and they are fighting heat wave, and then the tornadoes hit. And they are Super Tornadoes. What would a Super tornado do to a tent city with a million people living in it?
Now lets go back to the first picture, running out of fossil fuels. How much worse would it be if this happened first, and the extreme results of global warming, exacerbated by all the fuel we burned up, hit shortly thereafter. As coastal cities flood, and transportation has been eliminated, nobody has a way to get out.
This could happen all over the world. The current population of the planet is about 6 Billion people. I think that if this worse-case scenario happened, global population could drop to about a million. Small pockets of people would find a way to survive, but most would not. And the planet would become one huge graveyard of unburied, festering corpses. And those that manage to survive are thrown back almost into a stone age, but with memories of how great life once was...
I hope I am wrong, but I can't get this image out of my head. Something for you all to chew on.
