The debate in the Collegiate Times recently about whether global warming is occurring is missing a key point. We could argue all day about whether or not global warming is occurring and what it's caused by, but let's assume that global warming is real, and that it is entirely caused by humans. Let's even be really generous and assume that global warming is occurring and will result in catastrophic climate change and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.

Even granting these points, there is still no chance that the solutions put forward by the most fervent believers of global warming will stop or even slow climate change. Trying to address global warming through government mandates and international treaties reducing greenhouse gas emissions is doomed to failure.

The developing nations of this planet, such as India and China, are rapidly expanding their economies using fossil fuel energy and will soon overtake the developed world as the main producers of greenhouse gases. This simple fact will certainly undo any emissions reductions that the West can accomplish with its current technology.

Regardless of how many PowerPoint presentations Al Gore makes, developing countries can never be expected to halt or slow their economic expansion because Western climatologists insist that they are polluting too much. The only other option would be to forcefully compel them to stop using fossil fuels, which obviously is impossible. Among the developed nations of the world, many signatories of the Kyoto Protocol, such as Canada and Spain, are massively overshooting their emissions quotas. As it always was, the primary motivation for the governments of the world making pledges like these is to please their domestic constituencies. No government, however, is going to make the great economic sacrifices, supposedly necessary according to environmentalists, in order to halt global climate change. To do so would be economic and political suicide.

The true solution to global warming would be to develop new energy sources, which would render fossil fuels obsolete. Environmentalists do not help in that effort by scolding the industrialized countries of the world and telling them to conserve or suffer disaster. Moving beyond hydrocarbon energy is a straightforward engineering problem that cannot be solved by politicizing the question and trying to send the rich nations of the world on a guilt trip.

Like many global warming media, Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" simply tried to scare people, and make them feel guilty for living the lifestyle they are used to. It would be much more effective if environmentalists dropped the Malthusian doomsday prophecies and focused on trying to send our society's technology beyond fossil fuels instead of back into the Middle Ages.

The only hope to stop global warming rests with scientists and engineers developing new technologies, not environmentalists and politicians developing new bureaucratic regulations and unenforceable treaties.

James Dorman

Sophomore, Aerospace Engineering