First of all climate change does exist, it's been happening since the beginning of climate (which is long before humans populated this planet by the way...).
Second, humans are not causing climate change but we definitely are contributing. Anybody familiar with the butterfly effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect ? Each and every one of us is by far the biggest "butterfly" on this planet, here's why... Each individual person has a very small environmental footprint (The average person burns between 1600 to 2500 calories each day, a horse or cow is around 15000 to 20000) but our support systems are simply massive. Think about this the average car burns about a thousand calories per mile, a big pickup truck over 2000, a semi around 4000 (this is based on cruise mileage, not city or rush hour), a ship about 128100000, a 747 about 18140400 calories per hour while cruising. A typical Canadian home burns about 65000 calories a day of energy based on year round consumption. And this does not include all the other areas we use energy (places of business, empty buildings, stores, shopping malls, streetlights, losses in the grid systems, energy used to transport fuels and so on...).
Every calorie of energy we are taking from beneath the surface is being converted to heat, in 2012 we humans consumed 104,426 TWh of energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption in comparison the sun provides about 170,000 TWh https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Topic:Solar_energy , this also shows we are converting allot of heat and contributing to global warming.
The problem as I see it is we are simply using far too much energy, I bet we could easily get by with less then half the energy we are consuming today. Think about it, look at this for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev9oPUNaqXE , this is 100% wasted energy, if city people really need light that bad with today's technology we could easily cut light energy consumption by at least 75%.
Globalization, free trade and economic growth are another huge waste of energy, we are shipping fuel and raw products over half the way around the world to have them made into finished products and shipped back to us (refer to truck, ship and jumbo jet caloric requirements above). What we need to do is bring manufacturing back home, transportation needs to be discouraged, it's costing us the planet. Another example, oil companies want to transport oil clear across the continent (Northern Alberta Canada to Huston Texas and/or to east coast of Canada for export on world markets. Here's the kicker, this oil will be shipped right past some of the biggest consumers of oil in the States (wherte some of it will be shipped back to) and (believe it or not) right past Toronto where Canada actually buys oil from the US at WTI prices (Canada sells oil at a significant discount on the world market).
I don't think solar energy is going to slow global warming either, I can't understand how scientists can't see that the light solar cells absorb and covert to heat is normally mostly reflected back into space, nothing is going to change other then carbon output and I really don't think carbon is the problem.
Windmills have issues of their own, we are affecting climate again because they are absorbing energy from wind (not to mention they are hard on birds...), slowing the wind may cause undesirable climate issues also.
So like food waste, we need to reduce energy waste, we simply can't have unlimited growth on a finite planet.
Thank you.
