Global Warming, I'm Not That Worried

The biggest threat to humanity is global warming, but I don't think it's that much of a threat. This is because I believe that the responses of humanity to situations of danger are far more capable, rational, and speedy than most people think they are. The projections that people make with regard to global warming are over the course of decades, but people do poorly is estimating the changes in people and technology over decades.
If people around the world continue to produce greenhouse gases at the same rate they are presently (and if technology does not change the numbers are likely to go up rather than down) then global warming will be a nightmare situation in fifty years. But this seems to me to be enormously unlikely because there is huge motivation for technological improvement. For technological advances to happen there needs to be basic materials and techniques available and motivation for scientists to achieve breakthroughs. Well, the basic theories and techniques to provide alternative energy sources abound. We have the prototype, beginning technology for wind power, wave power, and nuclear power. But the big thing we have is the biological ability to alter organisms to produce alternate fuels. For example, hydrogen is a readily available resource, the waste product of the fuel is water, and it works just fine in present day technology (you can run your SUV on hydrogen with minimal changes to the vehicle). The problem with hydrogen is that it is such an excellent fuel that it combines with oxygen whenever possible to produce water. The trick in making hydrogen fuel is to seperate hydrogen from oxygen using less power than is produced in burning the fuel. Plants do complicated stuff of this sort all the time in photosynthesis, using sunlight to trigger a process that produces oxygen from carbon dioxide (and everyone knows that you can burn carbon with oxygen, that's just wood burning). So, a genetically designed organism may be able to use sunlight to produce hydrogen. Our future energy plants may be vast shallow pools under glass in the desert, gently bubblng hydrogen.
The second thing we have is motivation. The first motivation is the safety of humanity (and of the rest of the animal kingdom) but this is a motivation at a distance. The real motivation is that a technology solution would make the inventor trillions of dollars. The inventors of such advances would become richer than oil companies. If there's one thing that will get people with lots of money to invest in research, it's the prospect of having much, much more money as a result. Before global warming became a reality there was not a motivation for alternate fuels, there were cheap, easily obtainable fuels (coal, natural gas and oil) with supplies to last the world until 2080 at the earliest (oil would go first, there's no shortage of coal or natural gas). People would work out alternatives sometime in the future, perhaps starting in 2050 or so. But now people will choose alternative fuels over oil, even if it is somewhat more expensive at first. The result is large investment in research for alternative fuels.
The next worry is whether these alternatives will be invented in time. In order to make a difference there's going to have to be a major change in actual used technology within thirty years (and by then Portland, Oregon is going to have a meditteranean climate and millions of species will have died). People think this is a serious concern, but I think people have no idea how quckly this modern world is producing new technology. Take computers, for instance. Thirty years ago, in 1978, computers were essentially room-sized counting machines. Now there is a world-wide network and about one billion computers in people's homes. This isn't simply a case of making a useful device and selling it, this involves investment on a monumental scale, and a whole new segment of infrastructure. There are now fiber-optic cables running around the world running from house to house. And the power of the machines would be beyond most people dreams in the 80's. Remember your 64k personal computer? That's a k at the end, we now measure in g's. That's a million times bigger. A million.
And then finally, the reason why I'm writing this today is because I read this article which shows that although I have had this impression all along, there's now some evidence that I might be right. http://www.newsweek.com/id/140066 Basically it seems likely that within five years there will be an organism that provides fossil fuels that we can just keep burning in our cars, but will use co2 in its' production. This possibly will make the net effect of driving cars a reduction in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In ten years it might actually be true that the best way to reduce global warming will be to drive your car as much as possible, so that companies will have to match demand by producing more fuel. It is conceivable that in thirty years the problem will be that the process of driving cars will be removing co2 at a dangerously high rate.
However, this doesn't mean that real problems aren't happening now. Species are disappearing, people are starving, we are losing things that we may never see again. So, I am very confident about this problem being solved, but until then I will keep doing what I'm doing. Our car has 70 miles on it this month, we drive less than 3,000 miles a year. We don't have an air conditioner, and we wear sweaters inside during the winter. An energy policy is the third most important factor in my voting decisions (the first two are not killing people, and healing everybody, usually called foreign policy and health care). So, do what you can now, but don't worry too much about the future, it'll be OK sooner than you expect.