While it's possible that the role of human emission be overestimated, deforestation OTOH is already proven to cause huge damages. Also, local climate is hugely modified by excessive sun heating of urban areas, in this case photovoltaic and solar thermal could be more beneficial, per installed area, compared to the same plants elsewhere, as they both produce energy and limit concrete overheating, so limiting both air conditioning power consumption and worsening of local climate, while in the country trees and other plants usually do a better job than panels. Panels should be installed on buildings and in wastelands, never wasting woods, fields and other fertile areas. Also, in wastelands, solar plants could be equipped with gutters and canalizations to gather rainwater, to use it in dryer periods and limit further local erosion in the rain seasons.

It's scientifically proven that overpopulation and industrial civilization has been the leading cause of climate change on the planet. Currently, global warming is now progressing faster than even the worst case scenario predictions from scientists. Not to mention all of the desertification that has been occurring.

This just shows how stupid many people on this website are, only 50% agreed with fact, an additional 14% thought it was probably, and 36% of you are just flat out wrong on a question whose answer should be very obvious by now.

the problem with nuclear power is that we have absolutely _NO_ way to deal with the nuclear wastes, we just create more and more shit for future generations to deal with

We should try to develop ASAP reactors able to "burn" nuclear wastes too.

Volcanic activity releases less than 1% of the amount humans do per year. And while the amount humans release is low compared to the amount released naturally, it's the fact that it upsets the balance that exists in the carbon cycle.

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/volcanic-co2/

You're wrong, even prehistoric Super-eruptions which occur only once every several hundred thousand to millions of years, do not produce as much CO2 as the world does in one year. The combined volcanic eruptions of the world, otherwise, produce less CO2 than the US State of Ohio. The rest of your post is just silly.

that was the original thought behind starting to use that form of energy and just storing all the wastes  -  hoping that in the future we might be able to use the stuff as resources, but after 40-50 years of research in that area we still haven't come up with anything worthwhile on that front

there is very little energy to get from the wastes, but they need a ton of security measures to handle, so it's very very expensive to deal with them .. the corporations that build nuclear plants should be responsible for _all_ the costs the wastes create, but atleast here in germany I know they aren't, they just pay ~1/8th of the costs

That's the biggest problem with unintellectual portion of society, selfishness and short sightedness. We leave them a long turn dangerous mess for our very short term gains.

We can power the world on 5,000 tons of thorium per year and there are 34 million tons of thorium in the world which means we will run out of thorium in about 6,000 years ... I believe it is kind of foolish to worry too much about a problem that might occur thousands of years from now; we (realistically) have no idea what kind of technology people that far in the future will have to produce energy from alternative sources.

With where research was at in the 1970s before funding was pulled from thorium research (probably) because it could not be weaponized, we could have (probably) had viable large scale thorium reactors in the early 1990s. If we're lucky we will be in a similar position with solar and wind power in 2050, and (realistically) I can't see us getting there in our lifetime.

Notice; "all the cars", not "all human emission". Cars make up only a tiny part of human emissions. Also note that CO2 is not the only climate polutor on earth.

Feel free, however, to think that my post is silly.

Edit; Correction; a single year of volcanic eruptions, of course, not one eruption.