Clearly, you've never been to Los Angeles Let me know how you like it.
Been there. Also silicon valley. First in '73 (when the latter smelled like a fireplace three seasons out of four) and I turned down a job invitation from Signetics because of, mostly , that. (Didn't move to Silicon Valley until ;'86 or so.)
Let me know when you experience "Valley Fever".
Did that, too. (Bleh!) But the several-year allergy honeymoon (before picking up reactions to the local pollens was sweet.
Let me know how you feel about pollution in general
Icky-poo nasty bad stuff.
and our contribution to global climate change in particular after a week or two of technicolor sunsets (and breathing the air that creates them).
I've probably been breathing the portion of that that/s down here near the surface for much longer than you've been alive, and watched some of the "makes the sunsets red" stuff from volcanoes 2/3 of a continent away make my windsheeld wipers scratch my windshield.
But what do I think about "our contribution":
- Who knows, now that the issues have been politically polarized and the reseach is suspect. Maybe we bake, maybe we freeze, maybe it stays/gets even more comfy. Wait and see.
- The freakout over "warming" seems mostly from looking at it on far too short a time scale, seeing just the geologically "recent" stuff as we come out of a glaciation.
- In the short term one likely-seeming scenario (see Scientific American a few years back) is that, starting at the dawn of agriculture, human fossil-fuel use essentially regulated the planet's temperature, holding off a Milankovitch cycle drop into the next glaciation for several thousand years. Then industry made it rise a bit short term, but (ignoring other tech) that, AND the regulation, should go away in about 400 +- 200 years as the exploitable fossil fuels run out, after which we crash back onto the steepening slope we've been avoiding and roll on into the next glaciation (unless we do something else about it).l
- At large scale: Since the carboniferous we've been alternating combs of glacial/interglacial periods with deep ice ages, and we've been LOOSING atmospheric carbon dioxide with every deep ice age cycle. Last time we ALMOST got down to where chlorophyl stops working. (One form of it already has.) At the previous rate, absent human intervention or something, the NEXT cycle would get below it, pretty much all the plants die, and life gets to start over with other photosynthetic systems (maybe the purple one) or ocean-vent bacteria.
- Fortunately we've been freeing some fossil carbon back into the atmosphere. But I don't think we're far enough along yet to get us through the next deep ice age if tech goes away.
- So I'm more worried about something like a bronze-age collapse taking out tech until the next glaciation, then it not rising again at the next few interglacials, followed by bye-bye multicellular life, than I am about us all getting cooked by a humid heat wave.
Until then, please be quiet.
You wish. You first. B-)