Weekend Research Report

I'm with the Oxford guys on that comma thing, although I didn't know that the Oxford guys had anything to do with it. I was taught that both forms are correct, but I always preferred the Oxford way because it more clearly expresses the thought, like you said. I was not aware of the controversy about "hopefully", and I still don't see what's controversial about it. People make up new words all the time, indeed, all words were once new words. What does bug me is how people say "I have always prided myself" instead of "I have always taken pride". I mean, how does one pride oneself? Come to think of it, "taken pride" doesn't make a lot of sense either. It probably would be more meaningful to say "I have always felt pride", or "it makes me proud". I mean, how exactly does one "take pride"?

I did some reading on Wiki this weekend, but I didn't take notes or quote any sources because I couldn't find one that supports my position. Wiki has a lot of material on global warming, and I couldn't possibly read it all, so I kind of scanned around to get a general idea of what's out there. Like that Mars thing, there are numerous proposed  solutions to global warming, but most of them have not gotten off the drawing board because their authors haven't been able to persuade anybody to finance them. I didn't find anything like my carbon sucking machine, but there is one proposal to put a bunch of giant mirrors into orbit to reflect some of the Sun's rays away from the Earth. I think that one is at least as absurd as my proposal, and yet there are learned men out there who seem to take it seriously. One technique, called "carbon capture", has actually been tried a few times, and it works, but it's too expensive, raising the price of electricity by 40%. The idea is to filter out the carbon dioxide from the smoke before it even goes up the smokestack. This gas can then be injected deep underground, where it can be used to force more oil and natural gas out of formations that have been considered depleted.

I found considerable discussion about how green plants take carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in the ground, which is how all that fossil fuel got there in the first place. Proposals to enhance this effect range from saving the rain forest to genetically modifying plants so that they will do more of what they already do. I did not find anything about plant growth spontaneously increasing as the world gets warmer and wetter, which would make global warming self limiting, probably because no one has figured out how to make money from that. (That's an opinion, not a fact.) One fact that I did write down is that the government sold the last of its GM stock on December 10, 2013, but that doesn't have anything to do with global warming.