Rivers in North America typically run north to south. I've long been intrigued by the idea of a man-made river (or a series of them) connecting those north/south rivers together that would allow the diversion of flooded rivers into the man-made river to supply areas that were suffering from droughts or to resupply aquifers. I like the idea of an American Autobahn going east-west across the country with the man-made river running under it. Environmentalists would hate the idea as it would allow species from other rivers to move from one habitat to another, but it could solve many of the water/flooding issues the country faces on a regular basis.
Pipelines aren't effective for moving vast amounts of water (and we're talking about vast amounts of water from floods) but a river, kept empty most of the time, that was suddenly available to absorb the excess water could be pretty effective. Filtering/pumping stations to filter then inject that clean rain water back into aquifers could handle excess water also. An Autobahn type highway (toll road with unrestricted speed limits) atop a large (thirty foot deep 180 feet wide) man-made river topped by a highway starting at the Delaware River to the Susquehanna, to the Ohio, Mississippi, and western rivers could link major US cities and alleviate flooding issues at the same time. The construction costs would be enormous, but it's doable.
As to disease outbreaks, jet travel is a much bigger issue than climate change. With modern travel pretty much every isolated disease is just a few hours away from a few million people.
And with regards to global warming the focus is almost exclusively on carbon dioxide and it's reflective capabilities (the greenhouse effect) and little to no attention is given to the heat generated here. Every American reportedly generates 65 million plus btu's of energy a year and that's an enormous amount of heat generated per person. Most of the models showing the greenhouse effect ignore that heat and assume it would just go straight up into outer space without the greenhouse effect, but heat radiates out in all directions and with more people, more homes, cars, buildings, there should be more heat. More heat equals higher temps. If the greenhouse effect was working as projected, one would actually expect the temps to be higher than they are.
There's no debate that humans play a role in climate change, just as any other creature does, but how big a role do we play (I'm not so sure we play that big a role,) what can we do to lessen that impact, what works, and what's nonsense are the areas we should be focused on. A lot of the stuff people talk about now will in the future be looked at like we now look at glacier shattering man-made mountains and rockets to move the Earth. They're impressive solutions to a problem that doesn't exist. The money we're spending now on alternative power sources while backing them up with conventional power plants running in the background the whole time will likely be viewed as monumental wastes of money in the future. Wind farms, solar farms are little more than fancy lawn ornaments for all they achieve.
Fly!!! Eagles!!! Fly!!!
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