lyeinyoureye

Shoot, why even bother then? Everything is the same as everything else, since we can't have everything without everything else. The only difference is time.

ChiapasFixed

i have set up a thread to share design ideas to promote bike use and denounce the madness of the internal-combustion engine-monoculture.
the idea is these designs be licensed under copyleft for use in advocacy campaigns arouns the world.
please post your ideas! there will be prizes for the best designs!
thanks

wahoonc

Well...sort of...Climate is what you are stuck with...weather will be provided


Aaron

Leisesturm

If this thread can be considered a microcosm of the wider society then we can assume that the arguments will continue right up until the moment it is understood by ALL concerned that either there was nothing to it after all, like Y2K or 'damn, we @#$@ up and now its too late.

H

pauldaley

wisdom is awareness in action

applied consciousness

integrated consciousness

coldfeet

I read it, then looked for more information on the trends of which he writes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot#Sunspot_variation
Click on the 2 charts down on the right to bring them up large scale. What do those trends say to you?

ChipSeal

coldfeet, I wonder if there were a way to test whether solar activity was causing at least some of the GW? Perhaps if we could measure changes in surface temperature on other solar planets. If they were warming too, it would be powerful evidence that GW is subject to forces outside of man's control.

Leisesturm

That may well be true but should it be the point!! As has been said many times in this thread by others (but still the point seems not to be made) man's activities definitely ADD to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and were man to drastically reduce greenhouse emissions the effects of whatever natural temperature increase is taking place would greatly be reduced. The dinosaurs could only watch helplessly as natural events destroyed their environment beyond their ability to tolerate. Perhaps that is the present case, perhaps not. Still, it seems to me that as a species we have spent an inordinate amount of our brainpower coming up with evermore inventive ways of destroying one another, individually and en masse. If the sum total of man's creativity were focussed on problems of the environment and human physioligy (sp) I wonder if we would be sitting around arguing that GW isn't our problem because we didn't cause it or if possibly we might have a solution in place, maybe even one as audacious as sub-surface (orbital?) habitation.

H

coldfeet

But it is subject to forces outside man's control! The Sun is the largest source of heat for the Earth that there is. The Coal, Oil, and Gas we are burning were produced from organic material that only existed because of Solar Energy. We have burned over the last 100 years, Energy stored over tens of thousands of years. Solar cycles do influence overall temperature, thats obvious. It is equally obvious that our activities are also influencing it, just living in cities raises the temperature 3 or 4 degrees C over the surrounding area. When you look at the figures for fuel consumption, convert that to BTUs of heat energy, how can you say that doesn't influence it? If anyone can look at the competing points of view, and their supporting arguments, and still think the risk of doing nothing is acceptable,.. well, do what you want. I'm making sure Me and Mine aren't living in low areas.

Even if you could point to a coming equivalent of a Maunder Minimum, could you really expect it to lead to temperatures as low as the 17th Century? Even if you could, it's a lot easier to add heat to a planetary environment than take it away.

Personally, looking at those charts I mentioned, it looks to me, if anything, that there is an upward trend for next 100 years or so, I find that somewhat terrifying.

indexdothtml

I'm sure that in all 8 pages of this thread's existence that this has been brought up, but the livestock industry creates more pollution (methane) than the transportation sector. And 89,000 pound of poop. Per second. So, cutting down on meat is also a really goot choice.

ChipSeal

If other planets are warming simultaneous to ours, it demonstrates that the cause of GW is solar activity. It shows that CO2 is not relevant to GW.

But rather than seeing the contrary evidence as something to give pause to your faith in GW being the result of America's evil, you demand that we do something to counter act solar activity. This is rich! Tell me, what is the optimum temperature of the world? What is the target temperature to be? Some regions of the world do better or worse than the rest at any given world temperature. Who is to decide the winners and the losers, even if managing world temperature's could be done?

El Julioso

That's a non-sequitur. If other planets are warming as well (and we have no numbers to support this assertion - they could be cooling for all we know), this would show that solar cycles are one influence on global mean temperatures - not that they are the only influence.

Nature... you know, the mechanisms that supported a pristine planet full of life for tens of millions of years before we figured out how to release carbon stores which Nature had very wisely buried... in just over a hundred years, we've managed to really screw things up. I think it quite obvious who is the better judge of what's best for the planet. In the human psyche, it seems, short-term profit and the saving of labour pwns long-term sustainability and morality.

Am I the only one who likes to breathe fresh air? Am I the only one who prefers water fresh? Why do some ignore the other negative effects of pollution?

ChipSeal

I find that an interesting statement. Are we separate of nature or are we a part of nature?

Since we evolved, we must be nature ourselves. Anything we do on the earth is just nature!

But if we are not part of nature, how do you suppose we came to be?

Leisesturm

Semantic, fatalist, psychobabble. Beneath you. Yes we evolved but when we became technologically capable of altering our environment as profoundly as we are able, including the ability to deliver a planet sterilizing dose of nuclear radiation, any resemblance to previous evolution ended. A new world order as it were. We are sitting on our hands and passing the buck on our own future. That is our prerogative of course but the real irony is the billions of unsolicited opinions not to mention the POV of other sentient life forms like the other high primates and the dolphins and the whales. The U.S., in particular has a long, inglorious, track record of acting unilaterally for the rest of creation (evolution). It just may be that the GW is beyond our abilities to manipulate but IMO long before we face the consequences of rising sea levels we are going to have to face the consequences of the incredible bio-load of industrial by-products that are as we speak destroying our ability to reproduce in numbers sufficient to maintain our population. That is correct, even as we debate "overpopulation" in this thread, human fertility rates are plummeting in industrialized nations as well as those unindustrialized nations that are used as testing/dumping areas for 'developed nations' that exploit them. The coming fertility crisis will ultimately trump GW in my opinion but the debate is good practice, no doubt there will be naysayers about HFC too when it goes public.

H

Alekhine

Pretty much what I thought when I read that: A pile of specious, high-abstraction, semantic sophistry.

El Julioso

We did indeed come from nature, but we are freaks. While we are just animals (with big brains), there is one thing that fundamentally sets us apart from all other species on the planet.

Other species change through biological evolution to survive in their environment.

We, on the other hand, have come to change the environment to suit our species.

This amount of power is huge. It gives us great potential for survivability, if used correctly. There is no type of power that comes without danger, however; if used incorrectly, our ability to modify our environment gives us great potential to destroy our survivability. Ironic... it's no wonder that self-destruction through one's own power is probably the single most prevalent theme in literature.

But there are some laws of nature to which we are still subject. Environmental changes kill things... even pushing some species to extinction. Even before we started screwing with things we don't know nearly enough about (or don't care about), species periodically went extinct (though they've started to do so at a greater rate since we started our meddling). Now I don't think that AGW, even in the worst-case scenario, will make our species go completely extinct, but it will kill a lot of us and make life considerably more miserable for those who remain. And ultimately, yes, this would be a phenomenon of "nature" - albeit a freakish one - since we evolved by its principles. But it's a phenomenon that, unlike any other species, we have the ability to change, and if more of us overcome obsession with short-term economics and easy solutions and think on a larger scale, then we may just get around to doing so.

ChipSeal

Good! At least we can agree on this then: Producing greenhouse gasses is not wrong or evil, it is natural.

coldfeet

Here's a question I haven't been able to answer with a quick google.

How does the Human population stack up against other animals in terms of total mass? That is, the Human population is around 6 billion. multiply that by an average weight...

Is there anything else that comes close?

Leisesturm

Plankton

coldfeet

Yeah... Insects, Plankton and the like, anything mammalian?

Roody

Not even you could really believe that. You're wasting our time and patience with silly and irrelevant arguments. Let's move along.....

Roody

I guess there are more pigs than people in Iowa.

Seriously, some individual species of insects are much more prevalent than humans in terms of biomass. Ants and termites, for example. Recent discoveries indicate that the largest source of biomass may be bacteria buried in the earth, by many orders of magnitude greater than biomass above the surface, perhaps. The bacteria cells in your own intestines are about the size of a basketball.

One frightening aspect of global warming is that nobody knows what will happen to these mostly unseen life forms as the climate changes. Altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere is to some extent the biggest biology experiment in history. We'll learn a lot about the conditions that various organisms can tolerate, including ourselves.

Roody

Basic scientific facts:

• Since solar energy is always being fed into the global system, that system will always heat until a balance is reached with energy that is reradiated into space.
• Carbon dioxide and certain other gases absorb infrared energy, which is the form in which solar energy is reradiated into space. This means that more solar energy is being held in the planet, causing an imbalance. Temperatures will ris until a new balance is reached.
• There are many indications that the earth's temperature is currently rising. Besides direct temperature measurements, other indications include observations of ice volume, migration and hibernation patterns of many animal species, and habitat range of other plant and animal species.

coldfeet

Yes, insects and bacteria are leaders in numbers and possibly mass. I wouldn't worry about insects as a group, some of their number will find a way to adapt. Us, on the other hand....

Roody

IMO, humans are far more adaptable than any other species.