[patriot_912]

Originally Posted by garret

global warming is caused by all the hot air that politicians pump out instead of actually doing a decent job

I agree with that!!!

[Ronnie]

WE may not be the cause for global warming but we are not helping things either.
We are the cause for all the chemicals in the ground water and trash in the oceans and just because we did not cause all this mess is no reason not to try to figure a better way of doing things that will leave our children a better place to live.

[Celticwarrior]

Shockingly enough, considering our differences of opinion in other threads, I find myself in 100% complete agreement with everything you just said, Taint. Will wonders never cease!!

Honestly, I have always been amazed at how arrogant people are to imagine themselves capable of "destroying the world". In truth, other than doing a pretty good job of killing off some other species, the only thing in danger of being wiped out is Humanity itself. The earth, and life, will keep on doing what it's done for ages before we ever popped up on the scene. We will be like trilobites, or dinosaurs, or dodos. We leave the scene, something else will come along and a new age will dawn. Sad for people, good for whatever comes next.

Originally Posted by TaintRight

You can spew tons of nitrous oxide from hundreds of thousands of cars in the LA metro area. You can make the sky turn a very unattractive orange color. At its peak you almost have to chew the air before breathing it. Then a simple wind change occurs (Santa Annas) and clears it all away in less than an hour and a half. So much for man.

You can cut down thousands of acres of Brazilian rain forest. And if you don't keep the trees cut back, it all immediately begins to grow back. Today there are more trees in the US than there were when the English settled Jamestown. This after massive deforestation of the east coast in the early 1800's.

Then we bathed the Chernobyl area with enough radiation to kill a cockroach. Today its a vibrant wilderness ecosystem.

The earth repairs itself quickly. Instantly in geological terms.

But these are petty local issues. Man certainly cannot effect global weather. Nothing man has ever done has changed the climate. Even the peak of our scientific mischievousness pals in comparison to what nature can and does do routinely. There aren't enough atomic bombs in all the arsenals in the world to equal the energy released by the earthquake that set off the Southeast Asian tsunami a few years back. We can't even duplicate the destructive power of a modest hurricane. In the other direction, we cannot even begin to duplicate the cooling effect of a Maunder Minimum. And when the ice begins to increase again on the poles (due to natural cycles that have been in effect for eons) , there will be nothing we can do to stop it. Don't believe me? Hold a seance and ask Eric the Red what happened to his deal in Greenland.

We are arrogant to think otherwise. And people who would have you believe otherwise are after either your money or your vote or both.

[Ron Fontaine]

Everything we do has some affect on the earth and the people who live on it.

Whatever God you choose to believe in, I sincerely doubt she condones trashing of the earth she created for us.

If we continue to fill the earth with toxic pollutants, what more can be expected than the degradation of the very environment we need to survive?

[B52gundog]

I've kinda wonder if the number of people on this planet has an affect on global warming. We're over 6.7 billion people world wide now. They don't have to do anything but breathe to heat up the atmosphere, ha ha.

I kinda relate it to being in a crowded room or auditorium where the room temperature can rise quickly if you don't already have the air conditioner working overtime.

[cowgirlup]

Saw a bumper sticker today.

It read:
"EARTH FIRST! We'll screw up the other planets later."

[scorch]

Originally Posted by cowgirlup

Saw a bumper sticker today.

It read:
"EARTH FIRST! We'll screw up the other planets later."

starting with mars/moon

[TaintRight]

Originally Posted by Ron Fontaine

Everything we do has some affect on the earth and the people who live on it.

Whatever God you choose to believe in, I sincerely doubt she condones trashing of the earth she created for us.

If we continue to fill the earth with toxic pollutants, what more can be expected than the degradation of the very environment we need to survive?

Since 1905 we have used hundreds of millions of rubber or synthetic tires on our cars and trucks. As the tires wear, how many billions of tons of black crud have we spewed into the atmosphere. There are not enough zeros to account for the total pollutants involved in this one example.

So where are the resulting piles of black dust? Where are the heaps of spent carbon and rayon deposited along our roads? There are none. Bacteria and other micro organisms consumed them as quickly as we could deposit them. Nature consumed what is toxic to us. Just as trees and weeds consume all the nasty old CO2 (this generation's New Wave end of the world toxin of choice). We are pipsqueaks compared to nature.

The TV show about life after man is telling. In 1,000 years you will be hard pressed to find evidence we were ever here. And 1,000 is a mere blink of an eye in geo terms. And after 50 years the only ways you can tell Bikini atoll was repeatedly H-Bombed are 1) looking at the cool news footage of the tests, 2) microanalyzing a subspecies of coconut growing there. All other evidence has been erased by nature.

So fear not fellow babies. We aren't near as powerful as the Al Gore's of the world want us to believe.

[Ron Fontaine]

Often I think some people are living on a different planet than the Earth I am living on!

Let's take smog for example. Smog from the Ohio area coal burning plants drifts with the prevailing winds to the Eastern United States where the Great North Woods is located. This in and of itself causes many health problems to those millions of people who are breathing this polluted air

Indeed, nature eventually takes care of the smog and it seems to disappear - however the smog is laden with mercury, a by product of burning this coal.

Many ponds and lakes in the Great North Woods are now contaminated with this mercury that originated from the coal fired plants. The mercury accumulates in the fish and animals as it moves up the food chain. I am constantly reminded of this when I read the notices posted to trees stating that is unsafe to eat these fish.

A high price to pay for energy, much of which is wasted anyway.

If you take a close look, nothing simply disappears. The chemicals and constituent parts - be they in smog, tires, or anything else - are going somewhere. Some are broken down, but other chemicals are going into the ground water, the ocean, the food chain, into the bodies of you and your grand children.

It's a cycle. Out of sight and out of mind doesn't make it go away.

The earth does have the capacity to heal itself, just your body can heal a cut you receive from your survival knife. Or two cuts. Or ten cuts even. But what about a thousand cuts, ten thousands cuts? At Some point even relatively minor injuries can cause the system to break down.

What happens when the earths system breaks down? The earth will of course still be here, but humans can expect mass starvation and even worse. It seems to me it would be a good idea to try and avoid this.

[Celticwarrior]

I don't believe that the people you are referring to don't actively want a cleaner, healthier planet, or recognize the damage humans are doing to it every second of every day, but that they feel the "moral imperative" of this Global Warming/Climate Change bandwagon has given the "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute" idea a totally different political spin, and it isn't for the "good of the planet". The idea of "Carbon Credits" for example. Ok, you want carbon out of the atmosphere, then shut down the polluting plant until they make changes to eliminate them! Instead, we have the idea of this same company CONTINUING to spew out CO2, but they pay some other company to plant trees in Bolivia or algae farms off the coast of Mexico or some such thing to "balance out the equation". The entire spurious idea that we have brought about a weather apocalypse within the past 200 years, based on flawed science and atmospheric data that standing alone cannot tell us it's cause, is what I personally have problems with. It's all based on interpretation.

Is it a shame that the world is getting warmer and polar bears might go extinct? Sure. But when the world warmed up after this last ice age and mammoths and wooly rhinos and smilodons went immediately extinct, it wasn't because of too many caveman fires. It was because their habitats went away with the glaciers. Today, we are at the very end of the last ice age and beginning the next warm cycle, and since we have never had to deal with that as a scientific culture, we don't know what effects that will have, nor are we able to say with certainty if any of the effects we ARE seeing are simply the natural processes of the warming cycle, or if we have pushed things along too quickly with our pollutants.

Should we work for clean, renewable energy? Should we try to clean up the messes we've made? Should we be concerned at the loss of habitat and species, especially the ones we have directly caused by deforestation and urban sprawl? Sure. I don't think anyone doubts that. I think that as time goes by, we will be active in cleaning up these messes just like today we are conscious of things like the effects of 18th and 19th century whaling for their oil, or the contamination of land and ground water from heavy metals used in gold and silver mining, or the recovery of timberlands that were stripped bare by lumberjacks 100 years ago. I just don't personally buy the idea that we have only moments to spare before the end of the world is nigh, simply because the temperature has risen in SOME places beyond the historic norms. I'll tell ya, I just had a pair of 38 degree nights here, and if there is "global warming", I wish it would come visit Michigan for a while!

Originally Posted by Ron Fontaine

Often I think some people are living on a different planet than the Earth I am living on!

Let's take smog for example. Smog from the Ohio area coal burning plants drifts with the prevailing winds to the Eastern United States where the Great North Woods is located. This in and of itself causes many health problems to those millions of people who are breathing this polluted air

Indeed, nature eventually takes care of the smog and it seems to disappear - however the smog is laden with mercury, a by product of burning this coal.

Many ponds and lakes in the Great North Woods are now contaminated with this mercury that originated from the coal fired plants. The mercury accumulates in the fish and animals as it moves up the food chain. I am constantly reminded of this when I read the notices posted to trees stating that is unsafe to eat these fish.

A high price to pay for energy, much of which is wasted anyway.

If you take a close look, nothing simply disappears. The chemicals and constituent parts - be they in smog, tires, or anything else - are going somewhere. Some are broken down, but other chemicals are going into the ground water, the ocean, the food chain, into the bodies of you and your grand children.

It's a cycle. Out of sight and out of mind doesn't make it go away.

The earth does have the capacity to heal itself, just your body can heal a cut you receive from your survival knife. Or two cuts. Or ten cuts even. But what about a thousand cuts, ten thousands cuts? At Some point even relatively minor injuries can cause the system to break down.

What happens when the earths system breaks down? The earth will of course still be here, but humans can expect mass starvation and even worse. It seems to me it would be a good idea to try and avoid this.