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True. That's because before then, people were overhunting them. So we're not killing them as badly with global warming as we were with bullets. Their populations are still expected to fall to 2/3rds of today's levels by 2050 at the current rate of course. But since we've switched to murdering them with gases instead of solids, I'm sure they'll be fine!

Are you sure you're not conflating palm and soy cultures here ? The latter is actually responsible for a bigger share of the deforestation.

We are already 'engineering the climate' - we're just doing it randomly and without plan.

If the price of oil goes down and everybody starts burning more of it, we're engineering the climate with more CO2.

If we chop down hundreds of square miles of amazon rain forest and replace it with cattle ranches we're engineering the climate with more methane.

If we want to start engineering the climate in a more directed manner, we MUST control these activities as well. Trying to control some of the strings while others are being yanked in a haphazard manner is not a practical approach.

The Kyoto Protocol has many critics - and with reason. It is clumsy, largely ineffectual and tainted by accusations of corruption. But real practical climate engineering will only be achieved by some sort international cooperation along these lines.

Now that we've solved the problem of feeding seals, let's tag those seals so that polar bears (who are in serious decline) can get their share.

Are you SURE polar bears are in serious decline?

Global population of polar bears has increased by 2,650-5,700 since 2001

IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group says its global population estimate was “a qualified guess”

Yes

You're welcome to eat your words now.

Here we go again, with the same idiotic line of thinking that brought us "Blackfish". I wonder if these people are trolling or just really this ignorant.

Activist claim: Working with captive cetaceans endangers trainers.
Reality: Cell tower technicians fall to their death all the time (who knew LTE had to be paid for with blood?). Can we at least agree advancing our understanding of marine mammals and inspiring future generations to give a damn might be worth at least as much blood as being able to Tweet about Miley Cyrus twerking? Also, it's probably possible to be accidentally killed in just about any line of work.

Activist claim: Captive cetaceans would have a better life if freed.
Reality: Not even close. Over 300,000 whales, dolphins, and porpoises are killed each as a result of by-catch. Also, pollution.

Activist claim: But think of the animals!
Reality: Yes, think of the animals in the wild, you lazy sorry sack of shit. You know, like the ones in Africa being illegally poached. Oh sure, you might have to travel to a place that's a bit rougher of a neighborhood than Orlando or San Diego to protest that and put yourself at risk of being shot, but think of the animals, amiright?

Activist claim: Seaworld is just an evil profit driven empire, hell bent on the exploitation of animals.
Reality: Humanity has already fucked things up pretty bad for animals in the wild (warning: graphic content). We're past the point of taking a "hands off" approach and hoping things just go back to being peachy keen for our fine feathered and flippered friends. Seaworld exists to educate, inspire and inform people that they need to care about these animals today, or the only place we'll see them tomorrow will be in photographs and videos. They also (unlike most of these armchair activists), actually get off their ass and help animals.

And your credibility dropped to zero by conflating water with pollution. Here's one of the first results when I googled man-made chemicals. I've previously read that there over 100,000 man-made chemicals released into the environment. If you know of a better word than chemical to use, BTW, please let me know. Here's an overview of the current mass extinction event, started about 10,000 years ago when man really started getting down to wiping out animals, burning forrests for agriculture, etc. It's a selective list. Here's a list of man-made extinctions, or at least the documented ones. Googling is hard, but thankfully I was here to do it for you.

There are no Polar Bears drowning and the ice sheets are bigger.

According to the WWF, there are 19 distinct populations of polar bears. 7 out of 19 populations are declining, 5 out of 19 populations are stable, and the rest there's not enough evidence to determine population status. They also list climate change as one of the primary threats to the polar bear population. You may be technically correct though, in that the polar bears tend to starve to death (or die from malnutrition complications) rather than actually drowning.

There are no Polar Bears drowning and the ice sheets are bigger.

According to the WWF, there are 19 distinct populations of polar bears. 7 out of 19 populations are declining, 5 out of 19 populations are stable, and the rest there's not enough evidence to determine population status. They also list climate change as one of the primary threats to the polar bear population. You may be technically correct though, in that the polar bears tend to starve to death (or die from malnutrition complications) rather than actually drowning.

This page shows how the WWF thinks it will happen. The problem is that the only mention of electric grid technology is the following statement

including a massive increase in capacity for generating wind, solar and geothermal power, plus all the new power lines and cables to transmit electricity over long distances.

They completely ignore that fact that there are limits on how far power can be sent. HVDC lines do help but one needs pretty big ones if most of the solar and wind powered generators in Norther Europe are down due to a long storm. I believe there should be much more research into storage technologies so we can store a few days power to get us through bad days.

I could not find a simulation on that page.

The fallacy that green electricity pundits state is that green power is zero emission. They forget that there are conventional plants burning at standby power just in case the green energy generators can not meet demand. Less greenhouse gasses are emitted but not zero greenhouse gasses. I laugh at the "But I am using wind generated power". That just means that instead of you and someone else using 50/50 wind and conventional power the other person is using 100% conventional power. It makes people feel good but has no impact.

jklovanc wrote:

This is an issue with people who tout solar as the solution to our power needs. ... ... There is no way to turn up solar when one needs it. ... So while the solar panels are supplying the energy there are conventional plants still spewing greenhouse gasses just in case they are needed.

It's not necessary that solar provide 100% of electric demand. Conventional power plants can dynamically reduce power production levels to meet base demand shortfalls. However, with a smart grid there are computer simulation models which show that it should be possible to provide 100% renewable production, cutting out fossil fuel power plants entirely.

This may be too optimistic. Regardless, the notion that coal and gas fired power plants must burn at peak on standby, thereby wasting power, is clearly false.

nice theory, but I think it doesn't quite hold up. Specifically cheap doesn't mean better for the environment.
eg. http://wwf.panda.org/who_we_are/wwf_offices/china/environmental_problems_china/
unfortunately much of what is cheap today is only on loan from future clean-up-costs. That is not factored in the costs now. Not even a bit.

However, cheap is better in other ways.
Drink water from a creek.
Cool off by sweating.
Sit on the ground.

I also suspect that the longevity of an electric car (besides the battery) can outlast a conventional one by a long time given there are so many fewer parts. So quality plays into it. I think it is a simplification that electric cars are more expensive. They probably will not remain that way from a price point either. I think that it is foolish to think that batteries are equivalent to consumable like gasoline. There are similarities, of course, but they are very different.

Even with rough calculations of other technologies, take something recent that has changed quite a bit, like plasma tvs - 10 years ago, they were $10k or more - now, a much better one is available for $1k. If electric cars follow that trend, they will be $5k-$10k in 10 years, and they will be better. The people today buying these are allowing that technology to develop. The people who aren't are possibly Luddites.

You don't need a big explosion to have something that qualifies as a great dying. We could have already done it, by some definition

is here. Contains lots of nice, big, hard to interpret charts and stuff.

>>10,000 species a day sounds pretty hyperbolic to me.

The actual numbers vary pretty widely, but that's what was tossed at us when I was in zoo school back in the 1980s (at the San Diego Zoo, no less).

Just a quick browse on the WWF site reveals that in the time it takes you to read this sentence, another species will have gone extinct!

http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/

They're saying here 50,000 per year, but honestly nobody really knows any numbers, so they just make up statistics and call it fact. Here's there pulled-out-of-their-ass guesswork in a nutshell:
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/

"IF we are losing just 0.1% of species a year and IF there are a million species on the planet..."

Yeah.

>>10,000 species a day sounds pretty hyperbolic to me.

The actual numbers vary pretty widely, but that's what was tossed at us when I was in zoo school back in the 1980s (at the San Diego Zoo, no less).

Just a quick browse on the WWF site reveals that in the time it takes you to read this sentence, another species will have gone extinct!

http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/

They're saying here 50,000 per year, but honestly nobody really knows any numbers, so they just make up statistics and call it fact. Here's there pulled-out-of-their-ass guesswork in a nutshell:
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/

"IF we are losing just 0.1% of species a year and IF there are a million species on the planet..."

Yeah.

River deltas house some unique ecosystems. Has anyone done an environmental impact study on using something like this?

See

http://www.panda.org/about_our_earth/ecoregions/about/habitat_types/selecting_freshwater_ecoregions/habitat17.cfm

Bullshit. Have you seen how rice is grown?

Grown by whom? The Fukuoka method only floods fields temporarily, and gets very high yields. The SRI method also uses much less water than traditional rice farming.

And much of the water used to flood a traditional rice paddy ends up irrigating other crops down the line.

Figures from the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) put water consumption in food production as follows, in m^3/kg:

• Beef (grain fed): 15
• Lamb: 10
• Poultry: 6
• Cereals: 0.4 - 3
• Citrus fruits: 1
• Palm oil: 2
• Pulses, roots and tubers: 11

Coal + sequestration is still *significantly* cheaper than solar and will be for the next 20 years at least.

That's because coal is subsidized and external costs are passed on the everyone, whether they use coal or not. If coal plants had to make it on their own and pay for their Externalities electricity costs would be a lot higher. Heck, even the Nuclear Power Industry uses coal's external costs as a selling point.

And dont mention Hydro.
The greenies hate that because it destroys habitats. :)

Some don't like hydro because frequently dams do not live up to their promise or the costs out weight the benefits [pdf]. "World Commission on Dams Report vindicates unjustifiability of large dams".

There is some regulation to carbon credits. The CDM Executive Board awards a 'Gold Standard' to carbon offset programs that meet their stringent criterion. Details

BRUSSELS, Belgium, October 20, 2004 (ENS) - The blood of ministers from 13 European Union countries is contaminated with dozens of industrial chemicals, including some that were banned decades ago. The officials have an average of 37 industrial chemicals in their blood, according to tests conducted in June and released Tuesday by the international conservation organization WWF.

The chemicals found in the European officials include those used in fire resistant sofas, non-stick pans, grease proof pizza boxes, flexible polyvinyl chloride, fragrances and pesticides.

-- http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-20 -10.asp

And:

The results further show that the highest number of chemicals in one person was 54, while the median number of chemicals detected was 41. At least 13 of the same chemicals were found in every single person tested, including chemicals banned in Europe over 20 years ago as well as chemicals in widespread use today such as phthalates and perfluorinated compounds.

-- http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/policy/t oxics/news/index.cfm?uNewsID=12622

Moyers' own "results" were the result of blood and urine tests. A combined total of 84 out of 150 they were looking for. And the details of what they are were not released, other than a few "eye popper" ones such as DDT. See http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/bodyburden .html for details. Urine tests reveal chemicals leaving the body and do not necessarily represent a sustained level of toxicity. There are substances the body passes through without using ... like corn kernels. ;) Thus, the presence of a substance in a urine sample does not mean the substance had any effect on the body.

Many of the "industrial chemicals" listed include things like the paint or wood finish you buy at your local hardware store, or the weed killer you buy from the store. News articles tend to downplay those. Note the distinct lack of details (in teh news articles) beyond the headline grabbers such as DDT. Why is that? DDT gets attention due to the great DDT scare/hoax. But as even the above referenced studies state regarding DDT:

Thus far, there is no conclusive evidence that exposure to DDT and its breakdown products at the levels found in the environment, affects reproduction and development in humans. The possible association between exposure to DDT and various types of cancers in humans has been extensively studied, particularly breast cancer, but no link has yet been established.

This is like other chemicals/substances where you only read/hear about them saying things like "In high concentrations/doses...". Why? because small doses/exposure does not show the dramatic effects. News flash: Dihydrogen oxide in high doses/concentrations

the rights if animals are not zero. but the rights of animals also do not rise to the rights of your fellow human beings

A video of the new species on this page.

Let's assume the technical problems of switchgrass-to-ethanol are solved, and we can actually get the 10,000 litres/ha yield (which is actually a net yield of something more like 7,500 if you take into account EROI). The USA uses roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day - that's 3,200 million litres per day (just for simplicity, we'll assume a litre of ethanol is equivalent to a litre of crude). So you need 320,000 hectares - 800,000 acres - just for one day's crude demand. To produce a year's demand, you'd need 292 million acres of switchgrass. That is a equivalent to a square 675 miles to a side, and nearly four times the area on which corn is currently grown.

With regards to stream-bed hydro, my point is simply that the energy extracted from it - worldwide - will be lost in the noise. It is such an irrelevancy to global energy demand as to not be worth more than a moment's consideration for anybody other than the vanishingly small number of people who can benefit from it.

While there may be plenty of individual environmentalists who are comfortable with nuclear power (indeed, I would count myself as such a person), every single one of the major environmental organizations have opposition to nuclear power as a policy and as an active campaign. As a semi-random sample, we have:

• Greenpeace
• The Sierra Club
• World Wide Fund For Nature
• The Green Party of the USA - indeed, pretty much every party thus titled around the world.
• To give an international perspective for you, in Australia, the premier environmental NGO is the Australian Conservation Foundation, who are strongly opposed

Maybe there are internal debates about the topic currently going on in these organizations, but if so it hasn't resulted in any actual changes in policy yet.

Valuable footage is given by the WWF. One scenario is that with a "business as usual" approach the planet is eaten up by appr. 2050. So, keeping in mind that there is a time lag from thinking over action until implementation until effect, we may conclude what?

CC.

It is nnot only global warming, it is eating up resources as well. The Living Planet Report 2006 gives some insight.

From the site: Effectively, the Earth's regenerative capacity can no longer keep up with demand - people are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources.

CC.

tree farms

WWF has an article about it. I picked it up somewhere else though...

To be honest I always thought you had the more sturdy greyish TP to be recycle and "economical", but they are alot more expensive.

Regular TP packaging -here in Belgium- rarely states it's manufactured out of recycled paper, only that its packaging is recyclable...
I don't manufacture TP myself, so I honestly wouldn't be able to say for certain. But I couldn't find a statement on the internet of someone who actually does.

And then I will order 3,000 WWF 'Slam Down' collector plates using your Paypal account.

What does "Slam Down" have to do with wildlife conservation?

From the article:

Mobile phones contain a number of potentially dangerous substances, such as arsenic, cadmium, ZINC and lead, which can harm the environmental if the handset is not disposed of in a responsible manner.

Oh really? So, why in the world is there this incredible push to make lead-free devices, when it appears that the zinc alloys seem to be the most-likely substitute for lead?

I'm fairly green myself. The question I have is, why adopt whack-a-mole policies that are likely to replace current problems with other problems?

I made a more accurate cinematic version of the epic poem for my high school English class, entitled "The Beo Wulf Project." With WWF wrestling

WWF? You wrestled pandas?

Not that this isn't an extremely impressive move, but seriously - they're going to spend all this money trying to compete with NASA to get to Mars? Yes, the fulfilment of human greatness, scientific forethought and everything, but c'mon - I could think of a thousand better ways of spending that money. This is sad.

Yes and no. In the US and Canada they're known as World Wildlife Fund, but in the rest of the world they've used the name "World Wide Fund for Nature" since 1986. The abbreviation and short name is WWF everywhere anyway and it's a registered trademark. It's still makes (some) sense as an abbreviation for "World Wide Fund for nature".

Look here for source. www.wwf.org is also in use, but is a fairly empty portal.

Clue: The people of the earth consumed 28 billion barrels of in one year while discovering only 8.5 billion barrels of oil to replace it.

Industrialization powered by oil caused this massive population increase. When the oil is only one half used up we are going to see "downsizing" as in massive die-off.

Solar

Solar PV generated power could provide 10,000 times more energy than the world currently uses.

Or perhaps more realistic approach:Pebble Bed Nuclear

Here is an option to switch to mostly renewable power

You're also the only one who still ... believes the WWF is real.

WWF is real. It's WWE that's fake.

That said, what would WWF say about a gene that could cause carp to go extinct worldwide should it somehow manage to be shipped out of Australia?

Again, these are EXCLUSIVES

Caps lock means you're so sure of the exclusivity of those titles...

Battlefield: 1942

1942 was on the NES.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Fact: Willow has appeared in an NES game.

Ninja Gaiden

Not an exclusive. It has appeared on the NES. It's also coming to the Game Boy Advance, in a slightly modified form (different story because of unavailability of characters for licensing, but classic Ninja Gaiden gameplay is still there) as Return of the Ninja. ("Gaiden" means "sequel".)

Robotech

Fact: 1-800-Robotech was the phone number for Quarterdeck Software, publisher of the QEMM memory manager for DOS. US telephones don't have Q or Z in the mnemonic labels on their number keys, which is why Blizzard's American phone number had the word "SNOW" at one time.

Superman: Man of Steel

Superman appeared in a rather crappy (to put it lightly) Nintendo 64 title. What makes this new Xbox version so much better? (question, not flamebait)

Unreal Championship

Isn't that just UT or UT2003 adapted for a console? If so, I might as well run UT on my Quake/MAME cabinet.

WWF RAW 2

Panda wrestling?

Halo alone is worth the price of the [Xbox] console right there.

Super Smash Bros. Melee is worth the price of a GameCube console right there, and in a couple months, the GameCube will be getting its own Halo killer, called Metroid Prime.

If I had to choose between Halo and 50 PS2 games, the choice would be clear.

I thought of another bad PS/2 joke. Once Bochs is ported to PS2 Linux, does that mean that the Sony PS2 can in effect become a PS-Slash-2?

What's wrong with Bhuddists watching the World Wildlife Foundation? Oh, you must have meant WWE.

Don't believe that report, don't believe the
next one, be reasonable.

Sometimes humanity makes me sick. We Europeans aren't much better than you Americans (we use half as much energy per head, which of course is still 10-100 times more than the 3rd World.) And the third world of course can't be held back: China and India and the Pacific Rim are /developing/ countries.

Sorry for the pessimistic rant. But seeing the jokey responses to this story fills me with despair.