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Ocean Sponge May Be Best for Fiber Optics
TheViffer writes "ABC News is reporting that scientists say they've identified an ocean sponge, living in the darkness of the deep sea, that grows thin glass fibers capable of transmitting light better than industrial fiber optic cables used for telecommunication. 'You can actually tie a knot in these natural biological fibers and they will not break - it's really quite amazing,' said Joanna Aizenberg, who led the research at Bell Laboratories."
Once again, nature outdoes our best attempts at copying it.
Refuse to make a statement in your sig!
Cool, fiber optics up to 7 inches long! That'll be effective! I can finally connect my computer to... uhh... to my uhh... what the hell, 7 inches! WTF!
Hrmm... what lives in a pineapple under the sea... sponge bob fiber light... wait no.. er... DOH!
Are we still allowed to copy nature? I thought reverse engineering was made illegal under the DMCA.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
yet another specie we can drive to extinction in the name of technology.
But seriously, won't this sponge smell funny especially when trunking it in dark and dry spaces like under floorings?
Just a thought.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Now, this is the sort of thing that makes you wonder why we spend so little effort studying our oceans. While I am all for space exploration and research, we should also spend considerably more effort to understand what is in our oceans, how they work and what effects we are having on them.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
EE 1: We need a better fiberoptic cable.
EE 2: Let's look at organisms deep in the ocean!
EE 1: That's just crazy enough to work!
Long ago, Ma Bell pressurized the long distance cabling with air to keep the conductors dry. What would they have to do with these, pressurize them with seawater?
The paper in Nature about on this research says the sponge fibers are more fracture resistant than commercial fibers because of a layer of organic ligands at the fiber's exterior. Now if we can just genetically engineer them to grow a few hundered miles in length...
Quoting the article: Ocean Sponge's Glass Fibers Transmit Light Faster Than Man-Made Fiber Optics, Scientists Say
So, c>c? Damn, those are some pretty impressive sponges!
In the future, all spacecraft will be made of cheese.
Glass still works great and I still don't have any fiber coming to my doorstep. Perhaps we should get it there (and to other households) before we start looking to replace and upgrade what we allready have. Besides that, everything's great with the new discovery.
SCO announced that their name actually stands for "Sponge, Cable - Optic" and asserts they evolved this function first, 23 million years ago.
First SCO post!
Does anyone know where I can pick up some Athlon seeds?
But do they glow in the dark in slowly changing multi-colored patterns. That's the important thing.
Mother Nature, so, like...uh...rocks!
... if scientists could reproduce what the sponges are doing synthetically in a lab. This way we could have our new form of fiber optic without killing tons of sponges.
Nature does things for a reason...I wonder why this creature uses fibre optic to anchor itself to the ocean floor. I doubt it is using the fibre optic to communicate...Perhaps it is using it because it happens to also be very flexible and strong at the same time, the fact that it could also be used for transporting light is a co-incidence.
Who makes fiberglass cables under the sea?
SPONGEBOB GLASSPANTS!
Flexible, clear, with sodium has he.
SPONGEBOB GLASSPANTS!
If flexible fibers be something you wish,
Dive under the ocean and look for some fish!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This is why we shouldn't just cream the biosphere- who knows how many absolutely cool techs lurk under the rocks.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
---
WARNING:Slashdot karma not redeemable in the afterlife.
[sarcasm] Silly me. I'd forgotten that it's unfashionable to appreciate a tree (flower, sponge, animal) for its own sake and nothing else. [/sarcasm]
Snarky comments aside, I do hope that discoveries like this one will once again illustrate why we need to be better conservators of what is, so far, the only planet we've got.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
...now Verizon customer service is gonna be all, "Sorry, sir, it will take a week for us to replace the sponge."
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
It is astounding that no matter how much advance we make technically, nature has developed/evolved a solution better than anything that we can produce.
Of course you wouldn't harvest them for their 2 to 7 inch long bits of fibre optic.
You try and replicate the process the sponges use. It at least shows it is possible to make the stuff at cold temperatures, which as the article states (which you obviously didn't bother comprehending, and probably reading) makes doping the glass easier.
I live on a blue nest of CAT5 you insensitive clod!
by learning how the sponges, make their fiber optics we can improve how we make our own. Also we could gene-splice this into a sheep or other farm animale.
Not a problem probably. The benefit comes with ideas on how to fake it; naturally grown 7" segments aren't going to be very useful.
Maybe they'll start incubating genetically modified ocean sponges that grow much larger. I can see a cool horror movie being made here...
SCO recently copyrighted Walrus DNA, and both creatures use the pattented Symmetric Multi-Cell technology.
Anyone using a sea sponge better pay up and admit their blatent violation of others' IP.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
What use does this have in the real world?
"Sponges grow in the ocean. That kills me. Make's me wonder how much deeper it'd be if that didn't happen."
Yes, just look at those moon-beavers, they were colonizing outer space before we even developed powered flight!
Sory, I couldn't resist the snide comment. You are mostly right, but in certain cases we have done far better than the rest of nature. Yes, that's right, we're part of nature, too.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Or would that be SPCP?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
My Niece has been trying for months to get me to sit down and watch SpongeBob SquarePants.
She says Spongies RULE....
Maybe she's been onto something all along...
do() || do_not();
Tahts not waht you're WIFE told meh last nighnt.
Bicht
As the sea is overfished, fishermen resort to more drastic measures, such as bottom trawling, in order to make a catch. Unfortunately, bottom trawling scrapes lots of interesting beasties off the seafloor. These creatures have the potential for providing novel medications and who knows what kind of cool tech. Even if you ignore the environmental impact (and many do when there is a dollar on the line), it is short-sighted since the potential profits from discovery are so large. Think about how much money a new drug can make...
I realize that the people doing the fishing are not the biotech researchers, and I know that if I even suggested some sort of regulation I would flamed right crispy.
I don't have a solution that would make everyone happy, but I do think there is a big problem.
Now all they have to do is avoid the boats with monkey fights, the gay party cruises, and boats that are selling Alcahol on Sundays.
Ahh, the things you learn from the Simpsons.
MBCook - Going anon because this probably isn't funny
You think nature is so smart. Bah! Nature can't destroy, pollute, and decimate the planet as fast as we can, so there. What took 500+ million years to develop, we can eradicate and wipe out in decades. Barring an outside influence such as a nearby supernova or a 30 km asteroid impact, let's see mother nature match that!
We got mother nature by the balls...er...titties!
MMMMmmmmm, is that sponge related to psychadelic mushrooms?
That's what they called it in Babylon Five.
Frank Herbert wrote about the exact same thing in his book "The Ascension Factor." Only there it was sentient kelp. The coolest part was how the kelp could create ultra realistic holograms. Wouldn't that be an interesting twist on display technology?
to "internet cleaning day"
Thank god aliens haven't discovered that humans grow the best spligduglizacks.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Today we have this thing called biotechnology. We only need a few of them (the sponges) to isolate the gene(s) of interest and use something more plentiful (bacteria/yeast/chinese hamster ovaries) to manufacture it.
If you're wondering Chinese Hamster Ovaries are pretty much the standard in the manufacture of human proteins. I grow them in Bioreactors (fancy jars) everyday.
Another sea creature to Exploit and deplete from our oceans :(
I hope this isn't in any way related to sponge bob :-)
Help Fight SPAM today!
Is it just me or does anyone else see the sponge-monster-of-doom's tentacles breaking out of the ground to kill us all?
Yea. I'm going to go self-medicate now.
Considering that these sponges aren't exactly easy to find (like orb spiders), the research should take much longer. But my oh my, imagine the applications: fiber that is as durable as ethernet. Wow.
A little word of caution with it to keep our oceans free from mindless commercial exploitation would have been good
You're just jealous? =P
I for one welcome our new ocean sponge overlords!
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Man does she has a mouth and jaw made for cock sucking, no? I', gonna pound my pudd right now!!!!
That's the idea. In fact, I would say that nano-technology will be nothing more the DNA programmed manufacturing through the use of cellular life. Imagine for a moment... rather then compiling your source code of engineering into binary bits, you compile the source into DNA strands that instruct the cells to produce the compounds and materials you wish to manufacture.
Life is not for the lazy.
So once again we're sponging off Mother Nature.
AIIIIIIEEEE NOOOOOOOOO! *continues to move mouth soundlessly for several minutes afterward*
--Ryv
-
Tangent, Go!
Obviously, you couldn't patent the invention of banging two rocks together, since our ancestors did it.
Sponges are the most primitive Metazoans (multicelled organisms.) All animal life is descended from one sort or another of Sponge.
Our closest single-celled relatives are little buggers called Choanoflagellates, by the way.
Did the particular sponges from which we are descended make this stuff, I wonder? Probably not, since they presumably lived in relatively shallow salt water before evolving into worms.
My suspicion, which is pure speculation, is that these sponges make the glass fibers enzymatically, at some stage or another. Of course any enzymatic process would be difficult (to say the least,) to duplicate.
More tangential! If the glass itself is somehow secreted, made by enzymes, it ought to be POLARISING glass - because all the copies of a given enzyme must have the same handedness. That strikes me as totally awesome, for some reason.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Is there any thing that bell labs will not bring to us geeks? Think about it they have done alot..
projects @ http://spectechnologies.net
Great. 25 years from now, some company from Utah will be demanding I purchase a license to wash my dishes.
No matter how amazing these natural optic fibers are, coding during bath time is NOT a good idea...
That's why I have my rubber ducky with 802.11b support...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
...that god-awful Sponge-Bob parody video from AlbinoBlackSheep.com stuck in my head...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I'd like to find the person who modded this up an beat him to death with high school physics books.
Now all they need is to find natural sponges that are many kilometers wide.
Time travel is possible. We are quickly heading for 1984.
Oh my god, that is so funny. I just finished watching SpongBob Squarpants. Thanks man, I needed to laugh that hard. You're a genius.
You wouldn't even try to replicate it. You would use GM to genetically modify some bacteria so that you can let the natural processes manufacture it for you in long strands.
GM does have uses. Too bad illegitimate scientists try to put a stigma on it.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
welcome our sponge overlords!
I'm a techie, and I find stuff like this interesting of course -- I love the idea of optical communication, personally.
But I really fear that a sea creature such as this could be exploited. Imagine there's another tech boom, and everyone's out to capture these thingies. Is it really worth wiping out species just so we can get faster porn?
what made them try?
"Hey Bob, we got another load of crap from the bottom on that trawl. want me to throw it overboard?"
"Nah, let's try hooking part of it up to our router and see what happens!"
Those clever scientists never cease to amaze me.
Wrong!
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Naked, probably in the neighborhood of 300 pounds, and likely complete with frank and beans, all while posting to slashdot. You better find a lube and kleenex wholesaler, there.
Matter of fact, with a pickup line like "*drool* so like, you have any pictures hot stuff" I wonder why you don't just hit the bars and get your shwerve on with all the ladies.
You'll notice they they are attched to the
ocean floor at node points.
They are actually information receptors
for the alien undersea culture that has
been hiding from us since we spawned.
Of course.. I haven't watched
TV in almost 3 years so....
I'm a tech *sigh* I spend 3-8 hours a day
tracking information on the web.
(I've replaced my cartoon fix with slashdot)
Oh like no one has ever removed a sponge from the ocean and sold it in a store.
It'd be more hassle than it's worth
to patch a half a klick of 7 inch strands
together.
RTFArticle
And the really sad thing is these big companies making money out of studying nature aren't doing jack shit to protect that environment.
som OSS zealot will soon call for god to GNU GPL sponges.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I always knew Sponge Bob Squarepants worked for Nortel! ;-)
-psy
It would be fun to figure out how improbable it is that nature developed something this useful.
This, naturally, has already been discussed at length in THHGTTG
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
Good thing Bell Labs is looking for science at the bottom of the ocean, because that's pretty much where their organization is headed.
Sure you would harvest them,,imagine the wild dildo's you could make ..
The 2'' ones you could sell to the Japanese.
Well, as far as I knew, the main problem with current fiber optic technology is that we can't send/receieve/ and process information fast enough to even use our _current_ fiber technology efficiently. That is, we still can't/aren't using the maximum bandwidth from current technology, regardless of this new technology.
What's the index of refraction, as compared to glass fibre? This is one of the factors that limits flexability, and is really quite important.
-twb
What was okay a long time when there were fewer people does not make the same action valid today.
It adds up very fast now when you factor in a 6,000,000,000+ multiplier.
These researchers did not need to put a delicate deep sea ecosystem into danger. As I'm sure yoo have read, almost all (97%) of the fiber in the USA is NOT EVEN BEING USED. It was overbuilt. So rather than USE WHAT WE HAVE, it is better to go and plunder the sea and kill more sea life.
Finding new justifications to plunder nature is not moral, it's not even intelligent. We are putting the very ecosystem that sustains human life at risk because science has gone crazy and thinks they are masters of the universe. With global warming, pollution and the many other woes that face humanity due to industrialization, it is difficult not to think that science has been arrogant and foolhardy in their quest for knowledge.
There are now dietary consumption warnings for many large oceanfish due to the levels of mercury that they contain. Each too much tuna or swordfish and you will die.
China has poisoned a giant bay of nearly all sea life in their mad rush to industrialize, due to their dumping untreated waste into the bay.
As you know, many parts of the world have clothing requirements to go out into the sun due to lack of ozone.
You are fooling yourself if you think the environment is not in danger and that human beings are not dependent on the environment.
America is the largest polluter on the planet. And the recently backed out of the Kyoto agreement. Isn't it time America realized what they are doing to the planet? And took responsibility for it?
wonder why we spend so little effort studying our oceans.
Deep sea diving doesn't get you laid like riding thousands of pounds of burning rocket fuel into LEO. I bet those astronauts live like Wilt Chamberlain when they're back on the ground.
That is replicating it. Biological processes are common in industry (well so they claimed when advertising the biochemistry courses before I gave up on chem. eng. and transferred to CS).
This is one reason why we should be keeping more of the research money on terra firma. As far as helping humankind, the oceans have much more to offer than Mars or a passing meteor or a distant galaxy (at least at this point). I'm not saying that stuff isn't academically enriching, but it doesn't (directly) solve our earth-bound problems.
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
hey it's worked three times in the past two years, I'm not going to argue ;) only one turn down.
If we take the sponges out of the ocean, do you know how much more water there would be? Our poor coastal cities... Think about our poor coastal cities.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
So vnv sez:
Something or other. I wasn't paying attention, as I was too busy REVVING THE MOTOR OF MY HUMMER!
Now SHUT UP and consume MORE AMERICAN CULTURE AND PRODUCTS!
I swear, you foreigners just don't know your place in the grand scheme of things.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
SpongeBob Squarepants is doomed!
In other news, SCO has patented my loofa. It costs me $699 just to take a shower!
Well, personally, I don't think I smell all that bad.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
n/t
That's all fine and good, but don't let PETA find out.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Sponge Fiber Goats
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
can it sustain a rototiller attack by some broke-ass farmer in central Texas? SWBell: "You've severed a major fiber pipeline!" farmer: "Que?" SWBell: "..."
Ok yeah the ocean has a lot of water in it. But guess what ? Before any pollutants can be dispersed into the deep abyss they hit the continental shelves, which is where a lot of the life is, and you know what the shelves are not that wide and not that deep so the pollutants are still pretty concentrated. Gees, sport, think before you type. Its a no-brainer. As for the rest of the ocean its mostly barren (or just not many critters per square metre). I don't know how much marine life depends on the continental shelves but I would think it would be a considerable amount since it is often the site of upwellings.
Bitter and proud of it.
welcome our new poriferan masters!
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
The ocean is far huger than you give credit. The effects we have on the ocean are incredibly small compared to the effects of volcanoes, earthquakes, and the sun.
Then why have cod stocks crashed?
We don't have to fish throughout the entire ocean. We wait at locations where fish tend to gather.
The same applies to pollution. The volume of the ocean is huge. The surface area of the ocean is less huge. Mixing between upper and lower layers is actually quite small (among other things this is why people have been proposing that CO2 be sequestered down there; whether or not this is practical is left as an exercise to the reader). More importantly, regions of the ocean that have a linchpin effect on its biology can be very small indeed compared to the whole (fishing areas off the grand banks are a great example).
They are proving that no matter what we dump into the atmosphere, it has little to no effect.
You apparently live close enough to the equator that you haven't noticed the need for extra sunscreen vs. when you were a kid.
The solar flares we are experiencing are tiny, even during the so-called solar peaks. A larger than normal solar flare would literally burn our atmosphere off. The atmosphere is such a small, delicate part of our earth that many people are wondering why we still have one.
Earth holds an atmosphere because the mean velocity of molecules within it is much lower than escape velocity. The real question is why we don't have a much _thicker_ one (and that's explained by the oceans assisting in converting much of it to minerals). In order for the atmosphere to be boiled off in less than geologic time, temperature would need to increase several-fold, requiring solar light flux to increase by an order of magnitude or two (as a physicist, you are aware of the laws governing radiative heat loss). This is more along the lines of "going nova" than "having a flare".
In summary, the points you make that I'm in a position to speak about are questionable. This raises concern about the other points you have made, which I'm sure others more knowledgeable than I will comment on.
Sponges can also reproduce asexually by use of extensive regeneration; they reproduce asexually from fragments broken off the parent sponge.
I work in a research group that did some stuff in this field a couple of years ago. I didn't work directly on the sponge spicules and I'm not at the lab so some of this info is only as accurate as my memory.
Pretty much all sponges contain small glass needles called spicules which primarily act as a deterrent to being eaten. Some species of Antarctic sponges evolved spicules to the point of using them as light collectors. The species we were working with (can't recall the scientific name right now) lives about 100m below the ocean surface where there is virtually no light. Despite this, the sponge is dependent upon a symbiotic relationship with algae living inside of it.
Unlike normal sponges that have spiclues 90% light gathering efficiency over something like a 200 degree angle. The light is then concentrated and piped down that long body of the spicule where it shines onto the algae so they can photosynthesize.
What makes these fibers quite unique is their durability and construction technique. As mentioned, you can tie a loose overhand knot into these fibers and they not only fail to break but retain high light transfer efficiencies. This is due to a layered glass/protein structure that provides a slip plane for flexing and also works to prevent catastrophic crack propagation. This sort of layering is fairly common in hard biological tissues. (eg: mother of pearl)
The synthesis is fairly striking as it occurs in water at approximately 0 degrees C. Normal glass fiber pulling is at something like 2500 C in a completely water-free environment. (water has strong absorbance peaks in the IR wavelengths used in telecommunications) How the shape of the fibers is created is still a bit of a mystery but the biochemical process is fairly well understood. For those who are interested, look up work from the Dan Morse group. They isolated the enzymes responsible for the silica polymerization a few years ago and created a recombinant analog. Also look at work by the Morley Stone group more recently for some additional work done in this area.
Actual sponges would never be harvested for these applications, it would just be too impractical to get enough raw material and to splice those pieces together. However, it is conceivable that a biochemical process could be implememted to make the same sort of layered fiber. The advantages would be a fiber that is highly crack and bend resistant and that would require vastly lower amounts of energy to produce. The downside is that the silica is full of water and is useless for telecom frequencies. However, I see a potential market for in-house cables - Cat5 replacement if you will. The data rates in-house are much lower so visible wavelengths could be used with standard LED/photodiodes. Also, with in-house applications, the low-cost and high strength would be highly advantageous.
1. pillage the oceans
2.
3. profit!
What does a sponge need with such superior optical fibres ? Could they in fact use it for other purposes inside their bodies, such as optical communication ? ... now that would be amazing!
Bitter and proud of it.
For those interested in getting to the heart of the story, check out the original research paper from Nature magazine. If you're not at a university or other institute with site-wide access you'll need to subscribe or pay to see it, though.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
A proud moment for any Slashdot user, the very first dupe of an article I orginally submitted!
2001-01-04 16:31:48 Forget fiber optics, use Marine Worm Spines! (articles,news) (accepted)
I can't find it in the old stories archive to give a direct link to though.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The thing about bending fibre optics that nobody ever points out, is that if you bend even an infinitely-elastic fibre optic through too tight a curve, then you will get light leakage.
.....
Fibre optics work on the principle of total internal reflection. The angle at which the light strikes the interface between glass and air is too shallow for it to get refracted out into the air, so instead it bounces off. As far as a beam of light is concerned, a length of fibre optic is just like a tube whose inside walls have a perfect mirror finish.
If you put a tight enough bend into the fibre, then the light will no longer be striking at an unrefractable angle, and therefore will escape. {You can try this with cheap 1mm. acrylic fibre if you remove the outer jacket and warm it in a pan of boiling water}.
Now, glass fibres exhibit very nice thermoplastic behaviour, and can actually be bent without breaking to tighter radii than acrylic. Unfortunately, they begin leaking light long before they break
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Isn't current broadband speads fast enough already for porno downloading?!?
didn't this appear in a really old sci fi story "The Lazarus effect ?" The fiber optics were symbionts :-)
.. Ocean sponges better for fiber optic transmissions. Don't we need the sponges in the oceans? I mean, we upset the ecology down there and everything's going to hell in a handbasket (well, quicker anywway..)
What next? Someone discovers that the bashed skull of a baby seal routes packets better than Brand X's latest switch? Or perhaps that by falling some might redwoods, we'll increase the distance of our 802.11g transmissions and thus its worth it?
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
If only Patrick and Squidward could make similar contributions to modern science and communications technology!
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
I'm not sure whats more disturbing -- that you know the words well enough to the song to write that beautiful parody or that you actually took time to do it...
Current underseas cables between the US and Aus only use about 5% and with recent improvments of underseas transponders, they can kick that up another 1600% and drop 4 out of every 5 tansonders and still end up with cheaper bandwidth so at AU$20,000 per 155mb per month who would even consider the old rates? It makes me feel riped off for paying $5k/mo an unlimited 2mb links.
I may have thanked you too soon, but of course I'm not certain.
Is not the speed of light through a medium subject to the forces exerted by the atoms in the medium as can be measured in the forms of electrical permittivity and magnetic permiablility?
Or does it depend on where you're standing?
Also your "car analogy" is discredited by the already acknowleged fact of light travelling at a constant rate (either a constant for the given medium as I was taught, or a universal constant as you seem to be arguing). The light does not need to accelerate or decelerate in order to start or stop, thus a car is not like a photon in the slightest.
Remember, you can be certain that the cat is dead when he stops yowling to be let out.
Read, L
This has been a common claim in the literature. Some references and refutations here.
Hard to say which is the loony toon. The "And how do you pillage the ocean..." or the reply with it's "... human intervention most likely...". In the former case declining fisheries is a valid counter. In the latter, well:
a) the natural ocean background radiation
far exceeds the meagre amounts humans have dumped unless you're sitting right next to the dumped core;
b) recent volvanic activity (above (Mt. St. Helen's) and below (black
smokers) the ocean) has contributed considerably more "pollution" than human industry has (recall some recent eruptions have tangibly affected the atmosphere _globally_); and
c) research (e.g. work of Jan Veizer) has pointed out far more plausible climate altering effects than our meagre industrial effluent. Speaking of which, we still do not have a proven climate model let alone one of the role of various chemicals within the atmosphere except in the most very general sense.
So is humankind the big baddie? We really don't know. Is it blameless? We really don't know. But why is natural pollution OK, but "unatural"(?) pollution bad? Why does it seem that human activity beyond the most primitive animal functions is "bad"?
It might just be that we humans neither appreciate how truly huge this planet is, how truly insignificant we are, and how profoundly ignorant we still are about all that is around us.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Save the oceans!
Save the whales! Even the ones that aren't endangered!
No blood for oil!
ban boats for the manatees!
Spike trees!
No development!
No windmills off my multi-million dollar house location!
Enron!
No CO2 emissions! Starving trees are ok!
No tree cutting! Huge forest fires are ok!
No animal testing! Even though it saves lives!
Fiber optics from the ocean? From living organisms?
Bring it on!!!