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A Countdown To Global Catastrophe?
An anonymous reader writes "From The Independent: The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow - and the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already.
For the full story, see this article."
I OWNZ j00! w00t
There is always some type of disaster that is "going" to happen. It's all propoganda just to keep everyone frightened into doing whatever it is the flavor of the month wants you to do. Here's an idea, let's just live .. because when the time comes to die, you will.
.. big deal.. death is the completion of life in whatever form it may take.
And quite frankly, when that time comes
Stop worrying about every little thing that can kill you and start living..
The Nomad
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."-da Vinci
That is all.
More conclusive evidence, and still Bush refuses to sign up to Kyoto. Now it's just a matter of which will destroy the planet first ... American wars of conquest or American pollution.
Getting a lecture from someone who doesn't even know what the word 'ironic' means?
No thanks.
Driving down the Thruway into NYC one finds oneself in absolute RIVERS of cars & trucks, trains going by, planes zooming overhead. And they're gonna run all this on solar and wind power?? Give.. me.. a.. break... (maybe the vegans ARE right. We should all hurry up and learn to live in grass huts and eat the same). Yummy.
Idiots call global warming an opinion while it's a fact. Some guy comes on slashdot and tells the truth. He gets modded as flamebait while the idiots get modded +5 interesting. I'm convinced, there is no place for truth on slashdot. [I've never heard a non-american say that global warming is not happening.]
yeah, we know that US is anal backwards in everything already..
Fanatical alarmist proclimations of doom in 3, 2, 1... oh. Too late!
So-called scientists have been saying that the end of the world is right around the corner since as early as the 1960's. Crazy nonsense, like that by 1980 the world would be massively over-populated requiring "population control" (eg. forced abortion/genocide/what have you), and that the entire world would either be starving to death or rationed on food.
"But this is different!" you say. Then tell me, how is it so different?
This seems like nothing more than more scare tactics by the likes of the Earth Day foundation and the Sierra Club. Granted, I've not tied the connections together myself, but if it fits the trend...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This paper puts out enviro-scare stories nearly every day. They publish little else but wacko leftwing junk as most Brits will tell you - that's why they have a tiny circulation. What has this got to do with science and technology, and cool stuff in general?
Try searching Google for the Independent and global warming (156 hits)
or Independent and neutral (23 hits)
or Independent and unbiased (5 hits)
or Independent and Linux (5 hits)
Interestingly Independent and Bush evil gets 29 hits while Independent and god good gets 37 hits.... (okay I took liberty with the formulation of these last two, but you get my point).
To be honest, I'm more concerned about a USA armed with nuclear weapons faced with a threat of drought or worse, a threat to capitalism. Of all the countries in the world armed with nuclear weapons, so far only one has been insane enough to actually use them.
OK, if the worst-case scenarios pan out for global warming a lot of people could die.
Let's say we implement at a bare minimum the kind of strategies required to make Kyoto a reality. Not just window-dressing, but actually enforce upon the population of North America a cutback in energy use. How many people will die? Perhaps worse, how many people end up in basically third-world living conditions with no access to health care because there isn't any transportation available?
Those are the kind of tradeoffs that need to be considered. And that is assuming that global warming is a fact.
The punchline is always the same: send us more money.
Catastrophe is always around the corner, only time and more research (ie. grants) will tell.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Every time one of these "catastrophic" reports come out, the only thing I can do is sigh in frustration. It is quite clear that these folks just want to kill cars.. and kill the US.. .because the US is rich, and US Citizens can afford luxury cars...
They are conveniently ignoring the fact that 6 Billion human beings BREATHING emit more CO2 in one year than all of the fossil fuels that have been combusted since they were first extracted from the ground.
Add to the 6 Billion humans all of the livestock that is required to feed them (cows and chickens, mainly) and there's that much more CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases on top of it.
The only solution to the CO2 problem is to emit less CO2 or increase the amount of CO2 that the environment can naturally convert. The only way to really reduce the amount of emitted CO2 is to significantly reduce the population - but of course this is impractical because of "reproductive freedom," and the fact that you can't just go around exterminating people.
Population control is a problem that nobody will talk about - families having 19 kids either because they don't believe in birth control or because they want their particuar racial group to eventually become a majority in politics - it's just irresponsible. At this point, we have to start thinking of real solutions - not political ones.
Population control is very undesirable on the part of government, particularly the US government, because the social security and medicare ponzi schemes depend on an ever-growing population base to pay the ever-growing bill. Because the program takes in more than it puts out, it must necessarily have a growing income.
Let's face it folks, we can blame our problems on cars, coal, oil, and forest burning all we want, but until we admit that these are not the problem, we'll never solve anything.
It is just ironic that life will be its own end - but this is also part of the natural order of things - the equilibrium. Too much life - more than the planet can sustain - will somehow cause the reduction in life to a level the planet CAN sustain. It's just the way nature works, and the Earth is way to grand a scale for us to have any direct and immediate control over...
Our doom was sealed the moment we figured out how to beat each other to death with a bone, so to speak...
No one is going to die b/c "global warming" as a product of human actions is bullshit. When will the damn treehuggers stop the FUD.
Same old bollocks from the idiot lefties desperate to maintain control of a world that's getting away from them.
Wake me up when disaster strikes, Chicken Little.
OK, so human activity (fossil involving fuels, principally) are to blame for so-called global warming. This leads to some interesting questions:
...and if anyone is experiencing global warming in their area, please turn on a fan and point it in the direction of the northeastern U.S. It's cold as hell here!
What caused the end of the last ice age? Cavemen and campfires?
A Canadian economist a few years ago reviewed the data that the first guy (OK, I'm a little short on details) who postulated global warming. He (the economist) found there were errors in the data and the methodology, and when the errors were corrected, the warmest time on record was in the middle ages.
Finally, to say the global temperature is warming is a dramatic and ridiculous oversimplification of the facts. Unless you can compare every temperature from every day (or hour!) of the year, from a very large number of points on Earth to some historical baseline, how can one even suggest any kind of trend.
This continues to be JUNK SCIENCE of the highest (lowest?) order.
Easy - I'll know that the biggest return in history is coming *soon*, and chances are I'll still be on the planet when that last trumpet sounds.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, I guarantee you'll wish you did when it happens (and boy are you going to be surprised!).
I would categorize dismissers as: "Pshaw" type: don't demonstrate any basic depth of knowledge, beyond the fact the sun rose this morning. Basically, sitting pretty and don't care, and know they won't be alive to feel the consequences of their actions. "Bought" type: Spew out lots of carefully selected figures from a much larger pool of data to selectively discredit that which the total pool of data overwhelming demonstrates. Invariably financed by an industry group. "Ostrich" type: Smart enough to see what is happening, but just shove their heads in the ground. Never met, seen, or heard a dismisser that had a cogent argument.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Most "Environmentalists" are fanatics that wish to use the environment as an excuse for seizing control of society. For our own good, of course -- just like all other authoritarian reformers claim.
Seriously, science is one thing, but religion is another. An "Environmentalism" is the worst sort of theocracy-peddling nonsense.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Global wonking warnings are one of the reason "ecologist" has gained such a bad name in the sciences; It no longer is a science but more a religion or socila program of some sort. I would strongly suggest a read on the relationship between climate and volcanism. For a start try: Handler P., and K. Andsager, 1994: El-Niño, Volcanism, and Global Climate. Human Ecology, 22, 37-57. Chicken Little was probably an "ecologist".... -
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Global warming states that the maxima of BOTH hot and cold will increase. Nice to see people are too ignorant to even know what the actual theory is.
It doesn't take a genious to see that Kyotoists manipulate and distort climate research to suit their main political purposes and weird view of the future.
an ill wind that blows no good