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Cleaner Air Adds To Global Warming
shmlco writes "In the "You Can't Win For Losing" department, an article on the BBC web site is reporting that reduced air pollution and increased water evaporation appears to be adding to man-made global warming. Research presented at a major European science meeting adds to other evidence that cleaner air is letting more solar energy through to the Earth's surface.
Burn fossil fuels, you make things worse. Clean up your act, and you make things worse. Is it time to set off a few nukes and see if nuclear winter can cool things down?"
Air pollution kills people anyway, so its not exactly a 'solution' to encourage air pollution surely?
Cue lots of 'hilarious' ironic tabloid newspaper columinsts suggesting that we all fill up the SUVS to 'do our bit' though.
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I've seen a (semi) serious suggestion that the best way to deal with global warming is to put a thin film of dust in between the earth and the sun. This wasn't from some internet hack either, but a rather senior physicist.
1. Create huge heat-powered laser
2. Shoot the beam to outer space
3. Profit!
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Burn fossil fuels, you make things worse. Clean up your act, and you make things worse
s/make things worse/change the environment/
Maybe we should just realize that we live and therefore we affect the world around us, and that the environment is ever changing. Oh, and things evolve. And it's not a good idea to build a dream home on a sand dune.
It is found in 99% of cancer cells
Large quantities are known to kill people
It is found in quantity in the brains of sociopaths
It is a vehicle for spreading most diseases
A powerful solvent in and of itself
Allows the breeding of mosquitos
We actually got quite a few vehement people wanting to ban this chemical in all of its forms.
When are the environmentalists going to admit that it's not "Global Warming" they're trying to prevent? It's all about DESTROYING industrialization.
Hmm... interesting conclusion.
Let's see, the earth is warming due in large part to the effects of human beings spewing crud into the atmosphere. A warmer earth tends to be covered with more water, have more violent weather patterns, and be all around less hospitable to life as we currently enjoy it. How do we spew crud into the atmosphere or otherwise adversely affect the ecosystem? Well, there's burning things in bulk, sometimes for transportation and sometimes for industry, there's promoting a certain type of environmentally impactive animal over another less harsh type, there's the paving of large swaths of the earth's surface, and so on and so forth.
Now, you're positing that people who want activities such as the above to be curtailed desire to destroy industrialization. You, sir, win today's specious reasoning award.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
Um....there's precious little discussion of volcanic contributions on that link, and it's hardly a neutral reference in any case.
An interesting site, but hardly a neutral one. Ought to find a better link than one that's the scientific equivalent of "because Al Gore said so!".
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
The US grows more then enough food to feed the entire fucking world. The average American diet might require 3 acres of arable land per person per year (which is a bullshit number or one people don't agree on as this http://www.planorganic.com/about%20us%20.htm offers a number of 1.5), but the average American eats a few dozen pounds of meat per year as well. There is no danger of starvation. At the very worst, if prices for food was to dramatically go up, we would have to eat less meat.
Your argument defies simple logic. Food cost are going down and have been going down for over a hundred years. This implies a growing surplice of food, not a shortage. You also blatantly ignore the fact that the US, like Europe and Japan, is in a death cycle. That means that the number of kids we are having per year does NOT replace the next generation. How is it that our population could possibly be going up then? Immigration. If it wasn't for immigration, the US would be in the same ugly death cycle that Western Europe and Japan is in, and we would have all the same social ills that come when more and more of your population is old, dependent, and not working.
Wealth kills the drive to reproduce. The only reason why this isn't a great tragedy in the US is because immigration helps to bring in more and more young strong hard working people.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/20 02105397_volcano01m.html
Actually, scientists are finding that even sulphur poor volcanos like Mt St Helens put out more polution than all the industry and cars in the state. And that measurement was only for a partial year. Moreover, they have to guess at the upper range because you can't meter the output of a volcano effectively.
This means that volcanos are hardly considered 'chump change' when it comes to adding to 'global warming'.
#-#
Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
You can fit the entire world population into Texas with a population density the same as that of Manhattan....the Earth is not overpopulated.
Actually, the story with clouds turns out to be a bit more complicated. Some studies of the subject have been published. The conclusions are that some kinds of clouds produce a net cooling; other kinds of clouds produce a net warming.
The weather satellites do give us pretty good information on the cloud cover, and the subject is known well enough to give good estimates of the total effect. Unfortunately, whether the total effect is "cooling" or "warming" varies on a daily (or hourly) time scale.
With a bit of googling, you can find a number of discussions of the topic. I just asked google about "cloud cover warming cooling effect", and got over 1.6 million hits. A casual glance shows that you have quite a lot of reading ahead if you want to understand the topic. Words like "variable", "depends" and "mixed" are common in these articles.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
If cows pollute more than cars, it's because we breed them in huge numbers. This is not "natural".
Perhaps, but the evidence is that before our agriculture, the grassland habitats that are best for grazing animals were populated with lots of large grazers. We may not have changed the total number by much; we just replaced the wild grazers with domesticated grazers. We really don't know which direction we changed the numbers.
But the really fun part of the methane story is the recent discovery of the "missing methane source". We'd had good estimates that roughly 1/3 of the methane came from our industrial pollution and 1/3 from ungulates (wild and domestic). But the remaining 1/3 was long a mystery. No more. We now know that most of the rest comes from termites.
This sounds like a joke, of course, and some of the science news stories were pretty funny in a geek-humor fashion. But it turns out that the total biomass of termites is greater than that of the grazing animals. Termites digest plant matter in much the same way as the large grazers, and they even use symbiotic bacteria that are close relatives of those inside cattle.
So imagine every second there are billions of tiny termite farts, each releasing a microlitre or so of CH4. There are trillions and trillions of termites in the world, each constantly letting go with tiny bursts of methane.
The world is more complex (and sometimes funnier) than we imagined.
BTW, geese and kangaroos are also grazers, and they add a tiny amount to the world's methane supply. But there aren't really enough of them to make a difference.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
We always talk of human rights. But what about planetary rights? I think that if we came up with guisde lines for sustainability that human rights would follow. Because the factory conditions that people would have to work in would be better. The smog problems in cities that cause all kinds of skin problems would diminish. Basicaly if we worried about the planets rights first than human rights would follow. I think we got our priorities fouled as a human race. We are so self centeredly worried about ourselves that we may kill ourselves off neglecting the greater responsibility that comes with the kind of self awareness where a species starts to create their own invironment, where a species changes the earth. At the point where a species drasticaly changes the earth at the moment that it become self aware of its own effect than it should take action not just for the sanctity of the earth and all the other animals but for humans. if we were looking out for number one than we would worry about a sustainable society and that would mean a lot of americans might have to chhange their behavior patterns and belief systems. It is time for us to stop thinking about imdiate gradification and move on to long term sustainability. Oh but my oil stocks keep racing up. You know what happened with eron. Well dick Cheney did the same thing to halberton but sense he got into government and gave them no bid contracts on iraq they didn't go bankrupt. These rich fucks, when they know oil is going down are going to liquidate again I am sure. So at some point pull your money out of oil. My opinion of course, michael