Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Is it time to set off a few nukes and see if nuclear winter can cool things down?"
Uh-uh. Last time I tried that on Sim Earth, my planet was overtaken by sentient robots. Of course, the robots eventually get taken out by carnivirous plants, but is that really much of an improvement?
Marked increase in SMUG. Damn you, George Clooney!
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
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.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
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.
Point is that man-made pollution is more than the earth can absorb because there are too many humans. If we reduced the population, earth would be better able to absorb the naturally-created pollution.
Ohhh! Pay Dirt! A pair of half-eaten choco-pants!
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.
Have no fear, global warming that this generation of scientists are sure is happening will meet head on with the new global ice age that the previous generation of scientists were sure was happening and the net effect is we'll all have weather like San Diego.
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.
Actually, the pollution was (or 'is', in southern Asia and China) *masking* the effects of increased warming at ground level. Cleaning up the air doesn't add additional forcing; it merely keeps it elsewhere.
I don't think I can bear to read the following hundreds of ignorant "I've heard it's all due to the sun getting hotter" crap we always get on Slashdot AGW stories. If you think that, you don't know what you're talking about. Go away and read Real Climate or, for a comprehensive refutation of all the trolls we can expect to see attached to this story, please refer to this excellent debunking of so-called 'sceptic' canards, lies and deliberate mis-statements of facts.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
... in laymens terms:
YOU CAN'T WIN
so sit back an enjoy the ride. Be true to yourself. Do what you need to do to sleep at night, and dont give a f*ck about what they say about global warming. Its been hot, its been cold, and we only have accurate weather data spanning about 100 years. If you think we can make accurate preditions based on 100 years of data (a piss in the bucket compared to the thousands or millions or billions of years this world has been in existance, depending on who you asked) then I have oceanfront property to sell you in Wisconsin, which was very cold last winter.
Is it time to set off a few nukes and see if nuclear winter can cool things down?
I nominate Idaho for Nuclear Whipping Boy
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I say we carry on as before. Clean up the environment, sure, but for more immediate reasons of beauty and health: nobody likes to walk a littered beach, or suck down the smoggy L.A. air, after all.
In the 70s, scientists were absolutely convinced that they'd mastered the complex climate change models, and confidently assured us all that an Ice Age was imminent.
Nowadays, global warming is the new scientific fad. And not only does it appear that global warming is much greater in scope than any amount of anthropogenic factors can account for, it also appears that there's not much we can do about it anyway.
On top of all that, I suspect that the smarty men, for all their expert and well-intentioned efforts, still haven't mastered the climate change models to the extent some of us would like to think.
So I say we carry on as always: sometimes building, sometimes tearing down. Sometimes exploiting, sometimes preserving. Sometimes making a mess, sometimes cleaning it up. And always refining and improving our methods and priorities, not based on the current socio-scientific fads, but based rather on the traditional motivations: the ebb and flow of human desire, expressed individually and collectively by various means.
I mean, if we don't even properly understand climate change, and can have only a measurable but insignificant effect on it, then how can we possibly make good decisions about what sacrifices to make and what goals to pursue in relation to climate change?
There are plenty of other more sensible, more practical, and more meaningful reasons to change some of our behaviors. I, for one, would like to see more arguments for ecological responsibility based on those, and less arguments based on voodoo climatology.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
you're assuming that the only space and resouces that people use are the ones they're standing or living on.
what about the land needed to grow the food these people eat? that's not in cities. what about the water required to irrigate deserts so those people can have lettuce in january? that's not in cities. what about all the oil required to run suvs and make platic shampoo bottles for all those people? what about the massive hydro and coal electricity projects needed to run all those electric shavers and 60" televisions?
just consider food for a moment. the average north american diet requires 3 acres of areable land per person per year. for the entire population of the united states that works out to just less a billion acres.
overpopulated.
2 1337 4 u!
No it isn't.
If we can cause the problem, we can fix it. The only question is, will we?
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Acutally, the book was Fallen Angels by Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn, and it went a little further than that. The ice age had been held off by pollution-related greenhouse warming. It was only after the world cleaned up its act that the ice age came on.
It's a great book. The heroes were SF fans.
Sorry, I'm a writer. That makes you raw material.
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.
Yes the world is overpopulated.
Ohhh! Pay Dirt! A pair of half-eaten choco-pants!
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?
My 10 gallon fishtank has about 500 goldfish in it right now. There's still room left for a few hundred more. I don't understand why people think the tank is overpopulated.
This guy's the limit!
No, really, it is.
Each gas that comprises the atmosphere has the capability to act as a greenhouse gas, and each one blocks different wavelengths of infared radiation. Some of then trap it when the sunlight passes through the atmosphere, some of them capture it when the radiation bounces off the earths surface back into the atmosphere.
C02, Methane, and *gasp* water vapor all contribute to heat retention in the atmosphere. It's basic Geography 101 shit that everyone learns.
However, since water vapor is, you know, an integral part of the atmosphere and several cycles on earth, we really can't do much about that. Better to worry about all the other gasses we up dump into the atmosphere that we can control.
Look out honey cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apologies
Volcanos add to global warming by releasing CO2, and to cooling by releasing clouds of ash. Sometimes one predominates, sometimes the other. It can go either way.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
If cows pollute more than cars, it's because we breed them in huge numbers. This is not "natural".
What do you mean? If we're products of evolution, then we humans are supremely natural. Furthermore, everything we do is supremely natural. Just as bees act according to their nature, and whales act according to their nature, so do we act according to our nature. How could it be otherwise? At what point would you say that "un-nature" has been introduced into the process?
Lions use teeth and claws to take their prey. This is natural. Apes use twigs to fish ants out of anthills. This is natural. Bats use sonar and aerobatic maneuvers to snatch bugs out of the air. This is natural. And we humans use our minds and hands to imagine and build tools to accomplish the desires of our hearts. This is natural.
Are you saying that space aliens have secretly induced us to act against our nature? Perhaps we are breeding unnatural numbers of cows to feed their alien appetites (it would explain the cattle abductions and mutilations). But wouldn't the aliens--and their cow-cravings--also be natural? Wouldn't that make the entire Human-Cow-Alien system yet another natural phenomenon?
Are you saying that the Flying Spaghetti Monster has laid down a moral law restricting the number of cows we can naturally breed, and that it goes against the FSM's law to breed more cows than that? If so, we can all look forward to being whipped with wet noodles for all eternity, in the afterlife.
But seriously, what natural or moral yardstick are you using to measure the nature of Man? Because it seems to me that if Man is a product of nature, then all the products of Man are also products of nature.
Cow population, nuclear reactors, SUVs, Catholicism, Nazism, anthropogenic factors in climate change: All natural. So where's the problem?
And don't say that the problem is that we're going to make ourselves extinct. Species make themselves extinct all the time. Nothing more natural than that. Ebola has a hard time spreading because it overuses its resources and kills its host too quickly. It's natural when viruses do it--and not just viruses; all organisms tend towards this, if not restrained by natural effects such as other organisms or environmental conditions (and note that the lack of such restraints is also natural). Why should it be unnatural when humans do it?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
That said, I'd rather see something a little more organized like, say, a large solar shade positioned between the sun and the earth.
I keep trying to get "Launch Solar Shade" passed, but I can't get the votes - I have the energy market cornered and Lal, Santiago and Zakharov have decided that they don't want to trade with me.
I am going to nerve staple those bastards if I ever get my hands on them.
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
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
And it won't work now. That is unless some strange aliens come along and start chopping everyone's head off saying that "THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE" and then you have to have connery come through a portal from the other side of the galaxy to save our asses. But then, the odds of that happening are probably pretty slim, don't you think?
reach almost universal agreement in the scientific community
There is tacit agreement that the earth is heating up, not that the cause of it is man made. These are two very different things.
There is also a large degree of opinion among those who think humans are to blame. Are they:
Causing most of the change, with minimal amounts of change being natural
Causing some of the change, and other parts are natural
Causing minimal change, and most of the change is natural
There is also a hugely varying amount of opinion on what, exactly, will happen if the earth continues to heat up.
Three major ones are:
1. Ice Age
2. A warmer planet
3. Earth becomes Venus
What do you mean? If we're products of evolution, then we humans are supremely natural.
There's a difference between being "natural" and "sustainable". The vast majority of natural creatures are also sustainable, because if you don't live a sustainable lifestyle your lifestyle (or species) will not persist. The unsustainable ones get winnowed out. Being "natural" or not has no bearing on whether your species will go extinct or not.
The word "natural" has become so mangled that it that it is both useless and meaningless except as part of a marketing campaign.
what about volcanoes
What about them?
cow manure
Inside the natural balance of the carbon cycle. A vast herd of domestic cattle is no different in this regard from a vast herd of wild bison. The ruminants eat the grass, the grass is broken down in the cow and exterior to the cow, releasing decomposition gasses. New grass grass grows absorbing gasses in the process.
Rinse and repeat over millenia.
And all of it simply an expression of incoming solar energy. More incoming sunlight, more plants, each absorbing more gasses. Plant a tree. Take care of it. Restore balance.
They contribute far more to global warming than cars do.
Ah, yes. The logically flawed argument that because there are uncontrollable disasters there is no harm in willfully adding another one on top of them.
And I believe it is currently estimated that half of all the increase in greenhouse effect gasses comes just from motor vehicles, whose numbers are growing with the Chinese and Indian governments adopting a pro car ownership strategy and increased mechanization of farming to promote "wealth."
Just as we've finished the first year in modern history when no new reserves of oil were discovered by anyone, anywhere, but that's another topic.
KFG
And then my cities were surrounded by mind worm boils! They were everywhere! Where did they come from? Did they not like me replacing their fungus with my pretty tree farms? I don't know, but they were pissed off. So I convened a meeting with the planetary council and got the vote to um raise sea levels and uh... Um, sorry what were we talking about?
OK, dude, time for calorimetry 101. Let's assume for a second that the temperature increase was just for the oceans (to avoid messing around with too many different specific heats). Let's further assume that it only applies to the top centimeter of the water (ie, the rest of the oceans are not affected). What would the impact be of a 2 degree fahrenheit increase in the surface temperature?
That's a lot of energy to have floating around that we didn't used to have.
All's true that is mistrusted
>If we can cause the problem, we can fix it.
Boy, I'd like to be able to agree with you on that one. But I can't.
Aside from the question of unified will, which is big enough, we get to the point of physical possiblities. We're learning a lot about climate, weather, modeling, etc. But I suspect that the experts will be the first to admit that they're not experts. Engineering a climate is a far different thing from trying to decypher what is happening with one. We also know that some of these processes are very-long scale, certainly longer than quarterly profit reports or even election cycles, which only compounds the unified will problem.
What if the North Atlantic Conveyer stops? (for a theatrical example) Let's presume we want to restart it. How do we do that?
What if defrosting permafrost releases CO2 that dwarfs what we've released? How can we possibly compensate?
What if the Earth really WAS headed back into an ice age before we got going with the industrial revolution? What if global warming is what's keeping the climate friendly?
What if this is all so danged nonlinear? What if a friendly climate is NOT the norm? What if the Earth is *normally* encrusted with ice, or a hot jungle? What if our entire development as an intelligent species has been during an unusually friendly inter-ice-age?
Enquiring minds want to know.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Wouldn't it be a whole lot cleaner to build a bunch of nuclear power plants?
Welcome to communist China. Please check your freedoms and liberties at the door.
Why don't you just voluntarily self-terminate so that there's more for me?
A Chemistry Prof of mine back in the day brought something along these lines up. His argument went something like this (I've shorthanded it for those who don't like to read paragraphs):
Pollution = Greenhouse Effect
Greenhouse Effect = Increase in global temperature
Increase in temperature = More water evaporating
Vapourous water = Clouds
More clouds = Less sunlight getting through
Less sunlight = lower temperature
The point being that there is a sense of balance in place. Yes, we're messing things up, but there are some checks and balances that lessen the impact. That's not to say we should keep on polluting, but that the situation IS reversible if given time.
His other big environmental statement was that he'd wish the "Save the Rainforest" people would spend more than 5 seconds looking at their arguments. The fact is (again, according to him) that the rainforests are NOT the "lungs of the Earth." They actually do a small minority of the CO2->O2 conversion compared to what the oceans and seas do. Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3 = Limestone) in the oceans does much more. Plant life in the major bodies of waters (ie.- algae) also is a significant contributor (in relation to rainforests). But there is almost no major coverage of the damage we've done to the oceans through shipping, dumping and other pollution.
Interestingly, the tie-in between the two lies in the algae and plant life. An increase in temperature can lead to an increase of plant life that can convert the polluting gases into O2... as well as other pollutants.
The problem isn't necessarily that we're polluting the environment, it's that we're doing it faster than nature can balance it. This used to be due to ignorance, but now it's willful and due to monetary pressures and laziness.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
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.
While I don't necessarily agree with the original poster's numbers (even verification can be troublesome, since the amount of arable land needed for every person is a an average and an assumption) I do agree with the result. People are insane with the number of anklebiters they are producing. Back in the day, you needed a huge family to run that farm you needed to feed yourselves. These days, all you are doing with 8 kids is putting a burden on the tax payers that don't have kids or only have 1 or 2. Enough is enough people, you dont NEED 8 kids!
As for liberties and freedoms, ever heard of the bad apple saying? Well, my cousin is a prime example. She can't work (as in has too many kids and daycare would cost more than she is capable of earning) and her boyfriend (I.E. father of the horde) is a shmuck who has the earning potential of a hampster. They just produced their 5th tax black hole. There is NO way in hell they can afford 2 of them, much less the others. So, because their feedoms and liberties are in jeapardy, and we certainly aren't going to let the KIDS starve (it isn't their fault their parents are absolute morons, is it?) we are going to go on and let them reproduce like some rabbits on viagra. What choice do we have? Let them starve or forced sterilization? Neither option is viable, so we just let them go like energizer bunnies. See Spot copulate, copulate Spot, copulate!
Makes me sick.
No, we're still evolving just as every living thing is evolving. The difference is that nowadays, our natural habitat includes hospitals, drugs, the built environment, and these are where our environmental pressures come from.
Nor are humans alone in creating our environment. Beavers build dams. Many wild animals self-medicate with herbs and saps. We haven't stopped evolving any more than have they.
Cripple fight!
I'm confused...
"Just because you are self-aware, you cannot draw a conclusion of abilities of others to be self-aware. My GF's dog is self aware, and so are her cats."
Is your second sentence some kind of sarcasatic counterexample of how you can't draw a conclusion about the abilities of others to be self aware, or do you not realize that you're contradicting yourself? If you can't draw a conclusion about the abilities of others to be self-aware, how do you know your GF's dog is? That's at least as crazy as the poster saying that humans are the only self-aware species.
For my part, I think there's some chance dolphins are self-aware, which is why we need to watch them very, very, carefully to see if they're doing anything sneaky. I think Gorillas and co. can be brought into the fold as extremely dumb humans if we give them a chance, but dolphins are different. I just don't trust them.
Thus, by your math, the U.S. can provide all of the agricultural products that it needs, and this is supported by the positive balance of agricultural trade that the U.S. has shown for the last 40 years (2). We ship out things that we can grow more easily (e.g. corn), and import things that we can't (e.g. rice). That margin is dwindling, and we may start to import a bit more than we export, but this is primarily due to an increase in import of consumer-oriented products, not bulk imports. This suggests that to a large extent, this is due to consumers being more savvy and choosing to buy more imported products for variety, rather than because we can't produce enough food.
Anybody who says that that the U.S. can't feed itself is either misinformed or outright lying. Either way, that's a sure sign of somebody with a political agenda.
1. Source: WorldStats.org
2. Source: TruthAboutTrade.org
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No they didn't.
Yes, yes, they did. Perhaps you're too young to remember the scare, but I very clearly remember being terrified after listening to a scientist explaining to the viewing audience that we were all going to starve to death in the near future. Your link is quite convincing, and I'd probably believe it if it weren't for the fact that I was there and I remember what was said.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'd say there's a small kernel of truth in the overstated assertion that environmentalists were trying to "destroy industrialization". One of the things that long frustrated me about environmentalism was its Original Sin of Man against Mother Earth mentality (despite the prevalence of pooh-poohing about the same Original Sin meme from Christians). This was the source of a general nostalgia for bucolic pre-industrial life (back to nature), and a general distrust of things industrial. That made a lot of people anti-growth.
However, as environmentalism has matured (and as a younger generation has taken over), a lot of that has dissipated. Many of us would now say what we want is post-industrialism - a world where industry has been retooled so that sustainable management of inputs, outputs and waste are all part of the business model (rather than only the first two, and without regard to global issues). Industrialization was not only a vastly leap forward for humanity and its quality of life, but was in fact good for much of the environment: before industrialization people burned an awful lot of trees, farmed a lot of land poorly, and relied on massive animal stocks for transportation, and none of this was all that friendly to the earth. Now that we've seen the negative consequences of our current industrial methods, it's time for the next major leap forward. And despite all the propaganda, it's clear that pushing green industry will very quickly drive enormous economic growth and likely help humanity solve persistent problems like global poverty.
To answer the critics who say "if this is so great why doesn't business do it itself", I have a couple answers. First, as anyone who's worked at a startup or on a new product launch can tell you, markets move incrementally and businesses outpace them at their peril. So to get the market to surge forward, you often need external intervention. Second, much of what's needed is massive capital investment for long-term gain: in research, in infrastructure upgrades, and in capitalizing new technologies. Businesses generally do not have a 20 year mandate to improve infrastructure, whereas the government has exactly this mandate. And yes, the government intervention does makes mistakes, can promote inefficiency, or can produce unintended outcomes. But it almost always gets the market moving in the intended direction, and the mistakes can be cleaned up later.
If this all sounds a bit breathless, get me a gig at Wired. But I really do believe that investing heavily in this jump will give tremendous results for people, business, and countries.
From the article:
Between the 1950s and 1980s, the amount of solar energy penetrating through the atmosphere to the Earth's surface appeared to be declining, by about 2% per decade.
then later:
"During the solar dimming we had really no temperature rise. And only when the solar dimming disappeared could we really see what is going on in terms of the greenhouse effect, and that is only starting in the 1980s."
Every single time I've ever pointed out the global temperature drop from 1942 to 1975, a number of liberals jump at my throat and claim I'm making it up. Now here's a climatologist making the statement that temperature didn't rise from '50s to the '80s. The liberals will never buy this; that one statement of his invalidates the entire study in their eyes.
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
In the 70s, scientists were absolutely convinced that they'd mastered the complex climate change models, and confidently assured us all that an Ice Age was imminent.
No they didn't.
Don't know how old you are hawkfish, but I distinctly remember that they did. The phobia of the 70's was distinctly the other way. I remember my parents arguing about climate cooling at the dinner table. My mother was convinced that an ice age was imminent. My father was very skeptical. The argument revolved around how well science could predict climate. My father was convinced that since he couldn't get accurate weather forecasts, that climate forecasts were even more suspect. Here we are, 35 years later and the same arguments are still playing out.
The great plains ( a huge area) were essentially created by huge numbers of buffalo. I would say they have a significant effect on the environment.
Plants and plankton transformed the bloody atmosphere- so I would say they had a significant effect on the environment.
Soldier ants had a regular habit of laying waste to huge areas-- so... you get the point.
Most wildly successful species will reach numbers that impact the environment.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If you'd like to run a NASA global climate model yourself, EdGCM is a port to Mac or Windows, and wrapped in a GUI so you can point-and-click your own climate simulation.
Space and Computers.
There's a difference between being "natural" and "sustainable".
Yes, but the parent post isn't talking about "sustainable", it's talking about "natural".
The vast majority of natural creatures are also sustainable...
Which means that some minority of natural creatures are not sustainable. Being in that minority doesn't make humans unnatural. As you make clear, appeals to sustainability are not appeals to nature. And thus objections to unsustainability are not objections to nature.
Our conclusions are the same: natural creatures are sometimes unsustainable. You should be replying to the parent post, not to me.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
If both polluting and not polluting are correlated to global warming, is it not sensible to investigate whether or not NEITHER is causing global warming, and the correlation is indeed a false correlation? I mean, if A -> B and !A - > B, then one is tempted to conclude that B happens regardless of whether A happens or does not happen. And if that's the case, B is going to happen no matter what A does, which further means that B isn't influenced by A's behavior.
Now, I'm not so naive as to think that it's really this simple. I've long held that enacting crippling policies to "combat global warming" at this point is silly, and that more research and data collection is necessary before we can even set realistic and helpful goals. When research like this comes out, I feel that it bolsters that stand. But research like this also bears further investigation before we accept it at face value.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
So your parents were scientists or they got their info from the media?
If it's the latter, then that is exactly the parent posts point (if you bothered to even glance at the links).
The media reported an Ice Age was imminent. Peer-reviewed scientific journals did not.
Contrast that with today, when after a review of 981 ISI science journals, 75% of them were found to either explicitly or implicitly accept that global warming is occuring and that it is the result of human processes.
None of them were found to support the idea global warming is not occurring or that it is not the result of human processes (see here for details.
"The real reason the population in the west is still increasing is immegration."
:)
Well, I'd say a lot of it is due to the ILLEGAL immigrant problem we now have. There is nothing wrong with the legal entry immigrants...that's what this country was built upon.
Ah yes, I see... legal immigrants somehow don't increase the population... it all makes perfect sense now...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I couldn't have put it better myself
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Actually while the output per acre has increased, the output per litre of fertilizer has decreased. That means we push more and more fertilizer into the ground because otherwise nothing would grow anymore because the soil is in pretty bad shape.
That wouldn't be that much of a problem if fertilizer wouldn't be made out of oil. So yeah, the US is indeed overpopulated after the coming oil problems.
Rural Illinoisan here to tell you how full of shit you are. Meat is easy, we have factory farms for that, a relative of my raises pigs by the tens of thousands....per facility that he owns, and he owns 6. And he's not the only one around here with such facilities. And chickens and other birds are similarly raised, intensively, in what are basically factories. Beef is a bit different, it's more open, but there's no lack of cattle around here either...it's a big business in fact.
And what the fuck do you mean we can't grow strawberries? There are more strawberry farms within a short distance of here than you can shake a stick at, apple and peach orchards as well. And vinyards too while we're on the subject, make damn fine wine.
As for vegetables, there are locally grown vegetables everywhere....but it is true that most large scale commercial production is in certain parts of the country. That's more of a factor of local economics than the condition of the land.
These days, your cousin is a relative rarity, at least in the First World. Americans are reproducing slightly below the break-even level (approx. 2.1 kids per woman), while Western Europe and Japan are well below that. Some countries even have programs to encourage people to have kids so the population doesn't drop at too rapid a rate (it would be tough medically to have 90% of the population be 50 or above.)
Now, because of the aging of the population and immigration, this hasn't translated into negative population growth yet.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
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, not "reflected", but rather "radiated".
The greenhouse effect does not affect the rate of heat absorbtion of the planet; instead it affects the rate of heat dissipation by slowing the rate at which heat radiates into space (IIRC, this has to do with the amount of IR radiation reflected by Co2 in the upper atmosphere).
Ice ages happen when the rate of reflection increases; glacial growth leads to more of the planet covered by reflective ice, leads to lower temperatures, leads to glacial growth (loop). That may have been what you were thinking of.
I suppose global warming might make less light reflect back into space if the glaciers recede further, in which case there would be actual reflection involved. But that would be a side effect if it did happen, and I don't know enough meteorology to make an educated guess.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
You're assuming that the earth is a kind of oven and will automatically cool down if we stop pushing energy into it. This is simply not true. There are a myriad of delicate balances that could be toppled and cause chain-reactions that we don't entirely understand, we be seeing only the beginnings of that unbalancing, or we may be seeing the precursors. Two degreess is a lot of energy and considering the population went from 1.7 billion to around 5.9 billion in the 20th Century. How much energy will 5.9 billion need?
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
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.
You continue to contradict yourself by using the word "natural" while simultaneously stating that its antonym has no meaning. I personally don't care one way or another whether actions are natural or unnatural -- I just hold that the words should have valid meaning to exist in the language. For natural to have meaning, something must be unnatural, artificial, etc. Pick your own definition of those words if you will, but the way the word is used by the majority of people (which is how language is defined) is to represent the distinction between those things which are man made and those things which are not.
Incidentally, objects made by other animals are also sometimes considered to be artificial depending on the speaker.
Because you're right: if we're just another random evolutionary outcome, then we really do have no basis for making ethical judgements. See also: nihilism and Nietzche's Ubermensch.
I prefer not to. Nihilism is just as much of an intellectual dead-end as solipsism. People who believe strongly in either should simply step aside and let the people who care about the consequences of their actions make decisions.
The conundrum of man's place in--or out of--nature must be resolved before you can discuss "sane ethical and philosophical system[s]".
That's what I mean about contradicting yourself. You state that there is nothing that is not natural and then state that it's possible for man to have a place outside of nature. By your definition of "natural," that's impossible for any being except God, and it's arguable that by your definitions even God is natural and cannot be outside nature.
Anyway, whether things are natural or not is a separate consideration entirely from ethics, and whether or not we are the result of random happenstance over billions of year, divine providence 6000 years ago, or the push of some simulator's button 3 seconds ago is also utterly irrelevant to the condition of being human and living life. Ethics and decisions based on them have to result in the person believing in that they have a stake in some action or they are not sane. Nihilism and solipsism both fail because they ultimately argue that one can never have a stake in any action because they don't matter.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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
this country was built upon. Legal immigrants that moved here and became part of the great 'melting pot' and melded into society.
There's a few dead indians who would like to have a word with you about that...
The country was founded on genocide and slavery, simple as that. Stop rose-tinting it in order to soften your xenophobic views.
You can't take the sky from me...
Sorry, but it is the educated, not the rich. The rich are, of course, overrepresented in the ranks of the educated. Another important note, education is not intelligence, uneducated people can be intelligent.
A blog about stuff.