The Consulate General Seattle webpage disagrees with you.
Sorry, where was the contradiction with what the border officer guy said? Both stress that DUI is a serious offence; and AFAIK there is no mention of the marijuana possession business. What is the contradiction?
The worlds two biggest partners with the longest unprotected border have politicians that can't get along. We citizens should kick them both, but Ottawa needs a double kick.
Well, the problem is that as soon as the Canadian government puts pressure on the U.S. to loosen up the border, then the U.S. government will push back with two requests:
1) Share more info on your citizens and residents with us. 2) Strengthen your own border with the rest of the world.
Changing Canadian immigration policy to cater to U.S. demands is not going to play well for any Canadian politician.
And item #2 is really what is behind all those "terrorists are coming through Canada" stories you see in the American media. Hell, even Newt Gingrich, who really ought to have known better, thought the 9/11 bombers had come to the U.S. through Canada. After the Maher Arar case no Canadian government is going to suggest greater information-sharing on citizens between Canada and the U.S.
I suppose it might be the case that this system for auto-redirecting all Mac users to an error page dates from the time when all their songs were DRMed, and hasn't been updated. But it certainly doesn't convey the impression that they've changed anything.
This is exactly right. Ballmer is the mob boss threatening to kill you if you don't pay up. The mob boss knows it's bad for business to actually kill everyone who owes you money, because then they can't pay.
Seems like no better a time to post the old poem by Kipling:
Danegeld Rudyard Kipling
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:-- "We invaded you last night -- we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:-- "Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray, So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:--
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"
Have you seen leftist or Socialist papers with ads? There are almost ZERO ads in such papers.
The free weekly paper in my home city, which has a large political section of a heavily leftist bent, has an enormous number of ads. Some are what one would expect (the local discount movie theatre, bookstores); however, most of them seem to be for porn, strip clubs, and escort services.
You can copy music from a friend if you put it on a medium which has the levy, because then you have paid royalties.
Um, the document you linked does not say that. While it may reflect current practice in terms of what you will actually get prosecuted for, I have yet to see anything clear which says "if you paid the levy, you're good."
And in any case, what's the point of charging the levy on ipods and not, say, laptops? My Macbook is effectively my IPod.
If you cut it down the carbon will go back into the atmosphere and you are worse off than before.
What sort of scheme for sequestering the carbon from the atmosphere would work, though? Burying logs in a desert? Compressing the carbon into diamonds on a massive scale?
Plants need CO2, so removing it from the atmosphere might harm plant life. Temperatures will decrease (probably), and I'm sure that there's at least some species of wildlife that's now thriving with the warmer temperatures. Wind paterns will change. Climate patterns will change. To expect absolutely no "negative impact" on the environment is foolhardy.
Wow. Just, wow. I do hope your apparent concern for the ecological impact of climate change means you're against global warming as well.
Look, the whole point of the hue and cry over global warming is that the Earth is, right now, adapted to historical temperature levels. An abrupt rise or fall, of the kind we're seeing now, will have all kinds of negative consequences because many of the equilibria now in place take thousands or millions of years to rebalance themselves.
We're already pumping tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the air. The end goal of reducing our output by a billion tons is only going to reduce our impact, not create a new disruptive one. This is not to say that the means of achieving this goal might not be disruptive, e.g. converting a coal plant to a hydroelectric dam will flood some land and cause some havoc. But the end goal itself is not.
But to answer your general point: what if we went all the way and implemented this magic solution on a massive scale, to get a net decrease in CO2 emissions? Will this have an impact on the environment?
Of course it will, that's the bloody point: to cool things back to the way they were before! Will there be a few odd lifeforms that have benefited from warming temperatures? Sure, but they're the exception, just as raccoons (and to a lesser event, coyotes) benefited greatly from North American urbanization, even though almost all other native species didn't. The lucky oppurtunists will just have to suck it up and go back to whatever they were doing before global warming, which obviously wasn't too bad since they survived thus far.
if the amount of carbon to generate to power the process is lees then what is removed then you have a decrease in carbon.
Well, yes, but that obviously means the primary source of energy here can't be from the CO2 reaction. That would mean that, even with perfect efficiency in using the energy generated, you'd be going nowhere. (Or else you'd have a perpetual motion machine!) So nuclear, solar etc. are absolutely required for this.
New York City is widely considered one of the most left-wing cities in the US, but there, they're banning something people can avoid by simply NOT EATING IT.
Really? How exactly do you know when trans-fat is used at a restaurant?
For years, there have been health laws about restaurant food preparation, e.g. for preventing the contamination of restaurant food with rodent feces. Like the New York trans fat ban, these laws are intended for the customers' benefit but are a pain for restaurants to uphold.
If we can require customers to have the smarts to know whether trans fats are in their food, what's fundamentally different about requiring them to know whether their food was prepared in a clean environment? Why have health regulations at all? Let the market decide.
Incidents like this illustrate the limitations of the Wikipedia approach. It's not an encyclopedia, but rather it's a video game that escaped from its box, and is now influencing real people in the real world.
Look: here's how it works. If you lie in Wikipedia article-space about something that most other people can disprove on a Wikipedia page, you will get corrected. If I write that the current president of the United States is Barack Obama, I will get reverted.
This person, if he lied, lied in user-space. No one except the individual who wrote the page is claiming this to be true, and certainly not Wikipedia as a whole. If the New York Times writers fell for the lie, then they, and not Wikipedia, bear the responsibility for their mistake.
The worst that can be about Wikipedia is that a person who is a liar somehow got to be a high-profile editor, which is unavoidable in a world without thought police.
The more I observe, the more I am convinced that we are going to wake up and say how did we elect Harper twice? The first time everyone understands. It was a time to punish the liberals for scandal(though I still voted Liberal). This time I expect ultra slick campaigning from Harper, a wedge issue here and there. The attack ads from the Conservatives have already started. Brilliant really keeps the Liberals from wanting to force an election. If they do you have a head start.
No, while I agree that Harper's approach is inspired by Rove, I don't think it's going to play out like the U.S. Harper got in because of the sponsorship scandal and Martin's pathetically desperate campaign.
The current situation favours the Liberals. For this to change, we will need to see either a very tempting carrot dangled by Harper (along the lines of the GST cut), or a major mistake made by Dion. Either of these are still very possible. I think Dion is painting himself into a corner with his position on Kyoto, and I think bringing on Garth Turner was also a mistake.
I think don't think Harper will successfully be able to paint himself green. His image is too much that of an Alberta oil guy to achieve this. His goal now will be to keep the government from collapsing until after the fickle public's eyes have wandered away from the environment file.
That change benefits people other than the rich, in fact, it benefits any student studying on a substantial scholarship.
Yes, as a grad student whose primary income is a departmental scholarship, I have to say that having $10,000 of my income removed from taxation was pretty sweet. As well, there's the public-transit tax subsidy too.
So, while I am about the most ardently anti-Harper that a person could possibly be, I have to say that I have to say that his strategic pandering will probably help me out considerably.
Then why can't I make a working copy of Diablo I or Diablo II Play Disc (for backup purposes - I've destroyed one Diablo II CD from overuse)? I'd say software copy protection exists that is unbreakable.
I wouldn't bet on the existence of unbreakable DRM for software, but it is at least a somewhat defensible position. However, music is certainly breakable by design, because it has to be heard.
People as a whole aren't too picky about sound quality. They are willing to live with the acoustic downgrading and added artifacts that happens as a result of conversion to the MP3 format. Even if music was truly encoded in an "unbreakable" format, it still has to be decoded for play. In the worst case, people will just intercept the signal during play and re-encode it in an unencumbered and redistributable format, even if this means getting a lesser-quality recording than the original.
Why is this offtopic? "Squirting" is the Microsoft-sanctioned use of sending someone a song over a Zune. The joke makes complete sense in this context.
Um...these scientists have a vested interest in having humans being responsible for climate change. They want government money to do their research. Without a problem to research, there is no money. I hate to break it to you, but science is just as political as politics itself.
Personally, I don't think we have enough information to determine "the" cause for global warming. I don't think it matters anyway. It's more likely a natural phenomenon. Even if it is due to humans, it's still natural since we are part of nature. Humans don't live outside of nature simply because of our technology.
So science can't be different from politics because it is politics, and we can't hurt nature because we are nature! Truly, the power of redefinition is limitless! Bravo, sir! Brilliant!
If you'll excuse me for five minutes, I just have to go dump all this used motor oil from my garage down the sewer. After all, it's only natural! To think human activity is different is the most profound sort of arrogance.
Do you realize that you just corrected an arbitrarily high number with a different arbitrarily high number?
60 million years is high but certainly not arbitrarily high. It's a finite number like any other. If someone told you WWII happened about thirty years ago and you said it had instead happened about sixty years ago, the latter statement is still closer to being correct despite still being an approximation.
What big asteroid? Are you talking about the big impact that occurred at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary that might have been responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs? If so, you're way off, because the most recent Ice Ages didn't occur until, oh, 20 or 30 million years later.
Actually, about 60 or so. The KT extinction was 65 million years ago, and the ice ages didn't start until recently.
Yeah, it was a nice try. A nice, successful try. Until I read the post, I was going to suggest 2 and -5, which would've worked too.
Generally speaking in algebra, any unit multiple of a prime is considered a prime. Because -1 is the only unit other than 1, the negative numbers aren't usually counted, but there's no good reason not to apply the more general definition here.
it's a freely available, self updating representation of the entire earth's surface.
The Google Maps satellite photo of my house hasn't changed in the two-and-a-half years I've been using Google Maps. While I'm sure there's some useful information to be had, you're probably not going to find current troop positions and encampments, or have them updated enough to be useful. And Google Maps is hardly the only source of satellite photo data on the web.
Even though I am one of those pinko liberals this is one point I've got to give to the right. Any proposed solution that involves hurting the economies of the nations with resources to actually deal with the problem is not the answer. As many others have pointed out, global warming is a fact and it is going to take a lot of money and knowledge to survive it. Simply cutting back on emissions is not going to solve anything.
First off, this "economy is a sacred cow" thing is a pretty crappy guiding principle, since whatever you end up doing will have some impact. If people were allowed to use "think of the economy" as an excuse, then pretty much every single piece of environmental legislation of the past century would not exist, including those banning DDT, CFCs, and creating national parks, since all of these have had impacts.
Second, climate change isn't an all-or-nothing thing. If the U.S. and Europe had to "go it alone" that would still help. And it would create collective political pressure to apply to the "cheater" nations. If 90% of the American public actually believed human-caused climate change was happening, then any country that was an "emissions cheater" would have a bad rep and this would impact on trade deals and outsourcing. And, as history will tell you, trade is the cheapest and probably the most effective way of exerting political influence on foreign countries.
but it is predicted that a warmer earth will trade 5,000 more heat-related deaths for 20,000 fewer cold-related deaths.
I'm not sure where you're going with that, but this sort of cherrypicked speculation about "silver linings" of climate change ain't gonna cut it. Climate change is bad, period. Pretty much everything on the Earth, including all its biology, is set up for things as they are now, or set up for climate change on a geological time scale. Climate change will necessarily mean famine and wide-scale population shifts, which should easily negate any benefits from more of the world's surface area being liveable.
Environmentalists' arguments are only going to convince the choir until they first acknowledge that their history of 'global prediction' is really quite bad. Have we run out of clean water? Space for landfills? Food? Trees? Oil? No. None of the 'sky is falling' predictions have come true, so pardon me if I am somewhat skeptical of your latest crisis cry.
But it isn't just the environmentalists who are saying it now.
Slashdot Mirror
The Consulate General Seattle webpage disagrees with you.
Sorry, where was the contradiction with what the border officer guy said? Both stress that DUI is a serious offence; and AFAIK there is no mention of the marijuana possession business. What is the contradiction?
The worlds two biggest partners with the longest unprotected border have politicians that can't get along. We citizens should kick them both, but Ottawa needs a double kick.
Well, the problem is that as soon as the Canadian government puts pressure on the U.S. to loosen up the border, then the U.S. government will push back with two requests:
1) Share more info on your citizens and residents with us.
2) Strengthen your own border with the rest of the world.
Changing Canadian immigration policy to cater to U.S. demands is not going to play well for any Canadian politician.
And item #2 is really what is behind all those "terrorists are coming through Canada" stories you see in the American media. Hell, even Newt Gingrich, who really ought to have known better, thought the 9/11 bombers had come to the U.S. through Canada. After the Maher Arar case no Canadian government is going to suggest greater information-sharing on citizens between Canada and the U.S.
Two clicks is too much to expect from the average Slashdot bandwagoner, I guess.
I followed your link, and got this error page.
I suppose it might be the case that this system for auto-redirecting all Mac users to an error page dates from the time when all their songs were DRMed, and hasn't been updated. But it certainly doesn't convey the impression that they've changed anything.
I am in Canada, btw.
This is exactly right. Ballmer is the mob boss threatening to kill you if you don't pay up. The mob boss knows it's bad for business to actually kill everyone who owes you money, because then they can't pay.
Seems like no better a time to post the old poem by Kipling:
Danegeld
Rudyard Kipling
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:--
"We invaded you last night -- we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:--
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:--
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"
Have you seen leftist or Socialist papers with ads? There are almost ZERO ads in such papers.
The free weekly paper in my home city, which has a large political section of a heavily leftist bent, has an enormous number of ads. Some are what one would expect (the local discount movie theatre, bookstores); however, most of them seem to be for porn, strip clubs, and escort services.
You can copy music from a friend if you put it on a medium which has the levy, because then you have paid royalties.
Um, the document you linked does not say that. While it may reflect current practice in terms of what you will actually get prosecuted for, I have yet to see anything clear which says "if you paid the levy, you're good."
And in any case, what's the point of charging the levy on ipods and not, say, laptops? My Macbook is effectively my IPod.
Keep in mind that the CPCC != the CRIA (Canada's equivalent of the RIAA). The CPCC represents primarily artists.
While I agree they're not the CRIA, what is your basis for claiming they represent "primarily artists"?
If you cut it down the carbon will go back into the atmosphere and you are worse off than before.
What sort of scheme for sequestering the carbon from the atmosphere would work, though? Burying logs in a desert? Compressing the carbon into diamonds on a massive scale?
Plants need CO2, so removing it from the atmosphere might harm plant life. Temperatures will decrease (probably), and I'm sure that there's at least some species of wildlife that's now thriving with the warmer temperatures. Wind paterns will change. Climate patterns will change. To expect absolutely no "negative impact" on the environment is foolhardy.
Wow. Just, wow. I do hope your apparent concern for the ecological impact of climate change means you're against global warming as well.
Look, the whole point of the hue and cry over global warming is that the Earth is, right now, adapted to historical temperature levels. An abrupt rise or fall, of the kind we're seeing now, will have all kinds of negative consequences because many of the equilibria now in place take thousands or millions of years to rebalance themselves.
We're already pumping tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the air. The end goal of reducing our output by a billion tons is only going to reduce our impact, not create a new disruptive one. This is not to say that the means of achieving this goal might not be disruptive, e.g. converting a coal plant to a hydroelectric dam will flood some land and cause some havoc. But the end goal itself is not.
But to answer your general point: what if we went all the way and implemented this magic solution on a massive scale, to get a net decrease in CO2 emissions? Will this have an impact on the environment?
Of course it will, that's the bloody point: to cool things back to the way they were before! Will there be a few odd lifeforms that have benefited from warming temperatures? Sure, but they're the exception, just as raccoons (and to a lesser event, coyotes) benefited greatly from North American urbanization, even though almost all other native species didn't. The lucky oppurtunists will just have to suck it up and go back to whatever they were doing before global warming, which obviously wasn't too bad since they survived thus far.
if the amount of carbon to generate to power the process is lees then what is removed then you have a decrease in carbon.
Well, yes, but that obviously means the primary source of energy here can't be from the CO2 reaction. That would mean that, even with perfect efficiency in using the energy generated, you'd be going nowhere. (Or else you'd have a perpetual motion machine!) So nuclear, solar etc. are absolutely required for this.
New York City is widely considered one of the most left-wing cities in the US, but there, they're banning something people can avoid by simply NOT EATING IT.
Really? How exactly do you know when trans-fat is used at a restaurant?
For years, there have been health laws about restaurant food preparation, e.g. for preventing the contamination of restaurant food with rodent feces. Like the New York trans fat ban, these laws are intended for the customers' benefit but are a pain for restaurants to uphold.
If we can require customers to have the smarts to know whether trans fats are in their food, what's fundamentally different about requiring them to know whether their food was prepared in a clean environment? Why have health regulations at all? Let the market decide.
If the New York Times writers fell for the lie, then they, and not Wikipedia, bear the responsibility for their mistake.
Sorry,
s/New York Times/New Yorker/g
Incidents like this illustrate the limitations of the Wikipedia approach. It's not an encyclopedia, but rather it's a video game that escaped from its box, and is now influencing real people in the real world.
Look: here's how it works. If you lie in Wikipedia article-space about something that most other people can disprove on a Wikipedia page, you will get corrected. If I write that the current president of the United States is Barack Obama, I will get reverted.
This person, if he lied, lied in user-space. No one except the individual who wrote the page is claiming this to be true, and certainly not Wikipedia as a whole. If the New York Times writers fell for the lie, then they, and not Wikipedia, bear the responsibility for their mistake.
The worst that can be about Wikipedia is that a person who is a liar somehow got to be a high-profile editor, which is unavoidable in a world without thought police.
The more I observe, the more I am convinced that we are going to wake up and say how did we elect Harper twice? The first time everyone understands. It was a time to punish the liberals for scandal(though I still voted Liberal). This time I expect ultra slick campaigning from Harper, a wedge issue here and there. The attack ads from the Conservatives have already started. Brilliant really keeps the Liberals from wanting to force an election. If they do you have a head start.
No, while I agree that Harper's approach is inspired by Rove, I don't think it's going to play out like the U.S. Harper got in because of the sponsorship scandal and Martin's pathetically desperate campaign.
The current situation favours the Liberals. For this to change, we will need to see either a very tempting carrot dangled by Harper (along the lines of the GST cut), or a major mistake made by Dion. Either of these are still very possible. I think Dion is painting himself into a corner with his position on Kyoto, and I think bringing on Garth Turner was also a mistake.
I think don't think Harper will successfully be able to paint himself green. His image is too much that of an Alberta oil guy to achieve this. His goal now will be to keep the government from collapsing until after the fickle public's eyes have wandered away from the environment file.
That change benefits people other than the rich, in fact, it benefits any student studying on a substantial scholarship.
Yes, as a grad student whose primary income is a departmental scholarship, I have to say that having $10,000 of my income removed from taxation was pretty sweet. As well, there's the public-transit tax subsidy too.
So, while I am about the most ardently anti-Harper that a person could possibly be, I have to say that I have to say that his strategic pandering will probably help me out considerably.
Then why can't I make a working copy of Diablo I or Diablo II Play Disc (for backup purposes - I've destroyed one Diablo II CD from overuse)? I'd say software copy protection exists that is unbreakable.
I wouldn't bet on the existence of unbreakable DRM for software, but it is at least a somewhat defensible position. However, music is certainly breakable by design, because it has to be heard.
People as a whole aren't too picky about sound quality. They are willing to live with the acoustic downgrading and added artifacts that happens as a result of conversion to the MP3 format. Even if music was truly encoded in an "unbreakable" format, it still has to be decoded for play. In the worst case, people will just intercept the signal during play and re-encode it in an unencumbered and redistributable format, even if this means getting a lesser-quality recording than the original.
Why is this offtopic? "Squirting" is the Microsoft-sanctioned use of sending someone a song over a Zune. The joke makes complete sense in this context.
Um...these scientists have a vested interest in having humans being responsible for climate change. They want government money to do their research. Without a problem to research, there is no money. I hate to break it to you, but science is just as political as politics itself.
Personally, I don't think we have enough information to determine "the" cause for global warming. I don't think it matters anyway. It's more likely a natural phenomenon. Even if it is due to humans, it's still natural since we are part of nature. Humans don't live outside of nature simply because of our technology.
So science can't be different from politics because it is politics, and we can't hurt nature because we are nature! Truly, the power of redefinition is limitless! Bravo, sir! Brilliant!
If you'll excuse me for five minutes, I just have to go dump all this used motor oil from my garage down the sewer. After all, it's only natural! To think human activity is different is the most profound sort of arrogance.
Do you realize that you just corrected an arbitrarily high number with a different arbitrarily high number?
60 million years is high but certainly not arbitrarily high. It's a finite number like any other. If someone told you WWII happened about thirty years ago and you said it had instead happened about sixty years ago, the latter statement is still closer to being correct despite still being an approximation.
What big asteroid? Are you talking about the big impact that occurred at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary that might have been responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs? If so, you're way off, because the most recent Ice Ages didn't occur until, oh, 20 or 30 million years later.
Actually, about 60 or so. The KT extinction was 65 million years ago, and the ice ages didn't start until recently.
Nice try.
Yeah, it was a nice try. A nice, successful try. Until I read the post, I was going to suggest 2 and -5, which would've worked too.
Generally speaking in algebra, any unit multiple of a prime is considered a prime. Because -1 is the only unit other than 1, the negative numbers aren't usually counted, but there's no good reason not to apply the more general definition here.
it's a freely available, self updating representation of the entire earth's surface.
The Google Maps satellite photo of my house hasn't changed in the two-and-a-half years I've been using Google Maps. While I'm sure there's some useful information to be had, you're probably not going to find current troop positions and encampments, or have them updated enough to be useful. And Google Maps is hardly the only source of satellite photo data on the web.
Even though I am one of those pinko liberals this is one point I've got to give to the right. Any proposed solution that involves hurting the economies of the nations with resources to actually deal with the problem is not the answer. As many others have pointed out, global warming is a fact and it is going to take a lot of money and knowledge to survive it. Simply cutting back on emissions is not going to solve anything.
First off, this "economy is a sacred cow" thing is a pretty crappy guiding principle, since whatever you end up doing will have some impact. If people were allowed to use "think of the economy" as an excuse, then pretty much every single piece of environmental legislation of the past century would not exist, including those banning DDT, CFCs, and creating national parks, since all of these have had impacts.
Second, climate change isn't an all-or-nothing thing. If the U.S. and Europe had to "go it alone" that would still help. And it would create collective political pressure to apply to the "cheater" nations. If 90% of the American public actually believed human-caused climate change was happening, then any country that was an "emissions cheater" would have a bad rep and this would impact on trade deals and outsourcing. And, as history will tell you, trade is the cheapest and probably the most effective way of exerting political influence on foreign countries.
but it is predicted that a warmer earth will trade 5,000 more heat-related deaths for 20,000 fewer cold-related deaths.
I'm not sure where you're going with that, but this sort of cherrypicked speculation about "silver linings" of climate change ain't gonna cut it. Climate change is bad, period. Pretty much everything on the Earth, including all its biology, is set up for things as they are now, or set up for climate change on a geological time scale. Climate change will necessarily mean famine and wide-scale population shifts, which should easily negate any benefits from more of the world's surface area being liveable.
Environmentalists' arguments are only going to convince the choir until they first acknowledge that their history of 'global prediction' is really quite bad. Have we run out of clean water? Space for landfills? Food? Trees? Oil? No. None of the 'sky is falling' predictions have come true, so pardon me if I am somewhat skeptical of your latest crisis cry.
But it isn't just the environmentalists who are saying it now.