Don't be ridiculous; any cathedral-level building gives a 50% bonus to that city's cultural output. Even temples are a substantial boost - it's really hard to expand your borders in the early game without a religion.
Science, the religion, would have us accept that our betters have made assumptions that cannot be questioned by any reasonable person, and that only the most popular theories are correct - everything else is ignorance. And again, that's fine, just so long as we apply the correct labels. This was my point from the beginning. The statement "the universe started with a large explosion" has a significant faith portion to it.
Very well: to which of the assumptions underlying the hot Big Bang model do you object? And which less popular theories do you think might be more correct? Steady State?
Unless you seriously consider the 'We're all living in a simulated world' scenario you've been describing to constitute a 'significant faith portion'?
Or perhaps you don't dispute that the early Universe is extremely hot and dense, but only that that phase was truly the 'start'? Of that, at least, I can agree that there's some doubt. Properly defining terms like 'start' requires a meaningful context of time, and relativity breaks down completely at the very beginning. The cyclic Universe is dead, as I mentioned earlier - the Universe just isn't slowing down - which is a pity, I rather liked that model. Still, there are plenty of other exotica around which would make the Big Bang not the true 'beginning'. But now we're splitting hairs. The spacetime in which we find ourselves most definitely spent quite some time in its youth as an opaque fireball of hot plasma; we're only quibbling over the meanings of 'universe', 'started' and 'explosion'. And possibly 'large', since the geometry can be tricky.
"Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." is also a theory. Evolution (genes changes over time) is a fact, but the above statement is a theory.
Actually, I'd say the opposite.
'Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.' - This is a fact, if anything in the world is. As much a fact as 'Germany invaded Poland in 1939'. It's a bald statement about history.
'Evolution' is the theory - a system describing the general case of how species change over time. Evolution explains how and why human beings developed from earlier species: an explanation in terms of genetics, natural selection, relative survival advantage. The historical theory behind the 'Germany invaded Poland' fact above would similarly be an explanation in terms of economics, politics, relative strategic advantage.
A theory is something that connects together large numbers of facts and explains them all in a larger framework. Humans descended from earlier apes, dogs from wolves, birds from dinosaurs, we could make an endless list, but none of it would make any particular sense until we can understand the whole thing in terms of evolution.
Again, faith is faith. There's nothing wrong with it whatsoever, but why not call it what it is?
What is faith? To my mind, faith is believing something despite the absence of any evidence - or even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Christians often like to tell the story of Thomas the apostle to illustrate this, how he refused to believe in the Resurrection until he had met Jesus in person. To believe without evidence is a virtue in religion: 'Happy are they who have not seen, and yet believe'.
If your conception of 'faith' is something different, please explain, because if so we've been at cross-purposes for the last few posts.
Science works differently. We do not believe in the Big Bang on 'faith'; we believe in it because of many distinct empirical observations, combined with the general theory of relativity. The evidence in its favour is compelling. Yet, still, as you say, it's possible that our every observation might be wrong. That some malevolent god, or Romulan commander, or Agent Smith, might be manipulating our perceptions down to the last detail, to construct a false universe. Very well: if you want to call it that, then we have 'faith' that the Universe we see is in fact real; that although we may make mistakes, and although the Universe will surely contain many great puzzles and mysteries, we have 'faith' that no hostile power of cosmic scope is actively out to deceive us.
If that's 'faith' then I agree we are forced to maintain it. But in science 'faith' is not a virtue. It is a sin. And the entire purpose of the whole scientific enterprise is to eliminate the need for 'faith' from our worldview, as far as that is possible.
Since the remains of 'faith' we are left with today are 'that there exists an objective shared Universe', I'd say we've done pretty well. I can put up with that, since otherwise all we'd have would be 'Cogito ergo sum'...
I really like these sort of 'science of the past' conclusions. They're nearly all faith-based, just like the other religions they compete with...
So, are 'science of the past' measurements more uncertain than any other kind? We look at the sky and we see photons. A radio telescope detects photons all over the sky and concludes that the early Universe was extremely hot and dense. An optical telescope detects photons in one small area in Andromeda and concludes that there exists a vast spiral agglomeration of stars some 2.2 million lightyears away.
Is the existence of the Andromeda Galaxy just as unsure as the Big Bang, because both depend on observations that could be faked by God?
How about the existence of the Moon?
How about the existence of slashdot.org?
And if God could fake any and all of them with ease, why did you single out the Big Bang and 'science of the past' in particular?
I'm posting in followup to this post, which is far enough upstream by now that it probably ought to be reiterated:
Science has lots to say about the means by which such a being could act, and places restrictions on the time, place, and manner of such creative acts. Many of the things that science has excluded as possible means (barring massive deception on behalf of the selfsame being) are means that are expressed in religious texts. As a religious scientist, one is restricted fairly strongly to believing those texts only metaphorically, or not at all.
Religion says one thing. Science says another. You either
(a) believe the scientific result, and modify your religion using excuses like 'It's meant metaphorically'
or
(b) believe the religious tradition, and modify your science using excuses like 'God did it that way to test our faith!'
(a) is what reasonable scientific Christians do, I fully agree with you on that. (b) is what unreasonable fundamentalists do, and is what the long-ago ancestral post described as 'massive deception'. If God works out a way of tinkering with the Universe but making it look like he never did anything of the sort, then that's also 'massive deception'.
Data point: Radio telescope measures 2.7K microwave background. Theory proven: The spaghetti monster put it there.
This is not unique to the Big Bang, however. It applies to any observation. If God is an omnipotent liar bent on fucking with our minds, then we cannot trust any observation at all, because any of it could be faked. We can't even count on 9.81 metres per second per second - God might be fiddling even that.
So if you're going to throw out the hot Big Bang model of the early Universe on these grounds, then you'd better throw out absolutely every form of knowledge, with the possible exception of the most abstract of mathematics. Because you never know, some trickster deity might be rigging the Universe to look other than it is.
Except that not all religious people believe that the Earth was literally created in 7 days 6000 years ago. As the GP said, many believe in these little things called metaphors. Many Christians correctly believe that the Earth was formed from a collapsing dust cloud about 4.5 billion years ago.
And why do they believe these things? Because they accept the scientific evidence. As the ancestor post said, science has placed restrictions on the time, place and manner in which God can have intervened in the Universe. Few still believe the literal Genesis story, because it conflicts with strong evidence for a 4.54 billion year old Earth in a 13.7 billion year old Universe. God could have faked that evidence, but that makes God a liar.
Actually, isn't the 'explosion' part already being questioned? I read about an idea that said what the universe is doing is probably cyclical. Expand, contract, expand, contract - kind of a thing. I think I saw it here, actually.
The closed Universe model is very much out of favour, and has been so for a long time. All observations indicate that the expansion of the Universe is not slowing down towards a later re-collapse and Big Crunch: in fact, the expansion appears to be accelerating.
That being said, it really is 'just a theory' as one can NEVER prove it. Not EVER. Not even with a time machine, because if it were true it would be damn hard to record the event without altering it dramatically. That would, as far as I know, disqualify it from ever reaching 'law' status.
There's no such thing in science as 'law' status. We don't start out with theories and then prove them and then call them laws. There's no committee sitting down to vote on what we call a law and what we don't. And a lot of things we call laws are, well... wrong in reality. Have you ever encountered an Ideal Gas for the Ideal Gas Law to model? Or a perfectly Ohmic resistor that obeys Ohm's Law? No, me neither.
For the record, the predictions of the Hot Big Bang Model match the observed microwave background to enormous accuracy. And it gets the isotopic abundances of the atoms right, too. That the Universe was extremely hot and dense some 13.7 billion years ago is about as well established as it gets.
I really like these sort of 'science of the past' conclusions. They're nearly all faith-based, just like the other religions they compete with.
That's true, because I can build a radio telescope and measure the 2.7K microwave background myself, which is there just as the Big Bang model said it should be. And I can also build a godometer and monitor deities. Oh, wait...
And, no, you won't go to a magical afterlife filled with clouds, cake and concubines after you die.
The concubines are a lie?
(Actually, I heard recently that the whole business of concubines in heaven was a transcription error. Early manuscripts left out the dots above the Arabic text, introducing ambiguity; it's more likely that Allah was promising his people seventy-two bunches of grapes.)
Such shenanigans would count as 'massive deception'. If God has been intervening in the Universe, he has been doing so in such a way as to conceal his own involvement. If, for instance, he created the world in seven days in 4004 BC, then he retconned in 13.7 billion years of entirely synthetic history. That kind of behaviour makes God a liar and a fraud, which is not the kind of thing most theists like to believe in.
GM crops are bad, full stop. They do not produce seeds, which means that you have to buy new seeds each season.
I think your quarrel is not with GM crops in principle, but with Monsanto's business model, which I quite agree makes Microsoft look positively benevolent. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater; genetic engineering can create crops that are more efficient converters of sunlight to food, which can enable us to feed the world population with a much smaller environmental impact. More food grown on less land is a very good thing.
I think you missed the point. It was possible to kill children in Fallout. If you did so, your character sheet would proudly bear the title of 'Child-Killer' and just about every character in the game would then shoot you on sight. It wasn't that people hated Fallout for its child-killing; it was that people in Fallout hated you for your child-killing.
This happened even if it wasn't you who killed the child, but one of your henchmen. Or your dog. Or for that matter if you'd been spraying automatic weapons around and a stray bullet happened to hit a child. You learned to be careful what you shot at in that game. And you learned never, ever, to give a henchman any weapon with a burst-fire mode.
I'm not sure which sounds worse safety wise but the idea of any fully autonomous system 'with weapons' strikes me as a bad move, not in any sort of T2 way, just that things will go wrong sometimes, no system is 100% perfect.
The computer controlling an autonomous drone doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to be better than the human pilot. If a computer shoots at its own allies less often than human pilots would, it's a success. And for the USAF, that's a pretty low standard.
FWIW, where I live (Nebraska), season tickets are much much expensive than the sum of individual tickets. They're handed down through families and have probably sparked worse divorce custody battles than most kids.
Liverpool is the same. The club sets a price for season tickets, and in fact that price is substantially less than buying individual tickets would cost, but in truth they're simply not to be had on the open market. The waiting list is estimated in years, perhaps decades. Occasionally a season ticket holder leaves the city and gives up his season ticket; all the others are renewed religiously by their holders, and, as you say, even passed through families.
The problem is that the capacity of the stadium used to be much greater, before the terraces were replaced with stands. That drastically reduced the number of tickets available, and turned every season ticket into a treasure far beyond gold. There are plans to build a new and far larger stadium, but what with one thing and another funding is difficult to secure.
And what if the war is justified, even if it isn't defensive?
If that's the finding of the tribunal, then the leaders on trial will be found not guilty. Otherwise, they spend the rest of their lives in prison like any other mass murderer.
Rather than spending a fortune on shrinks, why not hire a programmer instead? Just have the display overlay something like, oh... 'Direct Hit! 10,000' when the bomb goes off. And keep a high score. That'll help the pilot achieve the necessary mental disconnect between his own actions and the gruesome fate of the people on the ground, and enable him to defend our freedom much more effectively without unfortunate side-effects like conscience or remorse.
Bonus points for hitting weddings, Chinese embassies, and British armoured columns.
Russia's Navy deteriorated badly after the fall of the Soviet Union and has not been significantly rebuilt yet, especially with respect to capital ships (and any conflict between Russia and Canada over Canadian possessions would be primarily a naval confrontation).
For an example of how far the Russian Navy has fallen, remember the Kursk? Sank while on exercises in the Arctic, surrounded by the entire northern fleet. The Russians tried and failed for days to mount a rescue. Finally they swallowed their pride and accepted foreign help; a team of Norwegian and British divers quickly reached the submarine, but the crew were long dead.
Since then the Kursk has been raised... by the Dutch.
If that's the best hackers can do then MediaSentry has nothing to fear.
Thanks to their war on alt.religion.scientology, the Fishman affidavit and the OT-III documents containing the Xenu fairytale were propagated, disseminated and mirrored globally. Mostly out of spite. Now, anybody who wants to can read their top-secret inner scripture, that kills any non-Clear who reads it, and find out it's unbelievably bad pulp SF; as a result, Scientology is now widely known to be a loopy UFO cult.
Consider the amount of potential energy when you drop six sextillion tons of mass into a black hole. Because of angular momentum it won't just drop straight in without a trace; it will form an accretion disc, losing that energy by friction and radiating it away. Accretion is about the most efficient energy source known, short of antimatter annihilation. It would, at least for a while, outshine the sun. The ISS astronauts would be cooked.
OR the timeline where you're the only non-cloned human left alive, surrounded by clones of your ex-girlfriend. Then you'll wish you didn't get on her bad side right before 'the accident'.
OR the timeline where you're standing on the beach with one girl you never quite dared to ask out, watching bloody chunks of the 500-mile-tall version of the other girl you never quite dared to ask out fall back to earth, and everyone else has been dissolved into a global ocean of yellow goo.
I've afraid you're the one whose bought into a common lie. Human activity releases far, far less carbon dioxide than the planet produces.
Indeed? Then I'd like to see your figures. Because we outdo the volcanoes by a factor of a hundred. Looking into other sources, well: rotting vegetation was mentioned, and I agree it's a far larger quantity than human activity, but is that a source of carbon dioxide? Rotting vegetation can never release more carbon dioxide than the amount it absorbed when it first grew, making it net carbon neutral. Unless there is a net decrease in the planet's biomass, there's no overall extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to plant life. Same goes for respiration by living things: the CO2 I exhale is carbon that was absorbed when my food grew, and will be absorbed again as a future meal grows.
We on the other hand are digging up and releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, all year, every year, and unlike the plants we're not taking it back out of the atmosphere. That's producing an ongoing year-on-year net increase in carbon dioxide. Nothing else on earth compares to human industry for increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be ridiculous; any cathedral-level building gives a 50% bonus to that city's cultural output. Even temples are a substantial boost - it's really hard to expand your borders in the early game without a religion.
Very well: to which of the assumptions underlying the hot Big Bang model do you object? And which less popular theories do you think might be more correct? Steady State?
Unless you seriously consider the 'We're all living in a simulated world' scenario you've been describing to constitute a 'significant faith portion'?
Or perhaps you don't dispute that the early Universe is extremely hot and dense, but only that that phase was truly the 'start'? Of that, at least, I can agree that there's some doubt. Properly defining terms like 'start' requires a meaningful context of time, and relativity breaks down completely at the very beginning. The cyclic Universe is dead, as I mentioned earlier - the Universe just isn't slowing down - which is a pity, I rather liked that model. Still, there are plenty of other exotica around which would make the Big Bang not the true 'beginning'. But now we're splitting hairs. The spacetime in which we find ourselves most definitely spent quite some time in its youth as an opaque fireball of hot plasma; we're only quibbling over the meanings of 'universe', 'started' and 'explosion'. And possibly 'large', since the geometry can be tricky.
Actually, I'd say the opposite.
'Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.' - This is a fact, if anything in the world is. As much a fact as 'Germany invaded Poland in 1939'. It's a bald statement about history.
'Evolution' is the theory - a system describing the general case of how species change over time. Evolution explains how and why human beings developed from earlier species: an explanation in terms of genetics, natural selection, relative survival advantage. The historical theory behind the 'Germany invaded Poland' fact above would similarly be an explanation in terms of economics, politics, relative strategic advantage.
A theory is something that connects together large numbers of facts and explains them all in a larger framework. Humans descended from earlier apes, dogs from wolves, birds from dinosaurs, we could make an endless list, but none of it would make any particular sense until we can understand the whole thing in terms of evolution.
What is faith? To my mind, faith is believing something despite the absence of any evidence - or even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Christians often like to tell the story of Thomas the apostle to illustrate this, how he refused to believe in the Resurrection until he had met Jesus in person. To believe without evidence is a virtue in religion: 'Happy are they who have not seen, and yet believe'.
If your conception of 'faith' is something different, please explain, because if so we've been at cross-purposes for the last few posts.
Science works differently. We do not believe in the Big Bang on 'faith'; we believe in it because of many distinct empirical observations, combined with the general theory of relativity. The evidence in its favour is compelling. Yet, still, as you say, it's possible that our every observation might be wrong. That some malevolent god, or Romulan commander, or Agent Smith, might be manipulating our perceptions down to the last detail, to construct a false universe. Very well: if you want to call it that, then we have 'faith' that the Universe we see is in fact real; that although we may make mistakes, and although the Universe will surely contain many great puzzles and mysteries, we have 'faith' that no hostile power of cosmic scope is actively out to deceive us.
If that's 'faith' then I agree we are forced to maintain it. But in science 'faith' is not a virtue. It is a sin. And the entire purpose of the whole scientific enterprise is to eliminate the need for 'faith' from our worldview, as far as that is possible.
Since the remains of 'faith' we are left with today are 'that there exists an objective shared Universe', I'd say we've done pretty well. I can put up with that, since otherwise all we'd have would be 'Cogito ergo sum'...
From your earlier post:
I really like these sort of 'science of the past' conclusions. They're nearly all faith-based, just like the other religions they compete with...
So, are 'science of the past' measurements more uncertain than any other kind? We look at the sky and we see photons. A radio telescope detects photons all over the sky and concludes that the early Universe was extremely hot and dense. An optical telescope detects photons in one small area in Andromeda and concludes that there exists a vast spiral agglomeration of stars some 2.2 million lightyears away.
Is the existence of the Andromeda Galaxy just as unsure as the Big Bang, because both depend on observations that could be faked by God?
How about the existence of the Moon?
How about the existence of slashdot.org?
And if God could fake any and all of them with ease, why did you single out the Big Bang and 'science of the past' in particular?
Religion says one thing. Science says another. You either
(a) believe the scientific result, and modify your religion using excuses like 'It's meant metaphorically'
or
(b) believe the religious tradition, and modify your science using excuses like 'God did it that way to test our faith!'
(a) is what reasonable scientific Christians do, I fully agree with you on that. (b) is what unreasonable fundamentalists do, and is what the long-ago ancestral post described as 'massive deception'. If God works out a way of tinkering with the Universe but making it look like he never did anything of the sort, then that's also 'massive deception'.
Theory proven: The spaghetti monster put it there.
This is not unique to the Big Bang, however. It applies to any observation. If God is an omnipotent liar bent on fucking with our minds, then we cannot trust any observation at all, because any of it could be faked. We can't even count on 9.81 metres per second per second - God might be fiddling even that.
So if you're going to throw out the hot Big Bang model of the early Universe on these grounds, then you'd better throw out absolutely every form of knowledge, with the possible exception of the most abstract of mathematics. Because you never know, some trickster deity might be rigging the Universe to look other than it is.
And why do they believe these things? Because they accept the scientific evidence. As the ancestor post said, science has placed restrictions on the time, place and manner in which God can have intervened in the Universe. Few still believe the literal Genesis story, because it conflicts with strong evidence for a 4.54 billion year old Earth in a 13.7 billion year old Universe. God could have faked that evidence, but that makes God a liar.
The closed Universe model is very much out of favour, and has been so for a long time. All observations indicate that the expansion of the Universe is not slowing down towards a later re-collapse and Big Crunch: in fact, the expansion appears to be accelerating.
That being said, it really is 'just a theory' as one can NEVER prove it. Not EVER. Not even with a time machine, because if it were true it would be damn hard to record the event without altering it dramatically. That would, as far as I know, disqualify it from ever reaching 'law' status.
There's no such thing in science as 'law' status. We don't start out with theories and then prove them and then call them laws. There's no committee sitting down to vote on what we call a law and what we don't. And a lot of things we call laws are, well... wrong in reality. Have you ever encountered an Ideal Gas for the Ideal Gas Law to model? Or a perfectly Ohmic resistor that obeys Ohm's Law? No, me neither.
For the record, the predictions of the Hot Big Bang Model match the observed microwave background to enormous accuracy. And it gets the isotopic abundances of the atoms right, too. That the Universe was extremely hot and dense some 13.7 billion years ago is about as well established as it gets.
I really like these sort of 'science of the past' conclusions. They're nearly all faith-based, just like the other religions they compete with.
That's true, because I can build a radio telescope and measure the 2.7K microwave background myself, which is there just as the Big Bang model said it should be. And I can also build a godometer and monitor deities. Oh, wait...
You can.
The concubines are a lie?
(Actually, I heard recently that the whole business of concubines in heaven was a transcription error. Early manuscripts left out the dots above the Arabic text, introducing ambiguity; it's more likely that Allah was promising his people seventy-two bunches of grapes.)
Such shenanigans would count as 'massive deception'. If God has been intervening in the Universe, he has been doing so in such a way as to conceal his own involvement. If, for instance, he created the world in seven days in 4004 BC, then he retconned in 13.7 billion years of entirely synthetic history. That kind of behaviour makes God a liar and a fraud, which is not the kind of thing most theists like to believe in.
I think your quarrel is not with GM crops in principle, but with Monsanto's business model, which I quite agree makes Microsoft look positively benevolent. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater; genetic engineering can create crops that are more efficient converters of sunlight to food, which can enable us to feed the world population with a much smaller environmental impact. More food grown on less land is a very good thing.
I think you missed the point. It was possible to kill children in Fallout. If you did so, your character sheet would proudly bear the title of 'Child-Killer' and just about every character in the game would then shoot you on sight. It wasn't that people hated Fallout for its child-killing; it was that people in Fallout hated you for your child-killing.
This happened even if it wasn't you who killed the child, but one of your henchmen. Or your dog. Or for that matter if you'd been spraying automatic weapons around and a stray bullet happened to hit a child. You learned to be careful what you shot at in that game. And you learned never, ever, to give a henchman any weapon with a burst-fire mode.
The computer controlling an autonomous drone doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to be better than the human pilot. If a computer shoots at its own allies less often than human pilots would, it's a success. And for the USAF, that's a pretty low standard.
Liverpool is the same. The club sets a price for season tickets, and in fact that price is substantially less than buying individual tickets would cost, but in truth they're simply not to be had on the open market. The waiting list is estimated in years, perhaps decades. Occasionally a season ticket holder leaves the city and gives up his season ticket; all the others are renewed religiously by their holders, and, as you say, even passed through families.
The problem is that the capacity of the stadium used to be much greater, before the terraces were replaced with stands. That drastically reduced the number of tickets available, and turned every season ticket into a treasure far beyond gold. There are plans to build a new and far larger stadium, but what with one thing and another funding is difficult to secure.
If that's the finding of the tribunal, then the leaders on trial will be found not guilty. Otherwise, they spend the rest of their lives in prison like any other mass murderer.
Bonus points for hitting weddings, Chinese embassies, and British armoured columns.
Actually, a great many people do. It's not North Korea you know; people are allowed to leave.
For an example of how far the Russian Navy has fallen, remember the Kursk? Sank while on exercises in the Arctic, surrounded by the entire northern fleet. The Russians tried and failed for days to mount a rescue. Finally they swallowed their pride and accepted foreign help; a team of Norwegian and British divers quickly reached the submarine, but the crew were long dead.
Since then the Kursk has been raised... by the Dutch.
And the drugs.
Thanks to their war on alt.religion.scientology, the Fishman affidavit and the OT-III documents containing the Xenu fairytale were propagated, disseminated and mirrored globally. Mostly out of spite. Now, anybody who wants to can read their top-secret inner scripture, that kills any non-Clear who reads it, and find out it's unbelievably bad pulp SF; as a result, Scientology is now widely known to be a loopy UFO cult.
Consider the amount of potential energy when you drop six sextillion tons of mass into a black hole. Because of angular momentum it won't just drop straight in without a trace; it will form an accretion disc, losing that energy by friction and radiating it away. Accretion is about the most efficient energy source known, short of antimatter annihilation. It would, at least for a while, outshine the sun. The ISS astronauts would be cooked.
OR the timeline where you're standing on the beach with one girl you never quite dared to ask out, watching bloody chunks of the 500-mile-tall version of the other girl you never quite dared to ask out fall back to earth, and everyone else has been dissolved into a global ocean of yellow goo.
Indeed? Then I'd like to see your figures. Because we outdo the volcanoes by a factor of a hundred. Looking into other sources, well: rotting vegetation was mentioned, and I agree it's a far larger quantity than human activity, but is that a source of carbon dioxide? Rotting vegetation can never release more carbon dioxide than the amount it absorbed when it first grew, making it net carbon neutral. Unless there is a net decrease in the planet's biomass, there's no overall extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to plant life. Same goes for respiration by living things: the CO2 I exhale is carbon that was absorbed when my food grew, and will be absorbed again as a future meal grows.
We on the other hand are digging up and releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, all year, every year, and unlike the plants we're not taking it back out of the atmosphere. That's producing an ongoing year-on-year net increase in carbon dioxide. Nothing else on earth compares to human industry for increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations.