Our world is dying

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transporting enything from Earth to anywhere else is extremely expenseive, and except for the Moon, extremely time consuming as well. a colony would have to be self-sufficient in things like food (there is also no proof we can actually manage mining in other planets, etc); supplying them from Earth would not be viable except for a handful of people. In any case, there is no known solution, even in principle, for bone density loss.
I do not think humanity will become extinct, but it could become destitute. The 'cockroach strategy' of survival by numbers works, but think of the resulting quality of life. Countries like Japan are physically running out of space, so that the Japanese take out 50-year mortgages just to buy a tiny flat.
There was on the BBC a program about a family making radical lifestyle changes to reduce their carbon footprint. The reduction was actually pretty small. even if everyone did it, and businesses and governments did their share, in a few years the gains would be gobbled up by the growing population - what affects the environment is the total pollution, not the pollution per person. Plus, apart from climate change, we have to deal with the reality of finite natural resources (oil, mines, arable land) - increasing the number of mouths to feed is hardly an answer. Historically, most developed countries either exported their surplus population or acquired vast new teritories by conquest, displacing the original inhabitants. wars also played a role, and up to the 19th century there were countries with plenty of sparsely inhabited territory that was desirable and economically viable to live on (the US and Argentina, for example); that is no longer the case and sparsely populated territories are very inhospitable.

Macbeth:
the fact that some enviros are single-minded and/or don't know what they're doing doed not mean that the atmospheric scientists who say that global warming is happening also do not know what they're doing.

Jrknothead:
Even if, as you claim, the scientists on the IPCC were picked with an agenda, that does not necessarily mean that they are wrong. Maybe you should read the report for yourself before you decide that it doesn't make sense.

Scientist who support the carbon modeled global warming are given lots of grants by special interest groups and our governments. Why would they not support it. They will only look for proof that this is the case.

On the other hand, scientists who oppose the carbon models don't get this funding and are not researching other causes. However, their views are supported by big business. In that case they must be wrong. Right?

No bias here.

*snort*
There are plenty of oil-funded think-tanks that will pay scientists far more than they would make doing grant-based research if they can throw some doubt into the discussion on global warming.

I dare you to look at the body of data - hard facts, with no opinion involved - and say that it is the vast majority of the atmospheric scientists who have it wrong, and not the oil companies. Look at the cherry-picked oil company data, but look at the IPCC data too.

fact check article on anti-warming adds

Gore wins the Nobel peace prize

I'm doing my part, just had a nice roast beef sandwich and now I'm smoking a cigarette while nice and warm because the wood pellet stove is fired up. I have well water in vermont, but buy bottled water from Maine.

The bags of wood pellets came from west virginia even though they are also made locally, got me why the local hardware store gets them from that far away. At least I can get a warm & fuzzy feeling for not burning oil if i don't think about the fact it took lots of power to produce the wood pellets and truck them up here, they come in plastic bags made from oil.

Could everyone who hasn't please read the Terms and Conditions I posted earlier? Oh and there's someone on here who posted on this discussion and I like his opinion a lot - he has an avatar with a fiery bird on it.

I am not one to believe that global warming is human-caused, but I am one to believe our world would be a MUCH better place if people could just put into perspective the reckless wastefulness they do in an average day. Wastefulness and reckless consumption reduces the quality of everyone's life, but most people are too short-sighted to see it. They may complain about a noisy, congested highway and all the air pollution but think nothing of driving their car and contributing to it. There's really no nightfall in our cities anymore as light pollution breaks the darkness and ruins the habitats of native species. People complain about the prices of energy, but cannot even bring themselves to shut off the climate control system....it goes on...humankind is highly hippocritical of itself when it comes to conservation!! !

Here are some of the common everyday wastefulness that I observe in a typical day:

Most commuters in a typical city live on one side of town, and work on the other side of town. In years past, people lived close to where they work. Prior to the automobile, people commuted by rail or on their own two feet. Even after the automobile became commonplace, commutes were in the 5-10 mile range in most cities...now they are in the 30-50 mile range. Look at those commuting vehicles too...most of them contain only one occupant! All this driving, and it has been found that about 40 percent of the jobs out there that people do could be done at home by E-commuting! Other studies have found that in big cities, public transportation is within reach of 30 percent of the commuting populous.

Now, imagine this...40 percent of the traffic is removed from the highway because those people are now E-commuting from home. Now, out of that, let's remove another 30 percent of that traffic because those people are now riding busses and trains. Let's now move the last bit of the populous to less than 10 miles away from their occupations. WOW!! ! LOOK HOW FEW VEHICLES ARE ON THE ROAD! It make angry because I must drive for my job, like other service-industry people do. While I am driving around in a fully loaded van trying to do my job, it's real satisfying to know that 70 percent of the people out there in their vehicles around me clogging and jamming the streets and highways really don't even need to be driving their cars in the first place!! !

Outside of the automobile, let's look at all the other wasteful stuff going on. I bet all you all have driven by businesses in commercial districts that are lit up like movie sets at night...AND THE BUSINESS ISN'T EVEN OPEN. Yes, you need lights for security, but THAT MANY??? There is a point you pass diminishing returns with anything! Wait till you walk inside. Most retail establishments are cesspools of wasted energy, like that grocery store with the open-face refrigerator case, and all those halogen lights shining into it!

Now, look down...all that fancy green grass around the parking lot, is it really necessary? What does it take to grow that stuff? Chemicals, lots of 'em...and water...lots of water...purified, drinkable water that I could be using to quench my thirst! Now,, where does all those chemicals go? Well, it runs off in all that water you're throwing on that grass. Where does it go after that? into the sewer, and then into the river, the river gets cloudy and dull because of the chemicals and sea life can't survive. Then the river water has to have all those chemicals REMOVED, and once again, pumped back into your selfish sprinkler system where the process begins again, and I end up having to drink over clorinated water because there's too much pollution in it!

One of the biggest wastes I see is in "remodeling". Typically, someone thinks something looks "old" or outdated for whatever reason. The building materials still serve their job, and the appliances, and other components still perform their job well, but they are removed anyways...thrown in a big construction dumpster where they get landfilled. I have seen office buildings get remodeled after less than 3 years of usage just because of someone's "feelings".

Now, lastly watch people sitting at a restaurant eating lunch or whatever meal. Less than half the people at the restaurant will leave without fully comsuming their plate of food. Why is the restaurant serving so much food?, and why are the patrons ordering so much in the first place? The food goes right in the trash. Yes, I may sound like your old lady telling you about starving kids in Africa, but it really is wasteful not to eat all the food you prepare. It's also wasteful to over-eat..all it does is make you fat, and your body poops out what it can't process anyways. So don't let your eyes get bigger than your stomach!


There are many more examples of this I can state. As I sit here in the dark on my laptop with only a single 4 watt CFL lighting my house, the windows open instead of running the AC, Someone could probably still look at my life and see where I'm using too much energy. I wouldn't mind it though, it sometimes takes someone else's eyes to see it! They would just need to walk through all the brown, dried up grass to get to my front door first!

Rush Limbaugh talks that he is proud of his reckless consumption. Despite my small "footprint" on this earth, I cannot say I am proud of making someone put up with my noisy, stinky work van, or my noisy air conditioner, smelly furnace, or my cans of nasty trash I must put out every week by the street corner among many things, and I cannot see how anyone could be!

Science is a myth. It can observe, but not predict.

It has been getting colder for two thousand years. Considering recent history, say the last 40,000 years, we have been, and are still, in an ice age.

Do humans cause global warming? Yes, they are warmer than the planet, and they like to burn things.

Does it affect the greater natural cycle? No, the shift from glacial maximum to inter glacial which has happened three times in the last 40,000 years is more energy coming and going than humans ever produced.

This is not only a normal earth climate, it is a mild period. Where it will go from here? Flip a coin, heads warmer, tails colder, and if it lands on edge, the same.

In 400 Scotland grew grapes and exported wine, Vinland could have well been in grapes, Scandiavia was very warm. Cold drove the Vikings south in 900, cold likely had to do with the fall of Rome. In 700 the Black Sea and the Nile froze. 1250 to 1500 the cooling caused a severe drought in the Americas. In Europe it caused ideal conditions for food production. Before that they could not feed themselves, even with the help of the black death and the Crusades. From 1500 to 1900 they exported surplus population.

They dealt with their problems by genocide and land theft, looted the planet, and now complain?

Cultures that lived within the natural eb and flow of nature had a bounty put on their scalps, men, women, children, old people. They were replaced by progress. Only Europeans are true humans.

Just keep doing what you are doing, it will all be fixed soon.

Please do not smoke, it affects the flavor of your meat.

MightyZebra-
that would have been Elemental; he's always good for a sensible, readible post. Probably my favorite poster on this board, in fact.

Regarding science: One of the hallmarks of a good theory is that it can accurately be used to predict outcomes. Newtonian mechanics is valuable because it can be used to predict things like the trajectory of projectiles with excellent accuracy. Einstienian mechanics has accurately predicted some things like the bending of light around the sun and the effectiveness of atomic weapons.

Some of the predictions that were made decades ago about global warming are coming to fruition now, long before the original predictors thought that there would be enough climate change to effect them: shifts northwards in species ranges, invasions of tropical diseases into northern climates (think, for example, west nile virus), population decreases in species strongly dependent on seasonal changes: migrating songbirds are in decline partly because they arrive too late to hit the caterpillar boom, and their chicks go hungry. The caterpillars, on the other hand, are doing very well. Mushroom species that used to be seasonal are now seen all year round. Average tropical storm strength is increasing. Rainfall patterns are changing.

There are multiple causes to some of these things, but they all were predicted ahead of time by atmospheric scientists and biologists and epidemiologists who were extrapolating on the theory of global warming.

Ice ages do seem related to the closing of the gap between the Americas, As I recall the Pacific is eight foot higher, and a lot of warm water would join the Gulf Stream if it were open again.

20,000 years ago was a cold max, but there were 5000 warm years before, then another time of ice, and 5000 years of warm before that, when we get back to the forth period of the Wurm which lasted 100,000- 125,000, and was lots of ice.

Out of the last 160,000 years, there have been three warm times, 5000, 5000, and this one, that has lasted 10,000. 20,000 warm, 140,000 cold.

The last two ice waves were proceeded with warmer than today periods, higher sea levels, the shell middens of Europe are far above the current beach. Both times this warm were followed by a sudden winter, when it snowed six inches a day for 2000 years.

Some thirty-five miles of snow fell, and what did not sublime compacted into two miles of ice.

I does become very dry, the salty sea will not give up any moisture, and when the ice starts to melt, comes periods like the Lesser Dryas, a 2000 year dust storm, that left loess deposits up to a hundred foot thick.

I hunted the Clovis and Folsom sites in the west. They are found on gray sand, the surface of 13,000 years ago, I looked for blowouts, where the wind had taken the red sand that covers, and in creeks, for most of the west got up to fifty foot of wind deposited red sand.

There was stilll a wall of ice reaching almost to Saint Louis when this was deposited.

We can climate map the past, but what the triggers are, what caused the warm spikes that proceed the coming of the Fobal Winter, the winter without end, and what turns warm to a train of snow, that draws the oceans down 440 foot, the last time, 330 foot the time before, we have no idea.

We can be sure humans had nothing to do with it. In a system that has a long record of odd, even, red, black, warm, cold, it is a safe bet to think it will change back again. Since the Lesser Dryas sea level has risen 440 foot, and the prior peak was only 24 foot higher. The one before that was not as high, and then came the 2000 year winter.

We are just at the point where it happened the last two times.

One model is Hurricanes, they form off Africa and move west, sometimes they turn right, and go north, a bit more hook and they would follow the Gulf Stream, and crossing the mountains of Scandanavia, would fall as snow. Something triggers the moisture train. Warm air being force up, dropping it's moisture as snow, becomes colder, dryer, smaller, and creates a low that sucks in warm, moist, high pressure air behind it, and the process continues till the ocean is too salty to give up any more moisture.

Whatever it is, it has happened twice in the last 30,000 years. Warming does seem to be speeding up. The old Norse speak of Fenis Wolf, coming to end the world, bringing endless winter, and running around the Pole Star. There is evidence of a 300 mile per hour wind running around the Arctic Circle, tearing up trees, blowing away animals, and spinning about for thousands of years.

We mighty humans had nothing to do with it, nor could we change it, stop it, and opening the Darian Gap would change things, back to normal, which for most of time was 120 degrees.

The age of reptiles was ending long before a meteor struck, most likely the Darian Gap between the Americas was closing over time, and it cooled the earth where huge plant eaters could no longer eat enough.

Most of our history, and likey the best part, is down 440 foot, where the beach was from 18,000 to 13,000 years ago, in a constant ice world. It was lower, warmer, and had the best soil. It was only about 10,000 years ago when these highlands were colonized, when the first towns were built, but they did not start from nothing, they came with domesticated crops and animals.

Proceeding the last two waves of ice there was a rodent period, a vast over production that left a layer of bones in all sites. This time humans are the rodents.