Global Warming (OT) - Page 3

Excellent post Bob-O.  I agree with your assertions 100% too Hodie.

2moons.  Good point. You are talking about the needless trashing and abuse of our environment.  This stuff is the result of certain major intl corps that have no morality at all, and people that are basically pigs and slobs.  It like comparing a walk through any gehtto to a walk thru munich or any city in austria.  Like comparing paris to frankfurt.  When I was in Munich and Frankfurt I was shocked at the cleanliness.  How come Germany is so clean and its food is so high quality?

Yeah, I know who does it and why.

If Europe is as you say maybe its the different set of value's and life style's.

I'd love to visit sometime.

alaman: “Yet another part of the Artic has the ice expanding and Greenland says glaciers in a lot of the country are growing. Man causing global warming is a bunch of hot air.”

Wrong: The Arctic is melting fast, scientists believed it wouldn’t disappear till the year 2100: at current rate (still rising) of melt it will be gone in twenty-five to thirty years. Antarctic ice is in similar retreat, as for glaciers in Swiss/Austrian Alps and the Himalayas (which in turn feed Asia’s major rivers, and on which hundreds of millions of people are dependent). Likewise, South-East Asian Monsoons depend wholly on the steady recurrence of the seasonal low-pressure system over the Tibetan Plateau. The Greenland ice-sheet is fading at a phenomenal rate – they’re now growing potatoes where only a few years ago this would have been considered impossible. The Siberian Tundra is losing its permafrost, with numerous structures collapsing as foundations give way, and as accompanied by an annual out-gassing of millions of tons of methane (25 times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon.) You really haven’t a clue, have you!

4pack: “The world is constantly changing, new species are always forming and more going extinct. Are we supposed to be expected to stop all of that? That would make us GOD not human. We could all park our cars forever and go back to nature, this warming would still happen. Then comes the ice age again....it's a cycle, like winter, spring, summer, fall. You can't stop it. It's happened since the birth of the earth.”

Flora and fauna species are going extinct at an astronomical rate as natural habitats are cleared for logging and expanding farming activity. Huge tracts of forests are also being destroyed now solely to make way for palm oil plantations (bio-fuel). At current rate of clearing, half of Congo rain forest will be gone within 25 years. (Tropical rain forests are the main powerhouse for new species generation.) Where other species are concerned we’ve played “God” for the past 5000 years – and are now doing so more than ever! Yes, the earth goes through an eternal cycle of momentous changes – but we’ve only been around for the merest instant – or didn’t you know!

DesertRangers: “The funny thing is you people need to move to China, India and other Asian countries and try to stop them as the US is the cleanest industrial nation in the world.”

Until overtaken in 2006 by China, The US was the world’s worst polluter, whereas Texas is one of the worst polluting regions on the planet. Large parts of the Appalachians are being turned into moonscape as they’re fed into coal-burning power stations.

Some 2004-year United Nations figures (carbon output from burning fossil fuels only): World 27,245,758,000 metric tons (100.0 %); United States 6,049,435,000 (22.2 %); China and Taiwan 5,010,170,000 (18.4 %); European Union 4,001,222,000 (14.7 %); Russia 1,524,993,000 (5.6 %).

Before spouting sheer crap, why not first check your facts!
 

hodie: “Then you will see that throughout the eons earth has experienced warming and chilling, warming and chilling. Do you remember their used to be glaciers thousands of years ago across most of what is now North America? Do you know, for example about the contributions to earths' atmospheric science of El and La Ninas?”

As mentioned, we didn’t even emerge till toward end of last ice age. El Nino is a naturally occurring cycle (caused by atmospheric pressure variance between eastern and western Pacific) - merely one stretching over more than one season. It also happens that 500 odd years AD a major volcanic explosion saw dust circling the globe with catastrophic consequences: onset of Dark Ages and, together with other factors, demise of the Roman Empire; disease, chaos and famine with large-scale crop failures, and a Mongol (a horse culture) invasion from the East because from pasture loss. All that the result of a bit of dust!

hodie:  “There is some contribution from man-made activities …”

Yes, indeed, with a thirty billion annual carbon contribution, you could say so …!

hodie: “China and other emerging nations have such severe pollution problems because of their outdated and behind the curve technology that all combined the US and most European nations don't even come close.”

China uses the same coal-burning technology as the US, and their cars are exactly the same type. Being generally older, US power stations, individually, are probably dirtier than the Chinese ones! In 2004 the combined carbon output of Europe and the US was double that of China (10 billion tons as compared to 5): that much for not even come close!

hodie: “People want to believe what they want to believe and shallow science, or worse yet, pseudo-science leads to poor understandings and solutions for real problems.”

Despite the voluble pretty words or waffle, aren’t you yourself a perfect illustration? Does the mere fact that Preston agrees with you, still not tell you anything! Although, admittedly, you both appear to suffer from a complete inability to make two plus two equal four!
 

Interesting info on Greenland from NASA

svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/stories/greenland/index.html

svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a000500/a000584/

You know, most of you are just spouting the rhetoric you've heard from politicians and other 'talking heads' who have an axed to grind, the same people who managed to convince you that buying huge gas-guzzlers was the patriotic thing to do. Most of you haven't a clue how global warming works.

Here's the short version of the science behind it, from a former teacher in environmental science.

Most radiation from the sun passes right through the atmospere without having much effect on it, as the gases that make up the atmosphere do not absorb that frequency of radiation (light). The earth is heated mainly by the long-wave (heat) radiation that is caused by solar radiation (light) being absorbed by the ground.

There are two exceptions to this. One is carbon dioxide gas, which is able to absorb infrared light and re-radiates it as heat. The other is water vapour. And, as any physics student knows, the warmer the air, the more water vapour the air is able to hold. So, global warming is able to feed on itself. We pump out more CO2 emmissions, which warm the air by absorbing infrared light from the sun. The warmer air is able to hold more water vapour, which in turn absorbs more solar radiation, and re-radiates it as heat.

It is also a fact that CO2 levels in the air have been on the rise since the start of the industrial revolution, which was made possible by the invention of the coal-fired steam engine.

Yes, it is really hard to know for sure just what is going on with the atmosphere and temperature of the earth, but I am not so stupid as to believe that billions of tons of carbon being pumped into the air, and thousands of hectares of forest being cut every year are having ZERO effect on the atmosphere. (Trees absorb carbon from the air, and give off oxgyen, acting as the planet's 'lungs') I also am extremely skeptical of politicians, who all too often walk hand-in-glove with big businesses who have every reason to NOT want to cut carbon emissions, or the emission of other pollutants.

I spent most of my final year at university studying the effects of acid rain on the planet, more specifically, its effects on the lakes in the Canadian Shield area of Ontario, which included the near-total extinction of all aquatic life in the most vulnerable lakes. Again, don't try to tell me emissions have ZERO effect on the environment!

Nor do I beleive that I might as well live my life whatever way I want, as anything I do is going to have zero effect on the environment. I drive a hybrid SUV, and if I had the garage and driveway space, would probably buy a Smart car, or a similar sub-compact for local trips, and save the SUV for highway driving, or carrying large loads. I recycle and support environmental causes such as Pollution Probe and the Federation of Ontario Naturalists. I support the development of alternative energy sources for our cars and other energy needs, and think the U.S. government has been abyssmaly short-sighted in not pushing for this to happen, given the instability of the region that produces most of North America's oil supply.

I also suffer from asthma, and am EXTREMELY sensitive to air pollution, so I have a personal reason for wanting emissions to decrease. I spent the weekend camping in Northern Ontario, and have been hacking and coughing ever since returning to the southern part of the province.

Oops, double posted! Not sure how that happened....

China does NOT use the same coal burning technology as the US does. Their technology, for the most part, is many, many years behind. Ever been to China? There are practically NO scrubbers anywhere in China and this is one reason why China is putting so much pollution into the air in their rush to industrialize.  In the last few years they have created over 700 NEW cities and we are not talking small towns. In the larger picture, there is another gas that is more important than CO2, that being methane.

Of course, volcanic eruptions contribute. Who said they did not? And yes, species are disappearing from this planet at an alarming rate, but not all of it is related to man-made activity either. And Almodovar, where do you live? How clean is your nation?