Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

I was taught that nothing on Earth is lost. It is all recycled in one form or another. I suppose we could manage to ship enough matter into outer space that it would make a difference, but I don't think we're otherwise losing stuff however much we rearrange it.

So, I have faith in humankind that if we run out of one 'raw material', we will have developed a workable substitute or different way of doing things by the time that happens. When butter was severely rationed in WWII, margarine was invented and is now a mult-billion dollar industry. When virtually all available rubber was appropriated for the war effort, we learned how to make vinyl tires. American ingenuity, if not stifled by excessive government mandates and regulations, has always been able to find a solution for virtually every problem thrown at it. If R&D doesn't produce the product they were shooting for, it often produces a product that is useful for something else. Most of the products that we take for granted now did not even exist when I was born.

The thing about computer models, is that we can become to dependent on them. Every now and then I do something that makes an Excel column add incorrectly. Until I learned to check formulas, it took me forever to find an error when that happened because I was so conditioned to trust Excel's addition without question.

Government can help us out by gathering, compiling, and dispensing good information. But government has too long a track record of ineffectiveness, inefficiency, and/or producing unintended bad consequences to be a desirable mechanism for getting things done.

See the link and do the math on the average world temperature numbers disagreements!

Great, but collective effort takes organization, not to mention a collection of people. If you are going to argue that everything that needs to be done can be done by individual effort I will tell you point blank that you are full of ****. If you want to argue that Government is not the best way to organize the effort fine, but in that case you need to put forth a credible alternative.

The last I looked China was not the best example of appreciation for human rights, free acess to information, freedom of thought, creativity, or expression, nor a free market system. It also includes a full 20% of the world population that includes some of the poorest people on Earth. So if you want to preach reform, that would be an excellent place to start.

But here, where do you think you will find more pollution and less concern for the environment: In Beverly Hills or in rural Appalachia where 60% of adults able to work aren't working? In New York City or in the slums of Calcutta? In Santa Fe or a primitive culture in Africa that is ravaged by drought?

I would need to put forth a credible alternative only if I believed that a collective effort is necessary to get something done. You haven't yet made a case that such is necessary where climate change or Earth resources are concerned.

Had we paid for our clean living rather than charged the costs onto our kids charge card I might have agreed with you. Had we cleaned up our lifestyle so that we used less energy and produced less exhaust on the earth instead of moving our dirty production to the slums of the planet as we did I might have agreed with you.

You want to make this a morally tale about how the wealthy are good for humanity, when what this is really about is how the powerful abuse the weak (the poor and the follow on generations) all while making themselves feel good about themselves and promoting themselves as good citizens. It is a complete fantasy. It borders on insanity.

You know there is a emotional need for humans to think that we are evil and in one manner or another will do harm to the earth.

When I was young the science of the time at least in the laymen journals was stating that our evil society would pump so many fine particles into the atmosphere that we would go into another ice age from the particles reflecting heat back into space.

Then when I was a young man I was told by experts that my society would come to an end in my life time due to natural resources such as iron ore running out. This conclusion was back up by computer models and once more see the Club of Rome nonsense.

Hell my grandmother told me that the opinion was widely stated that the large cannons fires in Europe during WW1 was causing unnatural weather conditions.

Someone in this thread had stated that the body heat of 6 billions human alone will change the climate in some manner!

The computer models are not proven and the data enter into them are all over the place beside.

As in the Club OF Rome if you are very careful in designing your models and then careful in setting up the data and starting condition you can get the ‘correct’ results.

Not fantasy at all. I don't know how old you are, but I have seen pieces of my world transformed as the people who live in it have demanded that it be restored, transformed, cleaned up. And it was done mostly by private initiative, not via government mandate.

If you give the poor in the worst slums ability to be more affluent, they will no longer be willing to live in slums. When most people enjoy sufficient affluence to be able to achieve a better quality of life, they invariably choose to do so. Give those poor folks in Africa basic human rights and a free market in which they can exploit their natural resources as we have already done in order to become affluent, and they will change their world. But make a world where those resources will be useless and have no value, and you doom them to more generations of crushing poverty.

All we have seen from government initiatives to improve people's lives is that poverty continues and the quality of life has deteriorated for millions.

Government is not the answer. Trust in human nature is.

It would be far better if the whole human race was poor and living only into their 30s that would be far more fair and right correct.

Foxie wrote:

You are funny!

That is kinda how it works, as peoples gain power they seek out other peoples to exploit, to do the stuff that they don't want to do. Maybe this is hard wired human nature, that we can't change it, but we can admitt that this is what we do. I am a socialist so I of course know the capitalist dogma by heart, the bit about promoting wealth and consumption is a well worn arguement that is worth considering. I think though that until capitalists can make an arguement that the earth can sustain 7 billion high consumption high energy usage humans that we need to take into consideration that maybe this is not the right way to go. Wealth is only valuable if it does something good, you cant eat money. If the creation of wealth degrades our planet then it degrades us, it that case the creation of wealth must be avoided.

The capitalists have a lot of splaining to do, everything that they blather about looks shaky on the evidence.

Poverty is relative, we can eliminate the poor by removing the wealth from the rich. It is worth considering doing. As for long life, I am told that there are mountain people in Napal that over their entire lives never made more than 100 dollars who are more happy than Westerners are and who tend to live into their hundreds. Lack of money is not necessarily a problem.

Well at least your identifying yourself as a Socialist explains some of the dichotomy that I see in your posts today. The problem is that if you resist the corruptive powers of which government is capable, you must resist giving any more power to government than is absolutely necessary which flies in the face of socialism as it is generally practiced on Planet Earth. But I can also understand that one who embraces Socialism would not put confidence in humankind's finer instincts but would put faith in government to order (or perhaps coordinate) the collective lives of the people.

On that front we are pretty different and probably won't find much, if any, common ground. You do offer a different perspective that is reasoned and thought through, however, and I thank you for that.

I am a socialist in the Zen sense, not in the traditional Western sense. This means for example that I consider it governments job to educate, encourage, and organize individuals and their efforts, but that it should rarely dictate or punish those who disagree with the majority (assuming that the majority effort is not being harmed by the malcontents) . There is and needs to be a constant tension between individual/collective and majority/minority, so absolutes are hard to come by. I contradict myself, or seem to, because the right thing to do depends upon the situation and on the timing.

You will find at a2k that I tend to argue the minority views, which is because I pick those things to comment on because no one else who holds my views are commenting. It makes it seem that I am more radical than I really am, but on some things (sex, gender relations, spiritual matters) I am pretty darn radical.

PS, I almost always find your posts interesting and helpful. I appreciate especially how well you stand up to attacks from the a2k groupthink, aka the mob. I have had a few run ins with that bunch myself.

Now you represent the minority? What happened to all that "societal-collective" huff-and-puff go?

T
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Well I don't always stand up all that well. Sometimes I get bored or decide it just isn't worth it or I just can't stomach the stupidity any further and quit which of course nets me even more abuse and accusations that I run if anybody disagrees with me, etc. I have participated on boards where playing devil's advocate was part of the fun and enjoyable with people who could appreciate that. Many here on A2K I think probably wouldn't understand the concept. Mostly my tenacity and passion is reserved for those things in which I do have interest and do believe in though.

I strongly believe that much of the global warming hype is intended to take away some of our freedoms and choices and force us into a collective ideological mold dictated by people who have their own self interests at heart much more than my interests. And I am passionately opposed to that.

I suspect we might share some components of that concept, but not all.

But thank you for the compliment.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif

Average Annual Global Temperature 1850-2008

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide.png

CO2 Trend 1958-2008

http://www.biocab.org/Solar_Irradiance_English.jpg

Solar Irradiance 1611 t0 2001

What freedoms and choices are being taken away? I mean, you should be able to say since you're so passionate about this right?

T
K
O

OK, you have data.....what is important, what is good, what is bad, how do you change the numbers if you should decide that you want to do so????? Reading numbers from instruments is not understanding the situation, nor understanding the consequences for mankind.

Yeah.. AND? I don't get any 50% differences in temperatures anywhere on that page using temperature.

1. Without the sun the world would be zero Kelvin
2. The temperature disagreements you are talking about are .025 Celsius
3. .025/288 is NOT 50% no matter HOW I do the math

Even if I use the Celsius scale a difference of 18.155 vs 18.13 doesn't give me 50% no matter HOW I do the math.

Even if I just use the difference in changes. 155 vs .13 .025/.155 doesn't give me 50%..

So.. Where are you getting YOUR math from?