FredT
Guest
The entire concept that Global warming is "our" (North America & Europe -translated by the press as the US) fault so it's up to "us" to fix it is way too simplistic to be accurate. If you look at the CO plumes in the atmosphere you'll see quickly that East Asia and the Amazon basin are the largest producers, yet nobody has asked those areas to "pony up" to the solution. CO2 concentration histories don't even track temp changes very well. The science is NOT a done deal!
Remember that Mother Nature has a great many checks and balances in her system. It's when we mess with that system we get in trouble.
We "channelized" and dammed rivers, and destroyed the water filtering swamps that kept the oceans clean during that process. Subsidence is mostly due to the fact that channelizing has stopped natural land building and dumps that valuable potential topsoil in the bottom of lakes and off the continental shelf. Much could be solved by simply parking a few semis at strategic locations on the levies along the major rivers, and detonating their loads of TNT at an appropriate time to let the river find a new course to the sea. This would annoy a bunch of farmers and landholders though, not to mention getting the politicians who'd even propose it fired!
We've "improved" beaches and thus proved that the ONLY thing we can do to a natural beach is screw it up! Most "replenishment" projects are done on barrier islands that have always been mobile anyway. Building homes on a transient island is folly, but we keep doing it. NOBODY on a barrier island should be insured against the sea reclaiming what it has always owned. We who use barrier islands for recreation should simply be happy for the short time the sea loaned us it's sand. Expecting it to be "permanent loan" is a folly to begin with, and most replenishment projects should NOT be funded.
The sum total of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere hasn't changed all that much. We burn fossilized carbon that came from the air to begin with. Our cattle and horses output large amounts of methane, but can anyone tell me that 100 million buffalos didn't fart? The largest aggregate producer of methane is still termites anyway.
There have been many warming/cooling cycles over the last 100,000,000 years. Why are we so vain to believe we have the ability to stop or start them? If "global warming" is a short term issue it will end in the start of another ice age that is overdue anyway. NO problem. These cycles will stop when the continents move a bit more and open up the arctic basin, say another 200,000,000 years or so, or we get a "snap tilt" by an asteroid impact that does the same thing and puts the poles in open oceans.
We also need to learn to listen to Mother Nature. She has ways to tell us when we have too many people in an area. We call them Famine and Drought. She also has a way to tell us to move back from the beach. We call that hint a typhoon, cyclone, or hurricane depending on where we live.
I still believe the best thing we can do for this rock is get off of it and start collecting and processing our raw materials in hard vacuum.
FT
Remember that Mother Nature has a great many checks and balances in her system. It's when we mess with that system we get in trouble.
We "channelized" and dammed rivers, and destroyed the water filtering swamps that kept the oceans clean during that process. Subsidence is mostly due to the fact that channelizing has stopped natural land building and dumps that valuable potential topsoil in the bottom of lakes and off the continental shelf. Much could be solved by simply parking a few semis at strategic locations on the levies along the major rivers, and detonating their loads of TNT at an appropriate time to let the river find a new course to the sea. This would annoy a bunch of farmers and landholders though, not to mention getting the politicians who'd even propose it fired!
We've "improved" beaches and thus proved that the ONLY thing we can do to a natural beach is screw it up! Most "replenishment" projects are done on barrier islands that have always been mobile anyway. Building homes on a transient island is folly, but we keep doing it. NOBODY on a barrier island should be insured against the sea reclaiming what it has always owned. We who use barrier islands for recreation should simply be happy for the short time the sea loaned us it's sand. Expecting it to be "permanent loan" is a folly to begin with, and most replenishment projects should NOT be funded.
The sum total of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere hasn't changed all that much. We burn fossilized carbon that came from the air to begin with. Our cattle and horses output large amounts of methane, but can anyone tell me that 100 million buffalos didn't fart? The largest aggregate producer of methane is still termites anyway.
There have been many warming/cooling cycles over the last 100,000,000 years. Why are we so vain to believe we have the ability to stop or start them? If "global warming" is a short term issue it will end in the start of another ice age that is overdue anyway. NO problem. These cycles will stop when the continents move a bit more and open up the arctic basin, say another 200,000,000 years or so, or we get a "snap tilt" by an asteroid impact that does the same thing and puts the poles in open oceans.
We also need to learn to listen to Mother Nature. She has ways to tell us when we have too many people in an area. We call them Famine and Drought. She also has a way to tell us to move back from the beach. We call that hint a typhoon, cyclone, or hurricane depending on where we live.
I still believe the best thing we can do for this rock is get off of it and start collecting and processing our raw materials in hard vacuum.
FT
