el_sean wrote:I started a thread like this before the whole forum went ka-put. No hard feelings though.
While I have my own beliefs about the Earth's future, I feel that nothing we can do or ever have done has ever affected the Earth's climate to an extent that would destroy the whole Earth.
Hence why I said "since the downtime"
I fully agree. There is nothing humanity can do that will destroy the planet. On the other hand, we very much have the power to destroy ourselves, or at least a very large chunk of us. We can make our home inhospitable to human life.
1. CO2 is a very common compound on Earth. So common, that the Earth's Ocean's are filled to the brim with the stuff. Oceans absorb and release tons and tons of CO2 depending on the climate at that time. The hotter the planet, the more CO2 released, the colder the planet, the more CO2 absorbed. This explains why rising temperatures and increasing CO2 levels tend to run together. The oceans release a ton of CO2, way more than how much us as a people release.
Yes, as the ocean is heated it releases more CO2. But guess what carbon emissions from pollution are doing? As we heat the planet, we encourage other factors to contribute as well. We heat, the ocean heats, it gets even hotter, lather, rinse, repeat.
To put it into perspective of how much CO2 is released... A single volcano eruption would produce more CO2 than all of the world's CO2 emissions for a whole year. Even a volcano eruption is a drop in the water when compared to how much is released by the oceans each year.
Actually, that's incorrect. According to David Suzuki, within 20-50 years, the Alberta tar sands alone will be producing as much greenhouse gas as all of the world's volcanoes combined.
2. Cows produce Methane, which is considered to make up 18% of these Greenhouse gasses. Sounds like we need to get rid of those cows instead...
Animals venting themselves is a natural occurrence that is biologically necessary. Us driving around in SUVs and HUMMERs isn't. We can live perfectly fine without that.
3. Plants need CO2 to live, just like how we need Oxygen to live. So in this theory, we should see a boost in plant life because of the warmer climate and the abundance of CO2.
Except we're also causing the majority of deforestation--the remainder being caused primarily by insects, like the pine beetle problem on the west coast, but that was also a result of climate change affecting the beetle population.
4. The Earth has several different orbits. We have our primary orbit around the sun, our secondary orbit around the milky way galaxy, and possibly a third orbit around whatever the milky way galaxy orbits. Each orbit will bring us closer and farther to heat sources, which would explain why the Earth is getting warmer: Because we are entering summer in our second orbit. It also explains the ice age.
May-hap so. I'll have to look into this. The change seems way too drastic to be plausible though. It makes more sense that it's a localized effect.
5. The weather is very unpredictable. Enough said.
It sure is, but it's also chartable. Look at the trends. Yes, the temperature goes up and down in a cycle, but it still climbs. If you haven't seen
An Inconvenient Truth, do it. There is a very nice graph laid out showing the current trend. It shows basically this:
As the temperature climbs, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere climb as well. Scientists can measure the amount of CO2 from thousands of years ago using ice core samples, and it shows that we're at about the same level of CO2 in the atmosphere (and thus temperature) as the Earth was at prior to the last ice age.
You can say it's cyclical all you want. It doesn't change the fact that the temperature is still climbing.
I personally don't believe that anything is wrong. I believe that mankind has trained itself to believe that the Earth is a fragile thing that's easily broken through the things we do. Earth is not as fragile as you think.
The Earth isn't fragile at all. It's survived countless collapses and do-overs. Ecosystems, on the other hand, are incredibly fragile. You introduce a foreign species and it can completely upset the balance, wiping out large populations of organisms that were already there. It's happened before. Nature will eventually correct the balance, but in this case, it could mean that it'll do it without us as well as countless other species on the planet. I don't know how much anyone else cares about the animal population, but for the first time in recorded history, we're seeing polar bears drown because there is so little ice in the Arctic during the summer. If the polar bear population drops, the population of other animals (seals, for example) will be allowed to climb. These animals are then allowed to over hunt/graze, diminishing the populations of other species, which in turn affects whatever else relates to them and so on and so forth.
2. Listen to both serious views on global warming, because anti-global-warmingists are silenced.
No, "anti-global-warmingists" typically work for oil companies or their sympathizers. It has been a goal of the oil industry to create doubt about whether global warming is real, and they've succeeded.
I'm not some salivating Al Gore lover, but if anybody hasn't seen
An Inconvenient Truth, they really shouldn't be speaking on this issue. If you've seen the movie and still doubt it, then that's another matter (possibly psychiatric). If you know about the problem and are just totally apathetic towards the situation and could care less if humanity is wiped out, that's a much more respectable opinion than "it's not gonna happen", because at least it's not denying the facts.
The point still remains though: we can do nothing, or we can act. The consequences of being wrong are what you have to face, and the evidence is overwhelmingly against us. We can risk *gasp* spending money on cleaner technology that will benefit the world
and the economy regardless of whether global warming is an issue or not, or we can risk sea levels rising 20 feet (just from Greenland melting, and it's already started), millions of people displaced, entire ecosystems collapsing and having to reset themselves and countless species dying off or becoming endangered. Scientists are calling the current era we're in the "Holocene extinction event", and we're the main cause of it. The last was the "Cretaceous-Tertiary" and it's what wiped out the dinosaurs.
You know Florida? If we do nothing and it goes against us, Florida is gone. So is California, British Columbia, most of Scandinavia... basically any coastal region is gone. That's just from the flooding. We then having shifting climates, torrential storms, droughts, and the social issues that will stem from massive turmoil and human displacement.
Also, going back to Greenland melting, if that happens, Europe goes into an ice age. I'll let you look up why for yourselves, as I'm not here to spoon feed you.
So, which sounds worse? Being subjected to the
horrors of green cars and alternative fuels, or complete and utter chaos? Those are the stakes. That's what your opinions risk.
EDIT: One final thing I thought I'd mention. You know Venus? You know how it's hotter than Mercury, despite being further away from the sun? You know why that is? It's because Venus lacks plate tectonics like the Earth, which aids in releasing built up pressure under the surface. Because of this, all of Venus' pressure is released in violent volcanic eruptions, which pump CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 heats up the atmosphere. It's undeniable. An abundance will create a totally inhospitable world. We only have to look a few thousand miles away to see the greatest example of global warming in effect.
