US Declares Greenhouse Gasses to be Dangerous: Thoughts?
- Thread starter Jerious1154
- Start date
Recommended Videos
Well, I'll say flat out that I think this is silly. To some extent I saw us as being one of the major nations holding on to any pretensions of sanity.
It's like this, we simply do not know if Greenhouse Gasses and/or Global Warming are a problem, or if man is even responsible. If Man IS responsible we have no idea if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
Let me go back to an old novel I suggest everyone read called "Fallen Angels" by Larry Niven. It's not the most entertaining book, but he talks about how it's pretty much a science-fact book in it's afterward and about where he got the information.
The basic thing is that scientists have figured out that we might have plotted the earth's rotation around the sun a bit wrong, and that the earth might actually go in cycles of slowly moving closer, and then further away to the sun over a long period of time, for it to be barely noticible at first. The result being enviromental changes on the planet and trends for it to get colder and warmer.
You might have heard referances to scientists talking about how we're overdue for another ice age. The above, and a few other theories explain why this is. It's also notable that we already know that earth HAD a very long Ice Age.
The point here being that all of those wonderful greenhouse gases that are warming up the planet might very well be what is keeping us all alive. We reduce global warming, and the next thing you know we don't just drop the global temperature but it keeps dropping.
Larry Niven's novel took things in a fairly absurd "liberal bashing" direction though, having the left wing denying anything was wrong even as the world was being wrecked by global cooling and technophobia. People cheering as man made satellites fell out of orbit, and only a handfull of people on earth (mostly sci-fi fans) being relatively sane. The story largely revolving around the inhabitants of a space station being the last remaining true technologists crashing a ship they were using to scoop atmosphere off the planet.
Long story, but the central premise merits some consideration. Apologies if someone has read it more recently than I have (I might have some of the details wrong). The basic point is that there are competing theories, and honestly I'm not eager to start screwing around with enviromental changes. Mankind has evolved to living this way on it's own for some relatively good reasons. I am not totally concerned that simply because mankind is having an effect on the enviroment that this is overall a bad thing. A lot of enviromentalists naturally assume that if man is responsible for something, or does something to benefit ourselves, that it is bad.
Besides being a human, I am more than willing to take a humans first approach.
I think the situation with Al Gore has done more to bring the Nobel committee and it's standards into question as it has to promote his agenda as being correct.
>>>----Therumancer--->
It's like this, we simply do not know if Greenhouse Gasses and/or Global Warming are a problem, or if man is even responsible. If Man IS responsible we have no idea if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
Let me go back to an old novel I suggest everyone read called "Fallen Angels" by Larry Niven. It's not the most entertaining book, but he talks about how it's pretty much a science-fact book in it's afterward and about where he got the information.
The basic thing is that scientists have figured out that we might have plotted the earth's rotation around the sun a bit wrong, and that the earth might actually go in cycles of slowly moving closer, and then further away to the sun over a long period of time, for it to be barely noticible at first. The result being enviromental changes on the planet and trends for it to get colder and warmer.
You might have heard referances to scientists talking about how we're overdue for another ice age. The above, and a few other theories explain why this is. It's also notable that we already know that earth HAD a very long Ice Age.
The point here being that all of those wonderful greenhouse gases that are warming up the planet might very well be what is keeping us all alive. We reduce global warming, and the next thing you know we don't just drop the global temperature but it keeps dropping.
Larry Niven's novel took things in a fairly absurd "liberal bashing" direction though, having the left wing denying anything was wrong even as the world was being wrecked by global cooling and technophobia. People cheering as man made satellites fell out of orbit, and only a handfull of people on earth (mostly sci-fi fans) being relatively sane. The story largely revolving around the inhabitants of a space station being the last remaining true technologists crashing a ship they were using to scoop atmosphere off the planet.
Long story, but the central premise merits some consideration. Apologies if someone has read it more recently than I have (I might have some of the details wrong). The basic point is that there are competing theories, and honestly I'm not eager to start screwing around with enviromental changes. Mankind has evolved to living this way on it's own for some relatively good reasons. I am not totally concerned that simply because mankind is having an effect on the enviroment that this is overall a bad thing. A lot of enviromentalists naturally assume that if man is responsible for something, or does something to benefit ourselves, that it is bad.
Besides being a human, I am more than willing to take a humans first approach.
I think the situation with Al Gore has done more to bring the Nobel committee and it's standards into question as it has to promote his agenda as being correct.
>>>----Therumancer--->
... Wait what? They finally did it? I figured we'd gotten this out of our system, like 200000000000000000000 seconds ago.
The earth has gone through, and will continue to go through periods of warming and cooling. The difference here is the scale of the changes. A typical warming/cooling cycle takes about 60,000 to 100,000 years. The concentration of CO2 generally fluctuates between 190 and 300 parts per million. If you assume that it takes 30,000 years to go from the lowest point to the highest point, that's an average difference of about 0.004 parts per million every year.Therumancer said:
Currently the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is 390 parts per million, the highest it has ever been in the last 650,000 years. The vast majority of the increase has occurred in the last 200 years, which is ridiculously fast compared to the world's natural increase. The concentration is rising by 2 parts per million every year according to the latest studies. We could start going into an ice age tomorrow and it would be almost imperceptible, because we are changing the atmosphere much faster than the world can keep up with.