You know, none of this really will change my belief on the enviroment; I'm still going to do everything I can to take care of it and lessen my impact. It's just what I feel is right.

~A

For that you are to be commended.

As for the AGW-theory-related crap like cap & trade tax, it needs a silver bullet in the heart.

AJ, I and no one I know is arguing against doing what is right and good for your local area. I remember when lake Michigan was so polluted that people joked and atheist can walk across it. Back in the 60’s and 70’s people did not understand the impact of pollution. Once it was understood people and local governments acted and began to clean up their local environment. We can pollute so much that we could wipe man off most of the planet. But that is about the extent of our power. People no longer as a group toss trash out their car window as they did in the 60’s What irks most people on my side of the isle is the myth that man is single handedly destroying the planet. Or that what we do is the cause of global warming. We are not that powerful and we have very little impact on the planet. On people yes, one the environment that we need to survive yes, so it is good that you do your part. Everyone does for the most part but the nuts on the environmental side want to take it several steps across the line of sanity to say that we need to stop all industry to save the planet. Kill the economy to save the environment.

Bet that took biting a bullet. Thanks for the kudos.

I'm not saying anyone is; I'm just simply stating that - despite the commotion over this and the science that goes every which way (unfortunately) - I'm firm in my belief.

Actually, I would have to disagree with your comment about our impact. I feel that we have much more of an impact - or capability for it at least - than we think, we just are not at the point where we realize that we can I would say.

Be well, ~Alderic

Then do me a favor, look up the H-bomb tests of the 50's and 60's. The biggest bombs and destruction man can toss around. Where it was used live came back within a few growing seasons, the fish are still around the Bikini islands, those test areas are still too dangerous for man but everything else is back to normal. We destroyed nothing of import other than one more place man can not live. Chernobyl is back to normal as far as plant and animal life other than it is unsafe for humans. The areas that are polluted by man has not killed off the wildlife although some animals have mutated or evolved due to our pollution but we have not hurt nature. Nature is not stopped by man; it is not even slowed down by man. As I wrote before, we can destroy man the rest of the planet will keep on humming and not even notice we are gone. Man has been trying to get rid of the flea, the mosquito, and the roach for 5 thousand years, add to that rats and other vermin and they are still around, There is not a race of humans that has not tried to destroy these pests yet they are not just surviving they are thriving. Coral is dying world wide for two reasons both of which have nothing to do with mankind. Not enough carbon in the oceans to feed them and the oceans are getting warmer because of the Sun. Our lack of pollution and their appetite has depleted their food supply (carbon) and the Suns expansion causing the water to get too warm for them. Man got the blame for killing off the coral 30 years ago but science has proven it was not us. We have so little impact on this planet that what little we have is laughable. Can we hurt a local area for a short time? Yes, but only a short time.

Not at all.  That's been my consistent position all along - individual choices to be 'green' are praiseworthy and even reasonable laws and regulations to improve air & water quality and to avoid needless environmental harm (at reasonable cost) are OK by me.

Same here.  My new house has geothermal heating, solar panels, and I use less than 2 gallons a gas a week.

But there's a big difference between individuals voluntarily doing something and having men with guns force them to do something.

I was actually teasing you about complimenting me, when you've - lately - been less than complimentary toward me.

Anyways, cool.

Very nice; one of my goals is to build my own self sustaining "green" house.

Who says anyone is going to force anyone with guns? Society, little by little, is already headed towards greener lifestyles.

My concern is actually at specific carryin capacity of the land. There will be a point where we've fucked it up too much in certain places and we it won't sustain us. What then? If society's mindset has shown us, we're not very keen on eco responsibility, it's all about what we can get now. Are we really going to take a look, for example, at an area like - i dont know...LA - and ask ourselves: "How long until this place is inhospitable and unable to maintain us?"

That's the impact I'm concerned about because, it just might sneak up on us and by then it will be too late.

We have the power to wipe out most of humanity. We don’t have the power to wipe out most animal life on the planet.

Yes, it has been proven that we can hurt mankind but the rest of the inhabitants of the planet will still be here.

That was the original thought but after studying the blast sites over decades we found that the only animal that can not survive in those areas are mankind. The animal life was back to normal in a few years, the plant life was back after three seasons. The birds eat the plants and live if we ate them we would die even today.

You need to understand that billions of barrels of oil seep out of the ocean floor every year. Microbes feed on it. This has been happening for at least a million years yet you hardly notice it. Sometimes you will see clumps of hardened oil wash up on the shore. That is not from oil spills it is what seeped up from the ocean floor. The ocean will get rid of the oil faster than man can clean it up.

We did that and man was hurt by it back in the 60’s and 70’s the wildlife survived. That was when President Nixon created the EPA to clean up the mess we were making. The environmental nuts have taken the laws created to protect us and turned it around to attack our industry. Dioxin and other chemicals were dumped whole sale into our ground water and we started having birth defects and frogs with three eyes. Most if not all were cleaned up in a decade. And now we know better. You see it was done already and wildlife survived, man was in danger not the planet.

Can’t be done by man. We nuked an island and the trees came back in months. Mount Saint Helens erupted and wiped out a huge area of trees, where man was involved the trees took longer to come back where nature was allowed to do its thing the trees came back in 18 months.  Life his harder to beat than you think.

You are correct, we can hurt man but the wildlife keeps going.

Right, that is what I wrote in my last post. The impact is all on man with some animals hurt on the fringe. Watch the series life after people, after 200 years almost everything that man has built will fall apart and after 10k years all the modern crap we have build will be gone. We will only have the pyramids and stone structures left and most of that will be covered by wildlife. Man has only been the dominant species for the last 10k years and if man were to walk away from the planet in 10k years three will be no sign of man ever having been here. man cam not destroy the planet, only mankind at best.

No middle ground here the only two options are either you have the impact or you don't.  That is a classic false dilemma. Then the dribble turns to appeal to emotion.

You tend to forget how small we are.  The Sun is gigantic and getting hotter.  The Earth core temperature is also heating which in turn would cause the oceans to heat up (think of a pot of water the most effective way to heat up water is when heat is applied in close proximity and heating up the air would take forever and have very little impact).

Here are a few scholarly journals:

http://www.griffith.edu.au/conference/ics2007/pdf/ICS176.pdf

"“According to the findings reviewed in this paper, the variable output of the sun, the sun’s gravitational relationship between the earth (and the moon) and earth’s variable orbital relationship with the sun, regulate the earth’s climate. The processes by which the sun affects the earth show periodicities on many time scales; each process is stochastic and immensely complex."

One can be lead to postulate that the same thing is happening on mars, venus, and other planets.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL030207.shtml

The study found that times of high solar activity are on average 0.2 degrees C warmer than times of low solar activity, and that there is a polar amplification of the warming. This result is the first to document a statistically significant globally coherent temperature response to the solar cycle"

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=4048902

"Recent results have indicated strong correlations between climate parameters and solar activity. Upper troposphere and stratosphere temperatures have been found to vary in phase with the 10- to 12-year solar activity cycle. On a longer time scale, the global temperature, particularly the Northern Hemisphere land air temperature, has been found to be nearly perfectly correlated with the long-term variation of solar activity."

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007P&SS...55..158R

This article was a fantastically interesting read because they used tree rings (yes, tree rings!) and they believe that the impact is from solar activity and there's a cycle! Yet, another articles that says the earth's climate goes in a cycle!

Here's an article about neptune for you (we can't be having an affect on neptune (if you feel some how we are I think you're giving too much credit to humans.  This shows that its has to do with the sun/solar system) http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006GL028764.shtml

"If changing brightnesses and temperatures of two different planets are correlated, then some planetary climate changes may be due to variations in the solar system environment."  The fact with mars leads me to believe that it has something to do with the solar system.

It seems that people put a lot of faith in that man is causing this whole GW thing.  If man is (which I don't believe. Again I'm not saying we shouldn't take care of earth. We should) causing GW India and China have given the finger to all of this. 

India and China populations are way bigger than the U.S and E.U. combined.  The line of agrument is that they're ONLY developing countries.  Yeah developing both are developing fast.  Both are using more coal.  Both have auto sales that have exploded (maybe we should export some of our cars to them).  Both having more people don't they have a great potential of messing up the environment? 

Oh wait, we're suppose to lead by example.  I'm sure that's going to make a difference with China and India, for they're going to do what's best for their country.

the_peoples_party, I wasn't referring to climate change in this instance. Even if man can't influence the power of the sun or earth's core, there is plenty that is possible in regards to pollution and nuclear catastrophies, enough so that it would be a real threat if it I was abused as a weapon or an horrible accident occurred or simple carelessness. 

Paladin, even if  nuclear fallout doesn't kill animal and plantlife, it kills humans and that is my mainconcern. What do I care if nature still exists if human kind has been erradicated?

Bottom line is that technology offers the means for massmurder and sustained destruction of our environment so that it would be hostile for our survival. And collective suicide as a species goes against every ethical moral norm and religion (except for some doomsday cults maybe). I am not concerned with the universe at large, just what we can do to impact out existance with the means at our disposal, and that is plenty.

If what you write is true then you took my statement out of context to put up a straw man.

The last catstrophy was in 79 AD I thnk when mankind went from several hundred million to tens of thousands. it took less than a thousand years to get back to those population levels again. So wiping out man is not as easy as you make it out to be. Yes, it can be done but if you leave just a few thousand scattered around the Earth the odds are that we will come back quickly.