I nearly snorted my morning breakfast when I read Kate’s title on the latest tripe from the Environmental Meetings in Kenya.
I must be a geek. Any reference to “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” amuses the heck out of me.
At any rate, after reading a referenced article, something occurred to me. I wonder how many stories were run about the need to widen the fight against forest fires, back from oh… 1900 to 1980 or so, when scientists finally began to grasp the ecology of forest fires and their importance in the life cycle of the Northern Boreal Forest, which covers ohh… 1/3 of the forests of the world.
What is my point? Bad science my friends. Scientists swore up and down that fires were bad and must be stopped. Then they did. Then the plant diseases and pests that were formerly kept in check began to run rampant.
I wonder how many climatological problems are kept in check by naturally occuring warming and cooling trends of the earth? I wonder what kinds of bad things are in store for a human race so arrogant that they believe they can correct the very conditions they thrive in?
November 20, 2006 at 7:43 am
Try telling the lefties that chopping down trees in the northern latitudes allows the snow cover to increase the albedo of the earth which increase the amount of energy being radiated back into space.
Or if you really wish to drive them crazy, point out the new studies that show that when forests burn or decay they release their carbon back into the atmosphere, so the only way to make trees net removers of carbon from the atmosphere is to cut them down and use them and allow a new trees to grow in same space.
If the lumber from the trees is used in construction or any other use that prevents it’s carbon from returning to the atmosphere you have a carbon sink. Picture an old English pub with timber that was cut centuries ago. Meanwhile back in the forest a new tree is growing and taking more carbon out of the atmosphere.
Once you have them cursing you for that blasphemy, tell them that if your city uses a landfill, they should throw their waste paper in the landfill where it will also become a carbon sink. Old landfill that are dug up often have newspapers
decades old that are still legible.
Have fun. Treat it as a psychology experiment.
November 20, 2006 at 9:26 am
As I have said before many many times. There may not be enough evidence to convince me that global warming is caused by human activity. However, it has also never been proven that it has not been caused by human activity. And, we are still doing damage to the environment. We are playing Russian Roulette with our planet.
November 20, 2006 at 9:38 am
Really? So then you would explain the fact that grapes have been grown in Newfoundland, and grain in Greenland 1000 years ago as what – the result of a propensity for humanity in the Middle Ages to burn stuff more than any age before or since? The current climate isn’t even warm enough to allow this!
Heck, if you are a dinosaur nut you also have to ask yourself, how the heck were tropical plants growing in the Arctic? Again, the world must have been warmer back then… but then the question becomes, was the world destroyed? Nope. Life went on, the pendulum swung the other way after a time.
November 20, 2006 at 9:40 am
And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: people who are against Climate Change are NOT against pollution controls! They are two separate issues. Once is politically charged and completely unproven, and the other is scientific fact, and needs to be dealt with. Conservatives have no problem dealing with pollution – Mulroney was the greenest PM EVER, and the Clean Air Act presented by Ambrose recently had only one flaw: it didn’t address CLIMATE CHANGE which isn’t even proven! Looking at it without the agenda of Climate change, it was a terrific start on real pollution standards in Canada!
November 20, 2006 at 9:51 am
Jack Layton could run around turning off the heat in poor people’s houses and carjacking the middle class to stop them from driving – that would be about the only way to meet the ridiculous targets of the Kyoto regulatory regime.
The economic inefficiency of the Kyoto regulatory regime will ultimately harm the environment more by 2050 if people are dumb enough to follow it through – check the highly regulated socialist ‘economies’ of the former East Bloc – they were environmental disasters until capitalism cleaned them up.