| Man-caused global warming is liitle more than a belief arising from a core presumption/philosophy that man can actually have dominion over something as grand a scale as the earth's climate. Nothing could be more egocentrist. Well actually humans have had many well documented effects on the planet on massive scales. Remember that whole ozone layer thing, the one that absorbs most of that harmful UV radiation you're so worried about a bit further down? Remember how it was thinning around the world and had a big damn hole in the bottom? Well some smart people figured out that man made CFCs were the primary problem and after a lot of screaming by everyone involved they were banned in most of the world. Since then the depletion has slowed significantly and with some more progress it should start to build back up after enough of the CFCs already up there degrade. There was the whole Dust Bowl episode where the lack of even basic stewardship principles regarding soil erosion coupled with a drought turned the center section of a continent into a cloud of dust. This was reigned in by deliberate and measured human activity to restore the area. The oceans, thought of as imperviously vast, have huge garbage patches that span millions of square miles, the collective waste of a century floating around in circles. So it really isn't much of a leap that the effect of billions of humans all over the planet burning fossil fuels in gigantic quantities for 150+ years now is starting to show. You can knock down a building with 5.56 if you have enough time and ammo. It pays no attention to the relatively huge unknown and largely immeasurable effects of that gigantic volatile nuclear fireball nearly 93 million miles away that is 1million times larger than our own planet. Yet you can still feel it, and it is hot enough and radiates enough harmful rays that it can kill you well short of what would normally be your natural time of death. Being pedantic but "1 million times larger" is a pretty vague description given the varied ways larger can be measured. The Sun has a diameter 109 times larger than Earth. Its mass is 330,000 times that of Earth. Its volume is about 1,300,000 times that of Earth. So "1 million times larger" isn't really right now matter how you cut it. And I checked it because numbers are important. It's also important to remember that even though there might be a larger factor involved with something a relatively smaller factor can still play a major role. To put how large that fireball is in perspective, if the earth were a basketball, the highest point (Mt Everest) would be a fraction of a mm high, yet it is too high to support human life, and the deepest oceanic trench would be slightly more than 1mm deep, and no man has even been able to approach that depth under any circumstances. (feel free to double check the math if its that important to you, this is from memory from a geology course I took many years back) I'm not quite sure what you're trying to get at with the lack of a Starbucks on the peak of Everest (for now) because that doesn't really have anything to do with relative size difference between the sun and the earth but man has been down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. It was in a metal ball and some may call that cheating but if we're going to take away our ability to use tools man wouldn't make it through a winter in Michigan either. That aforementioned nuclear fireball is approximately 1000ft in circumference and it resides approximately SIX MILES away from our little basketball (whose atmoshpere will not support our measly little lives 1mm in either direction), yet it can still kill us if we do not seek shelter from it and are left exposed to it for any prolonged period of time. Not really. Many millions of people spend the majority of the sun light hours under the rays and while some will get skin cancer because of it most will just get tanned and wrinkly. You could get dehydrated from being out in the sun too long but that could also happen in a sauna. Now call me a skeptic, a conspiracy theorist, a "denier", whatever makes you happy, but I am going to lean towards gigantic volatile ever-changing nuclear fireball as having a bit more sway on global temps and climate changes on a global scale than CO2 emissions. Especially given the exposed ulterior motives of those pushing the bogus "science" behind it and the opportunist political motivations mixing up with so much research funding. Lets face it, as a scientist you can either teach school for shit pay, do research for cock-pill companies and hair restoration firms, or work for a government-funded entity who has a vested interest in a certain line of thinking being supported "scientifically" Or by similar measure, a scientist working for a corporation with an agenda to push. Ulterior motives abound, especially when they are directly funded by those with severe conflicts of interest. The fact of the matter is the same as it's always been: the truth is what it is, it doesn't matter if anyone believes it or even knows it. Finding truth has become easier then ever with the explosion of information technologies available but with signal comes noise. So it's also easier than ever to hunker down in your own little world, staunchly believing whatever the party line is just because they're part of your tribe. For those actually interested in the truth you can bypass a lot of the screaming and poo flinging and find people who actually know what they're talking about. Or, god forbid, take some time and learn a little about the subject yourself and draw your own conclusions. I personally am more concerned and bothered by deforestation and a far greater issue of over-population. There are entire continents that after thousands of years of human civilization and technological progress, they still can't so much as figure out how to fucking feed themselves, yet they breed like rabbits. I agree, humans pose a major problem to the planet's relative status quo and the climate, which is tightly woven into surface activity, is affected by this. And while I share your concern about Utah, they're in the middle of the country so we can't exactly get rid of them. (Note to Mormons: It's a vagina, not a clown car.) So at the risk of appearing to simply take the side of talk show radio hosts.....who we all know whenever anyone says that phrase that they almost always mean Rush Limbaugh yet for some reason people are timid about saying it.....I can't help but agree with them. They dont need global warming to be true or false to continue lining their pockets or get their rocks off by being on the air with large audiences. The reality of the situation may not matter to them but the spin on it sure does. They have advertising dollars to worry about and corporate bosses to keep happy. They have no more incentive to tell the truth than any other man. In fact I would wager most would agree they have significantly less incentive as there are many who will pay handsomely to promote their own reality through them. The more they sing a twisted tune they more they'll make and humans pretty much always want more. Which is entirely beside the point that if they're not telling you the truth then there is no need to pay them any attention in the first place. Even if it did lack a conflict of interest, bullshit is still bullshit. POLITICIANS on the other hand, especially these days, are always on the lookout for the next victim whose cause they can champion. It's a never-ending search, and one that must be constantly renewed....UNLESS the victim is the planet, and we all can kind of get to be passive heros so long as we let these politicians who are going to bravely tell us how to live, what products to use and not use, which energy sources are approved and which aren't, etc etc etc Yeah, I hear you on that, like opposing gay marriage, telling you to buy American just because, don't support thorium reactors, support corn ethanol and etc etc etc. Ha, I'm just playing, there are no politics in this country, not about anything that matters. There is one political party, the business party, and they get what they want regardless of who gets elected. The rest is bullshit flung around to hide the footwork and a small percentage actually aimed at adjusting policy for logical reasons or the good of the people. But this doesn't really have any bearing on the truth, because the truth is not affected by politics. The first thing to do when attempting to find reality is throw politics out of the window, because that's not what politics is about. The first thing to do when dealing with humans is to understand 99% of all human behavior follows a biological script to the letter and once you can look around and see this in people around you and your own behavior then you can start to make progress. Go read some evolutionary psychology, people will appear as cogs in a social machine and the ridiculousness of arguments like these will become apparent. Then you can spend your time learning about why things are the way they are rather than arguing about what other people think they are. Since a looooong reply from you is inevitable just try to keep it focused on reality rather than politics, there is very little use any more of the latter.
|
