The Kyoto accord would only have put limits on the US, and not on the countries that actually produce more toxins, more pollution, more emissions than the US. It would have been downright naive and even dumb for the US to vote in favor of Kyoto without some sort of controls on other countries, too.faqsman said:What a load of crap. Kyoto was a joke.
The earth has gone through temperature cycles for millions of years, and
will continue to do so whether we are here or not. Mt. Saint Helen's
caused more emissions than we could ever produce...
Like him or not it's not necessary to insult him. You could instead say "...turned me against him". That would be less...flamy, you know what I mean?melgish said:It was his failure to sign the Keyoto treaties that first turned me against that 'tard
Yes, but the BIG difference is the time scale. Present global warming is immensely faster than any temperature fluctuations that happened in the past. When it's about millions of years, species can adapt. When it's about centuries, they can't. Ignoring this fact is just like driving at 80 mph towards a canyon while saying "So far, I'm OK."The earth has gone through temperature cycles for millions of years, and will continue to do so whether we are here or not.
Edit applied. and I apologize.Tharkun said:Like him or not it's not necessary to insult him. You could instead say "...turned me against him". That would be less...flamy, you know what I mean?melgish said:It was his failure to sign the Keyoto treaties that first turned me against that 'tard
Strong words, but words that ring true. Scientific experiments show that at the point where 50% of a life-giving resource is gone, a culture of bacteria only has one more generation left to live the "good life". After that, massive-and sudden depopulation of 90% or more will ensue.Saruman said:...We are like dividing bacteria in nice warm nutrient broth inside a test tube. Before long we will run out of food and choke on our own waste products.
Why have some of those on the Right become so anti-science like this, saying things on such scientific topics that just ain't so? It makes people on the Right just look silly, much like those who talk about the healing power of crystals and magnets and all the other sorts of pseudoscience make those on the Left look silly (to the extent that those who embrace these things tend to be on the Left).faqsman said:The earth has gone through temperature cycles for millions of years, and
will continue to do so whether we are here or not. Mt. Saint Helen's
caused more emissions than we could ever produce, not to mention
forest fires and cow flatulence and... We should all stop exhaling to
protect the earth. Or better yet, close down the Kerry campaign. lol
That is not true. Admittedly, he didn't expend a lot of political capital on trying to get it ratified. On the other hand, although the accord was reached in 1997, they were still working out the details at the end of Clinton's and the beginning of Bush's term...And, most of the countries, at least the ones with commitments under the treaty, did not ratify it until after the details had been worked out.By the way, Clinton stopped the Kyoto treaty from being signed,
The U.S. is the single biggest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions (and produces about 25% of the world's total with our ~4% of the world's population). It is true that greenhouse gas emissions from the developing countries are increasing...But, up until this point, most of the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been due to the developed countries (and obviously the emissions per capita are still much higher in the developed countries than in the developing countries). This is why it was decided that the developed countries must take the first steps, with the other countries to have controls down the road. Also, the developed countries have the best capabilities in terms of our wealth and technology to take the steps with the idea that this technology will find its way to the developing countries. (It should also be noted that the final Kyoto agreement allows developed countries to get credits for helping reduce emissions in developing countries, I believe.)BIF said:The Kyoto accord would only have put limits on the US, and not on the countries that actually produce more toxins, more pollution, more emissions than the US. It would have been downright naive and even dumb for the US to vote in favor of Kyoto without some sort of controls on other countries, too.
Well, you seem to read a lot of things. But the veracity of some of what you read is questionable. Certainly, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, volcanoes are not a major player. In fact, they have a net cooling effect because of the particles they emit into the atmosphere. After a huge eruption in the 1800s over in the far east (Krakatoa?), much of the U.S. had what was called "the year without a summer." These cooling effects, however, tend to be fairly short-lived relative to greenhouse gas effects because the particles don't stay in the atmosphere as long.I like the Mount Saint Helen's example, and I think it's timely when taken in light of her rumblings of late. I read once that Mt. Saint Helen's eruption in 1980(?) actually released more pollution and emissions in a single event than mankind has released in all of mankind's existence.
It has long been known that the ozone hole is cyclical...There is a very strong annual cycle, for example. And scientists believe that they are now tstarting to detect the effects of the very successful international treaty to virtually eliminate the production of CFC's that were causing the destruction of the ozone layer. This is indeed a problem that will heal itself over the next 50 to 100 years now that we have taken action.I also heard just today on Paul Harvey's report that the Ozone "hole" has closed up a bit, and is now 20% smaller. As Faqsman says, these things are cycles.
Well, you can throw out lots of thoughts...But, most of these thoughts are not likely to be taken very seriously by scientists who have spent many years studying the problem and coming to an understanding of it. Believe it or not, lots of alternative explanations occur to them too.It might be interesting to consider whether or not Mount Saint Helen's prior eruption 24 (or so) years ago may have had something to do with the widening of the ozone hole? Cause and effect in nature sometimes happens over extremely long periods of time, and sometimes, they take even longer to "heal." It's just a thought.
Here are the figures for the United States (from the site that the originator of this thread linked to):BIF said:No, of course it's not off topic. But does anybody know how much pollution is caused by automobiles, and how much is caused by our manufacturing base and industrial transportation? I thought we only used about 3% of our oil consumption for "end-user" transportation needs, and the rest of it was for manufacturing and transportation of goods and raw materials.
So, you can see that transportation is a significant part of the problem.Carbon dioxide emissions from the transportation sector, at 1,849.7 million metric tons, accounted for 32.3 percent of total U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2002. Almost all (97.9 percent) of transportation sector emissions result from the consumption of petroleum products: motor gasoline, at 61.6 percent of total transportation sector emissions; middle distillates (diesel fuel) at 20.5 percent; jet fuel at 12.7 percent of the total; and residual oil (i.e., heavy fuel oil, largely for maritime use) at 2.7 percent of the sector’s total emissions. Motor gasoline is used primarily in automobiles and light trucks, and middle distillates are used in heavy trucks, locomotives, and ships.
Not true. Plenty of scientists have considered alternative explanations for what is happening. It is also worth noting that the case for anthropogenic (human-caused) warming is not just based on what warming we have seen. It is also based, even more strongly, on a theoretical understanding of how these gases effect the earth's energy budget and on climate simulations incorporating these effects.BIF said:Now, whenever we have hurricanes (which are natural), higher temperatures (caused by the sun burning bigger and hotter), and now earthquakes and volcanoes (which are happening because of forces deep inside the Earth, far outside of our control), where do we look to blame?
At ourselves. Why are we so self-flagellant at every turn?
Well, as Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead. However, over the next 100 or several hundred years is what we might want to worry about at the moment. And, on that scale, there have been calculations made (in a paper published in Science in the last year or so) of how high the CO2 levels would rise if we exploited all the known fossil fuel resources, considering both only conventional ones and also both conventional and less conventional ones, and in either case the results are a really huge rise. The predictions of what such a rise would cause in terms of warming and the ancillary effects like melting of the land ice on Greenland and Antarctica and the resulting rise in sea levels is not pretty.BIF said:Again, I think the pollution problem is self-fixing. Eventually, we will run out of obtainable oil. And wow....we'll stop polluting for sure, then. We won't need laws. We won't need Kyoto. We won't need environmentalists. It will be VERY automatic. No oil - no pollution. No smog. No brown haze. So honestly, I'm not worrried about pollution. It's a tiny tiny problem compared to the real one on the horizon.