Transferring more stuff from the e-mail group ______________________________________ [quote:d77c26b36b="Garner"]"I don't believe all this global warming rubbish, and I'll tell you why... see, the world is still coming out of the last ice age!"[/quote:d77c26b36b] [quote:d77c26b36b="Roman_K"]Heheheh.[/quote:d77c26b36b] [quote:d77c26b36b="Electric_Man"]Heh, after the last week I think we're entering a new one...[/quote:d77c26b36b] [quote:d77c26b36b="Garner"]well, that's the other side of the global warming coin... as the over all temperature rises, the extremities increase, both positive and negative. winters get harsher, summers get harsher... rainfall paterns alter, and the sea warms. we may be between ice ages, but i doubt the last time the global temperature peaked it was hot enough to kill off the plankton. that's the real risk, see... plankton are one of the first tiers of not only the food chains/webs but also the oxygen and nitrogen cycles. kill them off and most every higher order life form is going to be put into SEVERE crisis situations. the key really is to plant more trees. a big enough band of trees at the southern edge of the sahara could mitigate if not eliminate most of the hurricanes that hit the US seaboard. reforest the amazon basin and get rid of the cows and the monarch butterflies wouldn't die. re-cedar lebenon, and the grass would come back. unfortunately, while it IS possible to rechannel irrigation for these sorts of projects, it involves multinational efforts, dealing with many countries that aren't in any position to care about the world at large when they have so many problems at home.[/quote:d77c26b36b] [quote:d77c26b36b="Rincewind"]Meh. I say we just get hot and die. Or go to the moon.[/quote:d77c26b36b] [quote:d77c26b36b="Garner"]well, in space, no one can tell how bad damien smells...[/quote:d77c26b36b] [quote:d77c26b36b="Hsing"]We had 20 degrees Celsius on Nov 10th. A few days ago, when the world should have been grey and depressingly wet and cold, people were leaving their jackets and coats at home alltogether, girls were wearing skirts, and I was dressed too warm with my woolen pullover. The flowers on my balcony are confused and produced new blossoms when they should be shockfrozen til May by the first harsh frosts. It has been like that since Spetember. Everybody enjoyed it after a summer that had been drowned in rain, and was creeped out at the same time when it wouldn't stop. A beautiful September is normal. A beautiful Oktober, or the first weeks of it, occurs. But then it became late October... And then November...[/quote:d77c26b36b] [quote:d77c26b36b="Garner"]weather patterns change with the temperature averages. also, the sea level has a tremendous impact. if you could raise the polar temperatures enough to raise the sufrace water coverage by only a few percent, you'd see some VERY interesting shifts. globally, most of the weather patterns would homogonize, at least slightly, with rare pockets, mostly over the central portions of large landmasses, would probably see a massive rise in tornados, cyclones, and similar storms. [/quote:d77c26b36b]
The thought that creeps me is that if the prognosis are right -and a lot of scientists come to the same conclusions independently from each other- its almost too late... And people refusing to accept the existance of the problem altogether are wasting very precious time. And those people are not mainly the so called "Third World" countries whose inhabitants can't afford to think in long, global terms because they are busy getting to see the next day, and don't have the institutions necessary to exercise long term environmental politics.
Although I do believe the globe may be getting warmer, I do not hold to the current theories of 'global warming' and prefer to think in terms of climatology rather than meteorology. I feel that humans are far too puny at the moment to do any lasting damage to the planet, but welcome any efforts (no matter how misguided I may think the reasons for them are) to further our own technology beyond burning ancient vegetable matter to light our homes, keep warm and propel ourselves in a pretty much two dimensional direction. Ludicrously burning fuels that we know are going to run out, putting off the inevitable until we have to scramble like painted fools to find another source of energy as we use up the last scraps of fodder like a dog eating his week's supply of food because it doesn't know any better.
My theory goes like this. The trick is to either find some energy source with a greatly reduced CO2 discharge, or greatly reduce the world's energy consumption. I heard somewhere that Americans (USAians to be more precise) are 5 percent of the world's population. They stand for 25 percent of the world's CO2 discharge. I don't know if these numbers are correct, but they sound plausible to me. In any way, I believe The Land Of The Free (ta-da-ta-daaaa!) could be the key to it all. Now, changing people's habits so they consume far less energy doesn't sound possible, considering the human nature is laziness, other than if you had no choice (the oil is so impossibly expensive that you simply cannot afford to drive to work). So, finding a better energy source then? Automobile propultion could be a good start. I believe USA is the only country with collective power enough to influence car industry. If I remember correctly, automobile companies claimed the catalytic converter to be impossible/too expensive/something like that until California passed a law that all cars should be equipped with one. Suddenly catalytic converters became a standard for combustion engines. This would never had happened if the law had been passed in Sweden - we're simply a small enough market to ignore. I'm sure an alternative power source could be found and implemented in just a couple of years, just as long as there was a real pressure on the industry to do so. This pressure could come by either an American law being passed, or by oil getting really expensive. Problem is, it seems we really don't have time to wait for the oil to get that expensive. And a law being passed against using oil for automobile propulsion doesn't sound like it's happening either with an old oil sheik as the President. Ethanol is the latest hype here in Sweden. It's a better energy source, since it doesn't release CO2 that has been tied for millions of years, but instead release CO2 that was bound last year in sugar canes, already being part of the cycle. Another pro with ethanol is that old cars can be fairly easily modified to run on ethanol which is really great because that makes a transition so much easier. But there is no means of producing ethanol in amounts enough to replace oil, there is not space enough in Brazil (as far as I know the world's largest producer of ethanol) for all the sugar canes needed. Hmm, I think I lost my bearings somewhere along the line and I can't remember where I was heading. In any case, I usually get about this far when thinking about this stuff and then somehow I get stuck. I can't see a good solution to the problem. As Garner said, one solution could also be to greatly increase the CO2 consumption by planting a lot of trees instead. I don't know. All this makes me sad, I feel so powerless.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1110_051110_warming.html The major problem with global warming is water vapour. The greenhouse gasses that humanity's waste releases into the air have managed to break a rather delicate balance. Good going, humanity! The result is that water vapour is now the main ingredient in the greenhouse gas cauldron. How to repair this delicate balance? Dunno. I think we've missed that train already, at least when it comes to lowering the output of other greenhouse gasses. Lowering the output is a step forward, as the balance won't be repairable as long as we're busily fucking it up, but it's only one step along a rather bumpy highway, as far as I can see.
