At least farmers in Greenland are happy...

[whottt]

2 Utter horse . Source please.

We have drilled over 3 kms into the ice to look at climatic changes over the last 200,000yrs, so how exactly did we do that if Greenland was ice-free 400yrs ago?

...

I didn't say it was ice free...I said it wasn't covered with ice like it is now...it wasn't, that's why there are people that live there now.

This is easily verifiable.


The rest of it...

When I was a kid the alarmists were screaming about the coming ice age...

Here's the deal, our planet is huge, it's in a huge journey around the sun and it's solar orbit is not fixed...this(among many other things) is why we have had ice ages and coolling periods in the past, and why we will do so again....not to mention all the natural occurrences on Earth that contribute to these things over which we have absolutely no control.

The assumption that man is in complete control of what these massive steallar bodies do and how their interactions impact the earth, is ludicrous...ditto the ozone layer, ditto the reversal of the earth's magnetic fields, ditto getting hit by an asteroid...



You want to make a difference on a Solar level you'd best be doing more than posting liberal hysteria on a sport talk message board's political forum.


The more I talk to lefties the more I begin to realize they are not so much these deeply caring human beings concerned with all living things and their fellow man...so much as they are absolute control freaks that think they know what's best for everyone and seek to control minute details of the lives of individuals.

I guess it's no wonder why the favorite lefty form of government always degenerates into an oppressive humanitarian catastrophe with no free speech, religion or political choices.

[whottt]

Here are a few facts about nuclear war and the good it can do:

Overpopulation? There's nothing that can quick fix that issue like a nuclear war.

Global warming? Nuclear winter will fix that .

Polution? All the smog and greenhouse gas producing technologies come from the largest population centers...the likely areas to be attacked in a nuclear war.


I mean death is death...is dying instantly in a nuclear war so much worse than dying any other way? Doesn't seem like it would be to me.


Plus...

Radiation is organic..

Man was given and continues to draw breath courtesy of the gigantic nuclear reaction at the heart of our solar system and the live giving radiation it emits...

Plus uranium is a naturally occurring substance...

Nothing man-made about radiation...it's all natural and organic.


Not to mention that one of the factors that lead to man's rise as the dominant speices on this planet was basically a gigantig nuclear bomb...


A good nuclear war will cleanse the earth of all it's man made evils and problems just fine. Better than anything else...and better than hysterics on a message board.

Plus, the surviving humans could mutate from the radiation or evolve naturally from the drastic environental changes...this proving evolution beyond all shadow of a doubt.


Nuclear war is the only way to solve man's problems.

May the best nukes win...and IME, he who gets the first good shot in usually wins the fight. We need to stop screwing around with this.

[Nbadan]

Radiation is organic

[boutons_]

BBC NEWS

Deep ice tells long climate story

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, Norwich

Carbon dioxide levels are substantially higher now than at anytime in the last 800,000 years, the latest study of ice drilled out of Antarctica confirms.

The in-depth analysis of air bubbles trapped in a 3.2km-long core of frozen snow shows current greenhouse gas concentrations are unprecedented.

The East Antarctic core is the longest, deepest ice column yet extracted.

Project scientists say its contents indicate humans could be bringing about dangerous climate changes.

"My point would be that there's nothing in the ice core that gives us any cause for comfort," said Dr Eric Wolff from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

"There's nothing that suggests that the Earth will take care of the increase in carbon dioxide. The ice core suggests that the increase in carbon dioxide will definitely give us a climate change that will be dangerous," he told BBC News.

The Antarctic researcher was speaking here at the British Association's (BA) Science Festival.

Slice of history

The ice core comes from a region of the White Continent known as Dome Concordia (Dome C). It has been drilled out by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (Epica), a 10-country consortium.

The column's value to science is the tiny pockets of ancient air that were locked into its millennia of ac ulating snowflakes.

Each slice of this now compacted snow records a moment in Earth history, giving researchers a direct measure of past environmental conditions.

Not only can scientists see past concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane - the two principal human-produced gases now blamed for global warming - in the slices, they can also gauge past temperatures from the samples, too.

This is done by analysing the presence of different types, or isotopes, of hydrogen atom that are found preferentially in precipitating water (snow) when temperatures are relatively warm.

'Scary' rate

Initial results from the Epica core were published in 2004 and 2005, detailing the events back to 440,000 years and 650,000 years respectively. Scientists have now gone the full way through the column, back another 150,000 years.

The picture is the same: carbon dioxide and temperature rise and fall in step.

"Ice cores reveal the Earth's natural climate rhythm over the last 800,000 years. When carbon dioxide changed there was always an accompanying climate change. Over the last 200 years human activity has increased carbon dioxide to well outside the natural range," explained Dr Wolff.

The "scary thing", he added, was the rate of change now occurring in CO2 concentrations. In the core, the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.

"The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years. We really are in the situation where we don't have an analogue in our records," he said.

Natural buffer

The plan now is to try to extend the ice-core record even further back in time. Scientists think another location, near to a place known as Dome A (Dome Argus), could allow them to sample atmospheric gases up to a million and a half years ago.

Some of the increases in carbon dioxide will be alleviated by natural "sinks" on the land and in the oceans, such as the countless planktonic organisms that effectively pull carbon out of the atmosphere as they build skeletons and s coverings.

But Dr Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia and BAS, warned the festival that these sinks may become less efficient over time.

We could not rely on them to keep on buffering our emissions, she said.

"For example, we don't know what the effect will be of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems. There is potential for deterioration," she explained.

More CO2 absorbed by the oceans will raise their pH, and a number of recent studies have concluded that this increase in acidity will eventually disrupt the ability of marine micro-organisms to use the calcium carbonate in the water to produce their hard parts.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...re/5314592.stm

Published: 2006/09/04 22:27:27 GMT

© BBC MMVI

=======================

So now we wait for the riposte "Repug science".

[LaMarcus Bryant]

greenland will never be as productive as current farming locations though

[MannyIsGod]

greenland will never be as productive as current farming locations though

Why?

[LaMarcus Bryant]

Well i am not basing this on a study but i am assuming alot more goes into the environment to provide healthy crops besides higher temperature

wouldn't it take a while for a suitable soil ecosystem to get up and going?

[MannyIsGod]

I don't know really. I was earnestly asking.

The soil is probably really rocky, but maybe not. I'm pretty sure its not the Great Plains but by the same token modern agriculture can probably make up for that. Greenland is much farther north and with the longer days can probably sustain more crops in that manner as well.

I don't know, I guess it would have its pluses and minuses but its interesting to me.

[boutons_]

If somebody at press conference or debate sprang that image on dubya, he wouldn't be able to locate where Greenland or Iceland were.

We could use this image to show him that the Arctic continent has melted completely.

[RuffnReadyOzStyle]

OMG, no-one even bothers to read my posts, and if they do they obviously don't understand them, or they take as extremist an opposite viewpoint as possible to make what I'm saying seem absurd...

willie - I am changing my own behaviours, or did you not read the thread again?

sickdsm - why, u ask me again. Do you even bother to read my posts? I will re-quote myself for your benefit:

"I don't want to see the wholesale destruction of the humans on the planet,or of the planet itself - to sit idly by while it all happens and not do anything about it goes against the very core of my being. I have to TRY to do something, even if I feel our current civilisation is doomed. The other thing is, I feel it's going to be a very nasty, messy and horrific century to live in, and if enough people wake up to these things we may be able to change that, so I'd really like to try to do something about that.

Believe me, I wish I didn't know what I do, then I could just carry on in blissful ignorance. But since I do know the things I do, I have to act on them or I can't live with myself."

Is that not a sufficient answer?

gtown - ...or, rather than the dire, extremist scenario you outline, and as I have advocated all along, we can make small, incremental changes over decades and make a vast improvement in reducing our impact on the world.

What if we start to use green tech, let's use renewable energy as an example, develop and implement it while achieving economies of scale to the point where we can export the technology to developing nations cheaply, make a load of cash and all the while help them to prevent making the pollution mistakes we made??? Not only could we reduce our impact on the planet, we become a moral leader and assist the developing world to do the same?

But no, that's not possible in your extremist world. And, yes, YOU ARE THE EXTREMIST HERE, not me. Re-read all my posts then yours and tell me who is the one taking things to extremes? I advocate moderate action over the long term to avoid catastrophe, you advocate black and white, one or the other, us or them binary division bull which helps no-one.

YOU are the crackpot here, sir, not me.

And BTW, I don't discuss environmental issues because of your country's ex-VP, I discuss them because I am an environmental scientist. Now take your bag of extreme assumptions, and all the words and ideas you make up then ascribe to people like me, and fvck off to someone else's thread.

whottt - yes, everything's "easily verifiable" if you provide your primary sources. If you don't, you're just another chump making stuff up.

Want to read about what's going on in Greenland and the Arctic, try the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, composed of the major scientific organisations of 18 countries:

http://www.acia.uaf.edu/

They have a free report (18 chapters) that you can download and read at your leisure.

As for all that other stuff, most of it completely unrelated to the topic at hand, who says we are controlling anything? The problem is that we are not controlling our pollution of the planet, and that with 6 billion of us doing it our pollution is significant enough to affect even a system as large as the earth. You are still living back in the 1800s when there were 1 billion of us and the environment was "infinte".

"I guess it's no wonder why the favorite lefty form of government always degenerates into an oppressive humanitarian catastrophe with no free speech, religion or political choices." So all liberal governments become authoritarian and communist? Yeah, that one sure stands up to scutiny.

I have no interest in controlling the lives of anyone. What I do have an interest in is every one of us paying the true price for the damage we are wreaking - right now we pay only a small % of the true cost for the things we take for granted every day. If we had to pay the true price we might not be so wasteful.


I am astounded by the extremism each of you has taken in response to the ideas I'm raising. I'm talking about fixing markets to pay the true price of our behaviours, and you call me a control freak communist. I'm talking about gradual, incremental change, and you say I want to tear it all down and start again, etc, etc. I really don't believe you actually bother to read what I post before you "reply". Take a serious look in the mirror folks, because your behaviour here has been pretty appalling.

I'm done with you. Good luck with it all. And in 30 years when the world is going to because we did nothing to address problems we knew about all along, you just remember that we had a chance to act, some of us wanted to try to change, and people like you howled us down with your pathetic mockery.

[RuffnReadyOzStyle]

Manny - I'm sure there has been some research on the subject, try looking it up.

I will say one thing though - you mention "modern agriculture" making up for sandy soil or whatever the problem may be. Actually my friend, modern agriculture is unsustainable over the long-term because it requires all sorts of artificial inputs that add up to GREATER ENERGY INPUT THAN IS ACTUALLY REAPED FROM THE FOOD.

For eg., traditional rice paddy farming in SE Asia produces about 50x the energy (in the rice) that it takes to make the rice, including man and animal labour and any material inputs. Modern Western agriculture produces less than the energy it consumes, due to all the artificial fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, transport, packaging etc.

My point is that making Greenland agricultural would probably consume a lot more energy than it reaped.

Want to know more? Here's an article (secondary source, haven't had time to read the whole thing, but it gets the point across):

http://www.energybulletin.net/5045.html

[gtownspur]

THe problem here is, that you wont be able to avoid catastrophe. That's where you're wrong. If you were to somehow take a vac and suck out all the prolonged gases dating back to the industrial evolution, you'd have it. But using green tech is utterly re ed.

[RuffnReadyOzStyle]

Um, no. You don't know what you are talking about. For example, if we reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2050 the atmospheric conc of CO2 will stabilise at around 500ppm (a bit less than double the CO2 conc before the Industrial Revolution). That one comes from the IPCC, btw.

By your logic, we may as well just do as we please because anything we do cannot avert the impending disaster. That is not what the experts believe. Climatologists are most worried about the unknown "tipping point" in the climate system, where the entire system tips (or switches) into a new equilibrium. We don't know the tipping point, nor do we know the effects on the biogeography of the planet likely induced by the new equilibrium state. The tipping point is what we are trying to avoid by reducing emissions.

However, since you are clearly talking out your arse, you wouldn't know any of this, so you can do whatever you like 'cause it's all going up in flames anyway. Wonderful outlook you've got there. Hope it takes you far.

[sickdsm]

. It will be a good thing for the planet, and subsequent generations of human beings, if we can learn from our mistakes, and as long as it doesn't involve nuclear disaster.


I don't know about you but personally, i like good things. Once again, i ask you, if something is good for the planet and future generations, what's the matter with it? It obviously isn't really a HUGE problem for the current generation.


We're making the world a better place by destroying it IN YOUR OWN WORDS.

[Extra Stout]

. It will be a good thing for the planet, and subsequent generations of human beings, if we can learn from our mistakes, and as long as it doesn't involve nuclear disaster.


I don't know about you but personally, i like good things. Once again, i ask you, if something is good for the planet and future generations, what's the matter with it? It obviously isn't really a HUGE problem for the current generation.


We're making the world a better place by destroying it IN YOUR OWN WORDS.

I think he meant the learning from our mistakes would be a good thing, not the environmental destruction part.

[sickdsm]

6 We are nothing more than a virus on this planet...we will not destroy this planet...if push comes to shove this planet will erase us as easily as we squash an ant.

6 I agree. In the next century I think the human population of the planet will be drastically reduced by a series of wars, famines, epidemics and systemic environmental collapse. It will be a good thing for the planet, and subsequent generations of human beings, if we can learn from our mistakes, and as long as it doesn't involve nuclear disaster.



He agrees that we can and will be squashed like a bug. If it doesn't involve nuclear war (our demise) and we can learn from it, since not all of human will be destroyed, its good for the world.


Not really that far out of a statement. World strikes back and heals itself eventually, much like natural habitat does after a volcano eruption or a forest fire. Its a good thing liberals didn't exist millions of years ago or we would have tried to save the dinosaurs.

[RuffnReadyOzStyle]

sickdsm, you are a freakin parrot, and you are using the vaunted extremist technique of picking one little point, isolating it from context, and then hammering away. Congratulations, you've shown us what a simple mind you have...

For the umpteenth time I quote myself for you again:

"sickdsm - why, u ask me again. Do you even bother to read my posts? I will re-quote myself for your benefit:

'I don't want to see the wholesale destruction of the humans on the planet,or of the planet itself - to sit idly by while it all happens and not do anything about it goes against the very core of my being. I have to TRY to do something, even if I feel our current civilisation is doomed. The other thing is, I feel it's going to be a very nasty, messy and horrific century to live in, and if enough people wake up to these things we may be able to change that, so I'd really like to try to do something about that.

Believe me, I wish I didn't know what I do, then I could just carry on in blissful ignorance. But since I do know the things I do, I have to act on them or I can't live with myself.'

Is that not a sufficient answer?"

EXACTLY WHAT DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND???

Yes, reducing the population of humans on earth would be good for the planet. Would anyone argue with that?

No, I don't want to see it happen through a cascade of disaster trigger by resource depletion, social and economic catastrophe and wholesale damage to environmental systems (including climate).

We can do something about these things if we start to change our behaviours now.

Comprende, moron?