@Docnick
A well worded opinion that does not agree with our present responsibility to our climate as officially sanctioned by the AAAS, the largest organization of scientists throughout the world and 97% of the scientist of climatology. Each agrees with the present administrations initiatives on climate changes.
I try to take the advise of the most educated, most experienced professionals who have made it their life’s work in just about every arena I have a question on; whether it be climate change or car repair it generally works for me, especially the more encompassing the issue is. It still boggles the mind to be so dismissive of the same people ( scientists in general) who we depend on for our national security and general well being as well as developing our entire technological base and the first we call when in need of help for solving the worlds problems from cancer cures to world catastrophe to war. And yet of it comes to climate change and if they support a government initiative in this area, they magically don’t know squat .
Pollutant: (n). A substance that is harmful or noxious in trace quantities.
CO2 is neither noxious or harmful (directly) in quantities ever likely to be observed in open air; hence, it fails the dictionary test, REGARDLESS of its putative action in GW.
If the EPA wanted to regulate agents of climatic change, it needed to do the intellectually honest thing and ask Congress for authority, rather than try to define a square peg as fitting in a round hole.
@meanjoe75green
Guess you feel the same way about lead, and mercury and asbestos and,… a bunch of other compounds and elements that in trace quantities, like arsenic have few harmful effects but become so when their levels increase.
Everything is toxic depending on it’s. level . Even O2
BTW.
What dictionary adds…" In trace quantities" to your definition.
Fine. Throw out the qualifier you hate so much…it still stands that CO2 is almost never directly harmful in quantities encountered. It’s a common ingredient in beverages, for cryin out loud! (As opposed to Pb, Hg, asbestos…)
@mean
"Never directly" is also CYA because O2 can be noxious as we all know at higher levels. It’s the higher levels of co2 by 30% that have contributed to the present problem as seem by 95% of climatologist and The AAAS.
Yeah, I believe in GW, FWIW…just think the EPA is overreaching by calling CO2 a “pollutant,” which it isn’t per any traditional ubderstanding of that word.
You may say “end justifies means”; I say “slippery slope of precedent.”
Well NaCl is a poison in large quanitys,like a lot of other things CO2 included,but at what level does it become unmanagable? The south polar ice cap will probaly never melt and if the North polar icecap itself melts it will not raise the sea level any,now Greenland and those icesheets can raise the sea level,but the real concern is the dilution of the heat exchanger called the “Gulfstream” and there seems to be some evidence of that starting to occur and slowing the flow down-anybody who wants to feel snug and secure only has to read Dixie Rays book on the effect of mankind on the enviroment
(I dont believe her book,but many conservatives do) Gaia is crying fellows,we need to start worrying about our nest on spaceship earth,at this stage a mass exodus is not possible as we move toward 9-10 billion on this planet,all I can say is"cry for the children" I wish we didnt have to behave responsibly.but we do-Kevin
LOL. That’s what the feds WANT… mercury …hundreds of millions of fluorescent bulbs each with a bit of mercury vapor to replace our environmentally friendly tungsten filaments! At 20x the cost!
And the people that pushed that agenda are the same ones that want to regulate CO2? And the same ones that were telling us back in the '70s that we were headed for another ice age?
The EPA did a lot of great stuff when they were originally created. They largely stopped industrial pollution of our rivers, air, ponds, and seas, and they even in many cases held the polluters responsible for the cleanup costs. But the organizations driving their decision making nowadays are using Al Gore science. IMHO the only thing he actually accomplished was to help expose the Nobel Society as highly political. And he did that by flying the world in a private jet and by long cavalcades of fuel-sucking Escallades giving speeches for thousands of dollars a pop.
Sorry, but I’m not buying this whole “we must regulate CO2” thing. Its real goal IMHO is the growth of the size, power and budget of the EPA.
@db4690
I hear you. It does make you wonder.
It’s a little bewildering when the technology we have gives us so much access and yet we choose not to use it.
One can use the same or similar key strokes to get answers to climate change as they can on oil change. Then, you just count and look at the qualification of the sources and the preponderance of evidence to form an opinion.
Don’t many of us do that when we want to reinforce our opinions on threads on car repair ?
I really don 't believe Fox News reporters believe much of what they say themselves. That’s not what they are paid for.
I wouldn’t be so quick to discount Fox. NBC, CBS, and ABC have all but gotten out of the news business. CNBC is a disgrace as far as biased reporting. CNN and PBS are loaded with British reporters and commenters with their own British bias. As an American and not a liberal or conservative, I fear for the future of real journalism and investigative reporting. Just ask yourself why a traffic jam in New Jersey, regardless of whether the governor was involved or not, should receive 17 times the air time that the IRS scandle received. Like I said, trying to be unbiased but something stinks in the electronic media anyway. So any diverse opinions, biased as they may be are welcome.
I credit Fox with outstanding sports coverage . They do specialize in entertainment, that includes their (news? ) They are about as far removed from legitimate, unbiased news as Sesami Street.
The fox blondes aren’t paid to believe what they say
They’re paid to look good and convincing when they tell their story
Here’s something to think about . . . studies have shown that children equate pretty looks with being smart
Apparently “a few” adults still equate pretty looks with intelligence and credibility
Hence, the fox blondes must be smart and therefore the story they’re telling must be credible
Here’s a funny story . . . years ago, some of my friends regularly read those magazines that you buy at the gas station and 7 Eleven. You know, the ones with the naked ladies on the cover. Anyways, that was their only source of news. When I implied that they were gullible for believing that crap, their response was “If it’s been published, it must be true.”
I suppose you could go one stop further, and take the attitutude, “If a reporter on TV is saying it, it must be true.”
Uh DB, The North Polar icecap floats and it has already raised the sea level all it can on the other hand Greenland and glaciers on land can raise the the sea level because they are supported by land and will add extra water that hasnt been in the watershed for ages.Please read my entire post and check the laws of bouyancy-Kevin
Kevin
From what I understand, the additional fresh water added to the ocean affects the salinity which gives rise to altering the Gulf Stream current which now provides a moderating affect to coastal Europe. When that tipping point occurs the effects are quite sudden .
The Koch Bros. and other wealthy supporters are not dumb. They all get climate change. They are supporting ideas that will continue to expland their wealth in hopes they can insulate they and their decendents from the effects.
People like they and Roget Ailes depend so much on technology they could not help but know the truth. But power and wealth keep them floating above those who support their methods . They have to be laughing. George Romny epitomized this hipocracy of gaining support from the very people he financial drubs.
Back in the dark ages, plagues arose as the population density climbed. This served as a seemingly intractable upper limit on population growth. This problem was ultimately licked by an engineering solution (sanitary sewers) and vermin mitigation.
Years later, cholera responded to the same engineering solution, allowing continued population growth.
Some time later, Malthus noted that population growth was in danger of requiring more arable land for farming than existed on the earth. This seeming intractable limit on population responded to the technological solution of nitorgenous fertilizers, allowing continued population growth.
Point being, humans have been overcoming environmental limitations by outsmarting them ever since fire and dometicated livestock. But for some reason, people want mass sacrifice and/or a cessation of baby-making as a GW solution…two things that just aint gonna happen! Time to “work smarter, not harder.”
Keeping 7x10^9 folks alive flat-out requires burning great amounts of organic matter. Trying to “solve” GW by austerity measures is like trying to “solve” cholera by telling people to stop pooping so much!
@MJ,dont worry because the time is coming when we wont be able to out tech over population and scarceity(mostly because a lot of Folks wont consider lowering thier lifestyles a bit,)things like arable land,topsoil,potable water,phosphates are getting scarcier,just because you see land it doesnt mean its hospitable,go through a major mtn chain and look at the treeline,above the treeline,life difficult,throw into the mix the deserts,polar regions,urban areas,etc,theres not as much as you think,how big a population would the “Hunter ,gatherer” culture support for instance? time to wakeup and smell the coffee-Kevin
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@McCune You are right; the Actic ice sheet floats just like the ice in your cocktail glass. When it melts the level in the glass does not rise.
A couple of actual facts; there has been no global warming for the last 14 years! That does not mean, of course that there will be no warming in the future. What it does mean, however, that in spite of an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, there has been no warming and the relationship between CO2 and warmig is not linear. Some time back I saw a Hollywood movie about another ice age; made inhe late 70s I believe when the scare story was another coming ice age.
The recent loss of Actic ice has been offset by an approximae equal GAIN in Antarctic ice. The fiasco of a recent “research ship” with Australian tourists, “scientists”, an politicians getting stuck in Antarctic ice trying to prove the demise of this ice sheet speaks volumes. They were to go where the ice sheet was in the early 1900s to prove the loss; they could not get within 6 miles of of where the sheet was then. They had to be rescued by an ice braker which got stuck itself! Now rthere are two shipsstuk in the ice where there was not supposed to be any ice! So much for ice loss. Al Gore still scares people by saying the loss of this ice will raise sea levels by over 50 feet!! Except that it’s not happening and might need at least a million years if it did.
The earth’s atmosphere is mostly oxygen, and nitrogen, and a measly .04% CO2. The rest is water vapor and other gasses. A doubling of CO2 won’t affect your beathing very much, but an equal aount of SO2 and other noxious gasses defintely would!
The three most important greenhous gasses are Methane (CH4), CO2 and Water Vapor. Methane is produced mainly by the flatulance of bovines (cows) and other ruminating animals. Methane is 4 times as potent as a greenhouse gas as CO2, and accounts for 25% of the green house gas effect.
A noble effort by Al Gore would be to try to ban beef, and persuade India to slaughter all of its hundreds of millions of sacred cows!!!
P.S. I do agree with Al Gore that we should phase out unprocessed coal as a power plant fuel. Natural gas generates only half the greenhouse gasses and none of the other nasty ones in coal.
No one doubts that technology has advance in two ways. First, exactly what you say @meanjoe75green in helping us get over the desperate situation we find ourselves in. But, not at the expense of a lot of lives when the solutions devised by science and technology are applied late.
No doubt, at some point doubters of man made and necessary man corrected climate change will be embraced as their own idea. It is just the politics of mistrust in the higher level doers disdaining them as the education and science elite, the same group that has saved many from wars, famine and deplorable living conditions that keep us from embracing it early enough.
It’s the reluctant of some who value the dollar saved now over the 10 fold loss of dollars and lives save later. It’s the “rather” look backwards then to the future that makes some so afraid of change, they look away at the suffering of their fellow man… And excuse it with a dollar sign.
Fortunately there is much to agree about that both those who believe and not can still remain friends when the topic centers around problems we both share in the here and now. We all “love” our cars and our families. That won’t change.