On 11/13/2013 7:51 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 4:26 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com
<mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com>> wrote:
> the fossil fuel industry doesn't have to convince anyone that global
warming isn't
happening,
There is no doubt that the climate is changing but that is nothing new, the climate has
ALWAYS been changing. Other than a few very brief ice ages during the last few million
years the temperature has always been warmer than now and occasionally MUCH warmer; at
least that's the way things have been during the last 600 million years.
But present civilization wasn't built 600Mya. Humans didn't even exist. The problem
isn't so much that the world will be warmer, but that it's getting warmer very quickly.
And by the way, right now the sea is rising at the rate of about one inch every 10
years, that would make for a rather dull Hollywood style disaster movie so it's not
surprising that environmentalists make exaggerated claims, it's the way they stay
employed, and without scare tactics many environmental groups would be out of business.
And in the past, when the earth was much warmer, sea level was several meters higher. As
you must know, melting ice is a first-order phase transition. Heat is absorbed the phase
change with no increase in temperature. So the antarctic and Greenland ice sheets will
melt over a narrow range of temperature increase.
> As Albert says, knowledge doesn't produce action.
One action environmentalists haven't produced is a cure that isn't far worse than the
disease. They say global warming will somehow lead to human extinction but will shout
down anyone who even mentions nuclear energy which produces no greenhouse gasses. They
say we're headed for a disaster of Biblical proportions but try to paint Nathan
Myhrvold, the former chief technical officer at Microsoft, as a villain for suggesting
ways a cooler planet could be engineered if increasing heat turned out to be a serious
problem in a century or two.
Myrhvold himself says it will be a serious problem within 40yrs even if we cut CO2
emissions by 6% a year - and there's no reason to suppose we will cut them at all. He
considers the problem "a serious pickle", which is why he proposes injecting particles
into the stratosphere, like an artificial volcano, as a transitional remedy. No doubt
some environmentalist have criticized this as a risky geoengineering solution with hard to
forsee side effects. But even Myrhvold seems to present it as the lesser of two evils.
Environmentalists claim to occupy the moral high ground but because of a superstitious
fear of all genetic engineering they oppose Golden Rice even to the point of criminal
sabotage which could prevent 670,000 children a year from dying of vitamin A deficiency
and 350,000 go permanently blind. Environmentalists blab on and on about the evils of
chemical pesticides but when science develops plants that need much less of them they do
everything they can to stop it.
Instead environmentalists insist that 7 billion people can be kept alive and in comfort
with moonbeams and hummingbirds and windmills powering blast furnaces.
A straw man mockery of environmentalists. I have a friend who has been president of the
local Sierra Club for many years and he's all for nuclear power plants, especially LFTRs,
to replace fossil fuel. He has no problem with genetic engineering except as it is used to
drive monoculture crops for pesticide resistance.
> if the global warming models are correct, that is already too late. If I
understand the most common models correctly, it _is_ already too late.
If it's already too late then I humbly submit that the best thing that environmentalists
could do is stop making scary sounds with their pie hole and let us enjoy the little
time we have left before "fire and brimstone come down from the skies! Rivers and seas
boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
<http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001368/?ref_=tt_trv_qu>the dead rising from the grave!
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria..."
You mean the mass hysterical fear of socialist world government swooping down and putting
out your barbecue from their green helicopter?
Brent
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