global warming. hoax?

[Exception]

Absolutly it costs, what, do windmills grow on trees? No wait, it comes from metals, metals that have to be mined, mining that greens say is bad and want stopped, so how are we going to build the windmills?
And just ask the customers of wind and water power if they get it free. I know we pay thru the nose here for power produced only 1/4 mile away, so it can't be shipping charges.
Wind and water are not free

Which 'greens'? Your vegetables?
What are you talking about? Who wants what mining stopped... and are these entities green in the face?
Who says mining metals is bad? Who has ever said that, ever?

So much gets mixed up here its impossible to have a straightforward discussion.

You're confusing elementary economical basics such as preliminary costs and variable costs. What you pay for your energy is the variable cost mostly, the oil / coal that's being used to generate your energy. You're paying hardly anything for the power lines and the power plant itself, those costs are so small when spread over so many, that it becomes tiny. Same goes for the windmill. Actually windmills are far cheaper to buy than plants, and are easier to maintain.

You seem to have a very skewed idea about whatever you call 'green'. Taxes are a non issue. I said that before. sustainable energy is not more expensive than that from fossils. The money will go to different people, that's the issue.

I'd seen another chart, so I stand corrected. It's still $466 billion You think that's a good way to spend that money?

I am not a 'green'. There's no such thing. Do you mean environmentalist? Do you mean left wing politics? Do you mean deontologist or consequentialist? Do you mean martians? It's not black and white, green or red, it's not simple, not binary... it's not yes or no do this OR that...

But sure, you rather have 10 new choppers of death, and pay for ever increasing gas prices to boot. Go ahead, it's your country. I'd advise against having kids though.

[Stooch]

some good responses here. Some people need to pay attention to the movie though, i know its hard. had to rewind a few times myself lol. But a few points raised in this thread have been pretty convincingly disputed. Like trying to use personal memory of temperature to determine a trend when there is millenia worth of data refuting it. And polar bears have been around for a long time. Yes they are shrinking in numbers but they lived through many and much hotter temperature variations - yet they are still around... But we ARE putting them in danger though. We are putting alot of different things in danger, in many ways. Right now it is nice not to worry as much about our imminent doom i guess. Like the year 2000 for example, the whole world plunged into chaos as the matrix crashed...

Imagine taking all the money spent on the war in iraq and just give it to the world. go to the worst off places and bring them up to par with the rest technologically and educationally (internet for everyone). I know its a pipe dream and highly unrealistic.. Thats the thing with capitalism, wealth tends to concentrate along with power... In the end its all about the benjamins.

But hey its a rich life right? Soon the animals will just have to evolve into using currency or die...

[Exception]

Polar bears are still around yes, but each year thousands of animal species go extinct. At an incredible rate. I'll try to find a chart of that. That one definately is not co2 related

There's all these systems as well.. decreasing the habitat of mountain goats leads to less of those, and a community of 1000 goats can only sustain one snow leoppard (or whatever it's called).. thus there's ony 5 (five!) left... and the bald snow eagle relies on the snow leopard for game... thus there's only 3 left of those... etc...

There's a great BBC series called Planet Earth... its stunning HD DVD stuff. Shows the only footage ever of one of these leopards.

[Mylenium]

I WANT to see the people who so desperatly believe in this so called global warming-change fuels types, use THIER own money, set up the industrys, set up the fuel stations, set up the infrastructure, take the chance, gamble thier lives and livelyhood....the same way whalers did when they went after whale oil, the same way wildcatters did when they went after fossel oil, the same way every industry has done since the dawn of man. Then we as consumers can decide which is best and let the chips fall where thay may.

Well, that's very much the capitalist view of the world but in terms of being ecologically sane, things don't work this way. I also think you are missing the larger issues here - as a matter of fact we have to change the way we live our lives.

The greenhouse effect aside, we are close to depleting many natural resources and need to change the way how we deal with these matters. Oil may last for 30 years at worst, 80 years at best. This will put entire industries in jeopardy. In about 60 years there will not be a shred of natural Uranium 238 on this planet, so nuclear power will not be much of an option anymore. Copper already is beginning to get one of the rarest metals on the planet and in a few years it will be as expensive as silver.

I could bring up more examples, but what I'm saying is: Those issues are way beyond any single industry or company. They affect entire societies and to our shame we all must admit that we are still comforting ourselves in the belief that the politicians and companies fix those things which they screwed up in the first place. We simply have neglected to think about those things for too long and now it's almost too late.

What irritates me massively about your view is that you are simply cancelling out some issues. About 70% of all people on this planet live in underdeveloped countries, representing a far larger mass than us few in the industrial countries. They don't have the power. We share a responsibility for them as well and, for what it's worth, we need to do good on them. You seem to not care about those issues as long as they don't happen in your front yard, but don't you think poisoning the environment and polluting the air in China, India, Bangladesh and so on just to get you cheap iPods, clothes and other comforts is just as bad?

Mylenium

[Stooch]

There's a great BBC series called Planet Earth... its stunning HD DVD stuff. Shows the only footage ever of one of these leopards.

yeah im watching it. its on discovery channel in the us.

no doubt, humans are killing off species left and right. hard to prevent habitat loss through expansion though. the whole market and the beauty of capitalism kinda pushes that. I like the current attempts to basically bribe countries into not cutting their forrests down (or is it the other way around?)

but hey its worth it in the long run.

[Phil]

If you don't understand what I am saying, go back and read my post about what happened to William Wallace and compare that to a few years in prison. I don't argue that we need to look at what's happening at Gitmo, I'm saying that back in the day, Gitmo would be paradise compared to what was done to POWs.

Torture is torture. Your proposal is not as simple as you make it out to be :

- the prisoner is locked up without any recourse for 5 years or more (this is not a few; this is not a prison - they have to abide by the rules of law. Gitmo doesn't and hasn't). This without any due process - simply on the say-so of the good ol' US of A.
- They are not shown the courtesy of a proper judicial process, but what may turn out to be kangaroo courts.
- Their family are generally ill informed about what is going on
- Very, very few convictions are resulting from this process
- There is no independent review of the reason for people to be there. Given the number of people impacted by the no-fly list, it's reasonable to expect that the driftnet approach has caused innocents to be pulled in as well
- Rendition has rarely been a way to get accurate information. In most cases, you simply get told what you want to hear. Guantanamo is known for this - sleep deprivation, waterboarding, etc.
- There is no compensation available for innocents. This means that there is no punishment attached for use of driftnets to scoop large numbers of people up and stick them in Guantanamo. Without the threat of punishment, the process is unregulated and damaged beyond repair. Any convictions should be viewed with utter suspicion and all 'evidence' also is tainted.

Compared to what appear to be endless years of being in this limbo state, with frequent torture as a side dish, a quick death could well be preferable. Rather than the graphic example of being hung, drawn and quartered (which caused Queen Elizabeth enough distress after one person was executed this way that she arranged for the second to be dealt with more compassionately), though, you have hanging by itself. In most cases, hanging should be quick. The US seems to be well up on killing criminals (or at least parking them on death row), and had no issue with Iraq's preferred method of dealing with its recent history. I believe current favourites include death by injection, death by gassing and death by electrocution. I'm not sure I think the US has improved as much as it thinks it has. I'm also deeply, deeply ashamed of the UK government, its complicity in cooking the books before going to war and its then near-total incompetence in dealing with their foreign adventure.

[*Pete*]

About gitmo...when several of the prisoners commited suicide, it was explained as "a terrorist attack, in order to harm US reputation" by the commander of Gitmo.

one of the ones who killed himself was about to be released just weeks later, but nobody told him that...so he was considered innocent, but now he is dead.



about global warming....i cant see why anyone would want to argue against reducing pollution.

EVEN IF, it wont do anything against the global warming, we would have cleaner air to breath, less problems to people with asthma or other breathing problems, for example...that alone affects nearly half a million people in norway, with a population of 5 million.


So what if we have to pay for windmills, solar power or what ever "green" technology is out there...we are paying for the more polluting forms of electricity today, what is the difference?

when did you hear about a privately owned nuclear plant????

you didnt, im sure...but you for sure have been paying for building that plant with your tax money.
and now its a problem to spend the same tax money, on something "green" that in the long run will end up to be cheaper.

a nuclear plant for example, is actually one of the cleanest and cheapest forms of electricity we have today...but "cleanest" is not clean.

first you have to get the fuel for the plant, not a very clean process and definately not a cheap process.

once you get it into the plant, its clean and cheap, if nothing goes wrong (chernobyl).

once done with the fuel..you will have to store it for a million years, far from human contact in mile deep tunnels, far from cheap...but relatively clean, as long nothing happens during the transport, or with the containers...hopefully it will never contaminate the water deep in the earth..becouse one day it will come up, and end up polluting the fish that we eat, and water we drink.

and if that happens...we will all become "Green", literally or not.


and as a comparison...a windmill, costs a little to build, once in place it will produce energy, forever..if broken it can be repaired, or reused to make forks and spoons of the metal.

if you decide to remove the windmill, after a year you wouldnt even know it ever was there..grass has grown on top of the place it stood on.

[Bill Carey]

It's always amazing how these discussions, where ever they occur, go from a single topic to a list of all the ills the evil humans (particularly the hyper evil Americans) have wrought upon the world.

The original topic was a video that disputed the 'known fact' that humans are singularly responsible for global warming, or climate change as it's now known in case they got it wrong and it's a horrible ice age we're about to plunge ourselves in to.

Understanding the cause is fundamental to determining what to do about it. We can affect the climate, drastically, if we so chose. (Put huge solar sails in orbit to block off chunks of sunlight and you WILL cool the Earth, we have technology to do this, or put up collectors to do the opposite) But should we? Is this a natural cycle that life needs to stay healthy?

We may well kill off the polar bears through habitat reduction, since they can't migrate south away from the icepack as it melts because of us, but that's a whole different argument. The thrust of the video's argument is that they are still here even though the Earth has been as warm and warmer in the past and they have survived. When we finish them off it won't be global warming that did it.

[Dirk]

I WANT to see the people who so desperatly believe in this so called global warming-change fuels types, use THIER own money, set up the industrys, set up the fuel stations, set up the infrastructure, take the chance, gamble thier lives and livelyhood....the same way whalers did when they went after whale oil, the same way wildcatters did when they went after fossel oil, the same way every industry has done since the dawn of man. Then we as consumers can decide which is best and let the chips fall where thay may.

Just quit forcing me to do it.

And yes, I AM forced to pay taxes for that green jiborish...where do you think govt grants come from? Santa Clause?

100% Agreement!

[Bill Carey]

...........

a nuclear plant for example, is actually one of the cleanest and cheapest forms of electricity we have today...but "cleanest" is not clean.

first you have to get the fuel for the plant, not a very clean process and definately not a cheap process.

once you get it into the plant, its clean and cheap, if nothing goes wrong (chernobyl).

once done with the fuel..you will have to store it for a million years, far from human contact in mile deep tunnels, far from cheap...but relatively clean, as long nothing happens during the transport, or with the containers...hopefully it will never contaminate the water deep in the earth..becouse one day it will come up, and end up polluting the fish that we eat, and water we drink.

and if that happens...we will all become "Green", literally or not.


and as a comparison...a windmill, costs a little to build, once in place it will produce energy, forever..if broken it can be repaired, or reused to make forks and spoons of the metal.

if you decide to remove the windmill, after a year you wouldnt even know it ever was there..grass has grown on top of the place it stood on.

Very true, nuclear should be viewed as an alternative to oil, valuable mostly to reduce our dependence on an energy source we can no longer count on. I'm like wind power, but not as 'the' solution. It's easy to see a future of bigger and more powerful windmills that eventually have the effect of changing local wind patterns. The monsters planned for the ocean even more so.

[*Pete*]

I believe solar panels will be the main energy producer in the future, not windmills...but i mentioned windmills becouse of the had been mentioned before.

[Thomas M.]

Oh man, this thread causes a lot of head shaking and disappointment here. How can anyone be so arrogant not to care about the most efficient way to create energy or protect the environment. It seems as long as the computers of these guys are running they give a rat's *** about how the energy has been created.

They are sitting on the very branch the are cutting with their saw and still think they'd know better what's going on and what is right or wrong. The fumes, gases and toxids they create by using/wasting energy should actually be pumped into their home that they begin to realize that "green" energy is something worth to consider.

The biggest problem today seems to be arrogance and the absence of a working brain. Global warming looks like a piece of cake compared to the spelling problems of words like compassion and responsibility.

Ouch!!!

[cholo]

Humans in general have never been particularly clever or intelligent. Some isolated individuals have been known to excel, but most of our species is really just a bunch of retards standing on the shoulders of giants, wielding this great power like a kid with a firearm. But that's the way nature intended it. Let's see how we fit into the whole survival of the fittest race. Maybe we will be the vehicle of our own undoing.

[gjjackson]

If it's global warming, then why is it we've been getting "Cooler" weather here. It was in the early 1900's here where temperatures reached 117. It has been going down since.