KDodds
New member
I'm loathe to get involved in a thread like this since it's one of those huge time-suckers. So, I'll say my piece and gracefully bow out.
When you have human involvement in an issue that develops into a long-term agenda, you can, almost 100% of the time, follow the money trail. Since Gore was used as an example (and a good one at that), just look at the trail and decide for yourself whether he espouses what he does because it's profitable to him or not. Would he take the other side and do a documentary on Global Warming fallacies? Likely not. It's not a popular debate side and he certainly wouldn't gain as much money from it, even tho his lifestyle seems to support a non-"Green" agenda. I'm sure some of you have seen this emaciated "raw food" nut out in California. He's got himself a bunch of followers, all equally emaciated. Guess what he does for a living. Yup. Raw food restaurant. One of the biggest jokes is that he uses the old "It's natural and what we were meant to eat" argument. Either through stupidity, self-deception, or outright fraud, he fails to recognize that when humans were eating exclusively "raw food" the average life expectancy was somewhere in the 30s. Hmm.
Then you get to Global Warming. This "heavy" topic is driven to the media forefront and backed by organizations whose best interest is that people believe what they are saying. For those of you who have been on this planet long enough, you'll remember the CFC scare in the 70's and how all the moms dumped their aerosol hair spray. Why? Well, we were creating these big pemanent "holes" in the ozone layer, you see. Fast forward and we find out that the ozone layer repairs itself, where at the time we were lead to believe it didn't, and that the elimination of CFCs really didin't do squat in the last 30 years or so. Hmm. After the hairspray thing it was styrofoam, the "half-life" of plastics, etc. Failure to recognize that these molecules didn't spontaneously self-create out of thin air really didn't mean much to the whole "landfill" madness and the non-existent "running out of space for our garbage" dilemma. And here we are, 20 years later, and our CO2 output is being questioned even tho we KNOW that the guesses of the past made by those trying to popularize such "doomsday" causes have been disproven My garbage still goes to a landfill, so does yours, miraculously, I guess we "discovered" some bottomless wormhole into another dimension that the landfills can off-load into, because we've literally tons upon tons of room.
Anyway, back on CO2. More guesswork based on what? Think about it. What's it called, the "reason" for Global Warming? The Greenhouse Effect. Greenhouse? So observable patterns in a Greenhouse can correlate to what happens to the whole earth? At its very root, this basis for determining the cause for a "warming trend", if indeed one exists and is not fleetingly temporary on a timescale we can't hope to grasp, or live through, is questionable, at best. Since this is a reef board, let's put it into those terms. Let's pick something simple, like, oh, nutrient loads. What you put into your home tanks you must pull out. Otherwise, over time, nutrients will accumulate. Eventually biomass will reach equilibrium with nutrient introduction (or close enough to it) so that growing fish, corals, etc. can no longer incorporate introduced nutrients into bio-mass as quickly as they're introduced. Hence, an accumulation of nutrients. What does this lead too? Depends on the tank, in a soft coral tank also populated by algae consuming vertebrates, you may be fine. But in many cases you'll see algae blooms. Do we see this as a result of nutrient accumulation in the ocean? Sure, but only on a localized scale. So, can we draw the conclusion that the world's oceans, left unchecked, will become one big Bryopsis farm until someone starts doing water changes? Silly? Stupid? Yeah, it's both. But it's the direct line of reasoning used to equate Global Warming with what we can observe in Greenhouses. That's not to say that it doesn't bear investigating, but without conclusive PROOF, it is not possible to conclude that we are the cause of Global Warming for ANY reason. In fact, I would say that our belief that we can effect the earth in this way is a self-inflated ego trip. Yeah, sure, we can alter our environment, we can knock down a forest and put in 20 McMansions. Big deal. That's the equivalent of your Trigger turning over some small rocks to get at some crustaceans or worms. That doesn't mean old Mr. Picasso can install a chiller (or heater).
Follow the money trail. Automakers are switching over to ethanol-safe tubing. Why? The money trail. They're gambling that more car buyers are going to care about "flexible fuel". It has nothing to do with the environment. Indeed, it has little to do with eco-consciousness at all, if even a little. Despite what the media reports and what we're being told, there are innumerable capped off drill sites all over our country marked as "dry" when they've never even been utilized. There's no current shortage of fossil fuels. We produce almost 100% of what we need. BP is not the only entity providing crude. And so on and so on. Yet, prices are rising. Why? After a $15B first quarter PROFIT? Demand isn't changing all that much, really. So why the hike in prices? Follow the money trail. Ethanol is the proposed "solution" to this non-existent problem. So where are we going to get Ethanol from? Well, American corn growers, of course. Does it matter that there are cheaper and more efficient means of producing Ethanol? Apparently not. In fact, cheaper and more efficient ways are quashed to make room for the new corn market in the U.S. Who wants to bet that American petroleum companies are heavily investing in the corn market? Follow the money trail. It's always about the money.
When you have human involvement in an issue that develops into a long-term agenda, you can, almost 100% of the time, follow the money trail. Since Gore was used as an example (and a good one at that), just look at the trail and decide for yourself whether he espouses what he does because it's profitable to him or not. Would he take the other side and do a documentary on Global Warming fallacies? Likely not. It's not a popular debate side and he certainly wouldn't gain as much money from it, even tho his lifestyle seems to support a non-"Green" agenda. I'm sure some of you have seen this emaciated "raw food" nut out in California. He's got himself a bunch of followers, all equally emaciated. Guess what he does for a living. Yup. Raw food restaurant. One of the biggest jokes is that he uses the old "It's natural and what we were meant to eat" argument. Either through stupidity, self-deception, or outright fraud, he fails to recognize that when humans were eating exclusively "raw food" the average life expectancy was somewhere in the 30s. Hmm.
Then you get to Global Warming. This "heavy" topic is driven to the media forefront and backed by organizations whose best interest is that people believe what they are saying. For those of you who have been on this planet long enough, you'll remember the CFC scare in the 70's and how all the moms dumped their aerosol hair spray. Why? Well, we were creating these big pemanent "holes" in the ozone layer, you see. Fast forward and we find out that the ozone layer repairs itself, where at the time we were lead to believe it didn't, and that the elimination of CFCs really didin't do squat in the last 30 years or so. Hmm. After the hairspray thing it was styrofoam, the "half-life" of plastics, etc. Failure to recognize that these molecules didn't spontaneously self-create out of thin air really didn't mean much to the whole "landfill" madness and the non-existent "running out of space for our garbage" dilemma. And here we are, 20 years later, and our CO2 output is being questioned even tho we KNOW that the guesses of the past made by those trying to popularize such "doomsday" causes have been disproven My garbage still goes to a landfill, so does yours, miraculously, I guess we "discovered" some bottomless wormhole into another dimension that the landfills can off-load into, because we've literally tons upon tons of room.
Anyway, back on CO2. More guesswork based on what? Think about it. What's it called, the "reason" for Global Warming? The Greenhouse Effect. Greenhouse? So observable patterns in a Greenhouse can correlate to what happens to the whole earth? At its very root, this basis for determining the cause for a "warming trend", if indeed one exists and is not fleetingly temporary on a timescale we can't hope to grasp, or live through, is questionable, at best. Since this is a reef board, let's put it into those terms. Let's pick something simple, like, oh, nutrient loads. What you put into your home tanks you must pull out. Otherwise, over time, nutrients will accumulate. Eventually biomass will reach equilibrium with nutrient introduction (or close enough to it) so that growing fish, corals, etc. can no longer incorporate introduced nutrients into bio-mass as quickly as they're introduced. Hence, an accumulation of nutrients. What does this lead too? Depends on the tank, in a soft coral tank also populated by algae consuming vertebrates, you may be fine. But in many cases you'll see algae blooms. Do we see this as a result of nutrient accumulation in the ocean? Sure, but only on a localized scale. So, can we draw the conclusion that the world's oceans, left unchecked, will become one big Bryopsis farm until someone starts doing water changes? Silly? Stupid? Yeah, it's both. But it's the direct line of reasoning used to equate Global Warming with what we can observe in Greenhouses. That's not to say that it doesn't bear investigating, but without conclusive PROOF, it is not possible to conclude that we are the cause of Global Warming for ANY reason. In fact, I would say that our belief that we can effect the earth in this way is a self-inflated ego trip. Yeah, sure, we can alter our environment, we can knock down a forest and put in 20 McMansions. Big deal. That's the equivalent of your Trigger turning over some small rocks to get at some crustaceans or worms. That doesn't mean old Mr. Picasso can install a chiller (or heater).
Follow the money trail. Automakers are switching over to ethanol-safe tubing. Why? The money trail. They're gambling that more car buyers are going to care about "flexible fuel". It has nothing to do with the environment. Indeed, it has little to do with eco-consciousness at all, if even a little. Despite what the media reports and what we're being told, there are innumerable capped off drill sites all over our country marked as "dry" when they've never even been utilized. There's no current shortage of fossil fuels. We produce almost 100% of what we need. BP is not the only entity providing crude. And so on and so on. Yet, prices are rising. Why? After a $15B first quarter PROFIT? Demand isn't changing all that much, really. So why the hike in prices? Follow the money trail. Ethanol is the proposed "solution" to this non-existent problem. So where are we going to get Ethanol from? Well, American corn growers, of course. Does it matter that there are cheaper and more efficient means of producing Ethanol? Apparently not. In fact, cheaper and more efficient ways are quashed to make room for the new corn market in the U.S. Who wants to bet that American petroleum companies are heavily investing in the corn market? Follow the money trail. It's always about the money.
