Global Warming

[sixtyandaquarter]

That's funny, if Al Gore is going along with what the government told him to do, the government must've wanted him to berate them and insult their intelligence.  Because that's what Gore's done with his little "proofs" and speeches.  It's propaganda, and a lot of it was against the U.S. government, particularly the righted business end.

 

[mawk]

Quite literally Cow flatulence actually put out more Co2 then all the cars in the earth.

Please, cite your source for that.

Would the amount of CO2 produced by all the cattle of all the lands rival that produced by continuous petrol combustion? And if the breath of cattle is truly such an incredible threat, could the same not be said about the six billion people on Earth? Good God, man, we've got to start culling!

In all seriousness, I don't care how people can discredit Al Gore. I don't particularly care for him myself; as bitter as he claims not to be, his comments regarding the election made it into An Inconvenient Truth somehow. The fact of the matter is that I trust Al Gore more than Glenn Beck. You know why? Al Gore has little to gain, compared with major news.

Between Al Gore and the oil industry in its entirety, who do you think is more likely to have the funds and the motivation to "fund" studies? I'm not saying that either party has necessarily bribed studies for "friendlier" results, but in all honesty, Big Oil has loads of profit to lose if carbon emissions are to be cut. And who is major media more likely to back on this issue, a lone man in a business suit amid crowds of hippies, or a large part of world industry?

I agree that global warming's not going to cause anything quite so sudden as the events depicted in The Day After Tomorrow, but I don't believe nothing's gonna happen, either. The constant release of carbon and heat into the atmosphere doesn't seem like something that'll sit quietly. It may or may not still lay within our ecosystem's powers to absorb, but we're shortening the fuse on both ends; we're going to pass that threshold eventually.

 

[Venetia]

I'd rather a hundred bleeding heart liberal Al Gores with good intentions than one fat guy/soccer mom in an H2 Hummer throwing out candy wrappers onto a nature reserve. Because while the bleeding hearts are annoying as shit and piss everyone off, all they're really doing is getting out a message that can waste some of your time. The Hummer person may not be outwardly bothering anyone, but their message is plenty clear on the environment as palpable damage.

I'm no fan of bleeding heart liberals, but I can't deny them their right to speak. And people, this is not about Al Gore the man, or what he does, or who he is as a person. The message is clear: we can curb the pollution if we just stop wasting so damn much. I don't care if he has 43 air conditioners and drives a fleet of V12 Lambourginis. It's not about him. It's about the message. I don't care if he overemphasized his messages--it's still a point and it still stands.

It's not hard to curb your waste. The Earth can tolerate some waste; it has before and it is now. A volcano belches out more toxic fumes in a day than a hundred developed cities in the same span of time. Sulphur springs all over the world are pumping sulphur into the stratosphere. Cows and ruminants the world over fart -- a lot. We were heading towards a warming trend long before this century--we have been since the Ice Age ended. But we, as modern humans, are speeding along the process more than necessary, and are polluting the waters of the planet, which may prove more serious in future generations than most people realize. What do you think we do with much of the world's waste? Do you really think there are THAT many land fills?

Easy ways to curb your waste:
a.) Eat more produce and fresh food--food without excessive wrappers. Your body will thank you, too.
b.) Carry a canvas bag with you to stores/supermarkets instead of accepting plastic/paper bags. Or, use a supermarket's bag recycling bin.
c.) If you have a recycling pick-up bin, just toss your soda cans and bottles in there. I wish I had one in my neighborhood, but I hear they're opening a plant nearby so maybe I'll get a pickup soon.
d.) Don't get a newspaper subscription--get your news online or on TV.
e.) Cancel your unnecessary catalogs. We get them all the time--circulars from stores like Best Buy or KMart, or catalogs from stores we're not interested in. Just cancel them.
f.) If you drive a lot, get a more fuel-efficient car. You don't need a huge Toyota Tundra if you have one kid and live in the suburbs.
g.) For light bulbs you use often (like patio lights, kitchen lights, bathroom lights), use those long-life, energy-saving bulbs. It'll save you money, anyway.
h.) Keep your air conditioner on a schedule to be off while you're at work or out of the house.
i.) Turn off the lights when you leave a room.

None of that is difficult or infringes upon your lifestyle. In fact, all of them save you money anyway, so even if you don't care about the environment, then it's good for the wallet. You don't have to be a hippie and buy a house made of clay and eat only what you grow and walk everywhere. If you just make a few very minor changes, you'll save the planet from a HUGE amount of wasted resources. I do everything in the above (except c, because it's not currently an option), and it's NOT hard.

That's all this is really about. The overall message: quit being wasteful. Not the little details.

 

[Samboy]

You forgot all electrical appliances... apparently (I heard somewhere) that leaving an LCD TV on standby uses basically the same amount of power than when it is on. That is a helluva lot of power... just turn them off (at the wall) when you're not using them, to make sure it cannot use power. At all.

 

[Ellie]

Cows farting doesn't let off CO2, it lets of Methane. Still a greenhouse gas, and still one of the major problems though. Just like paddy fields (rice) output a lot of CO2 (especially bad since rice is the major food source of the world), and Quorn crops (yes, vegetarians are harming the environment) - but not as much as herding cattle would harm the enviro.

Plus of course, to raise cattle, grow rice, produce Quorn plantations, you have to first find a field. And guess how they do it... they cut down rainforests. Not even that, most of the time they just burn it, rather than re-use the wood.

I try to use those "bag for life" things where possible. (Basically, supermarkets sell tougher plastic bags for like 10p, which you are supposed to reuse. But they still auto-pack your stuff in cheap bags anyway, so it doesn't make much difference... no matter how many times you tell them I already got a bag".)

I also plan to buy a private jet and fly everywhere, so that I'll have absolutely no carbon footprint. Ok, lame joke.

 

[Venetia]

At supermarket/grocery stores it's hard to use canvas bags, especially when you're buying everything for the week in one shot like I do. But all you have to do is stuff all those bags in one of the bags and throw it in the bag recycling bin. They always keep them toward the front of the store, near the carts. If you mostly visit small shops, then just hold onto the bags to use them for various things (like when picking up dog poop, or use it as a small trash bin liner, or as a lunch bag, or as padding in a fragile package, or to put leaky things into on trips), and then take them with you on a trip to Walmart or some big place.

I forgot about the appliances thing. A lot of people keep their refrigerators/freezers too cold. Try knocking it down a notch. Use a toaster oven for little re-heats instead of a full conventional oven. Turn off your power (at the circuit breakers) if you're going to be taking a long vacation. Put some insulation or sealant/caulk around the outer window frames of your home, or put a full-length rubber stopper on the Sliding Glass Doors to conserve heat/air conditioning. Put curtains/blinds on the windows for the summer. Seriously, this stuff saves me like $100 every month.

There're lots of non-annoying ways to conserve

 

[Astromech]

I'm not too sure about Global Warming really being influenced much by humans, but I am all for cutting back on energy use. There's nothing really bad about it -- global warming true or not. It saves you money in the long run while helping the environment. But about this tip:

h.) Keep your air conditioner on a schedule to be off while you're at work or out of the house.

I have heard this actually increases the amount of work your AC does since it must cool down your whole house at once when you start it up again, instead of turning on in small bursts to keep your house at the same temperature. Maybe it only applies to hot and humid places like where I live, Houston. Has anyone else heard this? Or is it just a myth.

 

[sixtyandaquarter]

You should not have your air conditioner cooling off your entire house, for one.
If you have your air on you should generally be in one area.  The room with the air on.  If you have doors in that room, shut them, and if not tack up some winter sheets.

The winter sheets will not allow the air to exit and your air conditioner if put on energy saver will read the room at the set degree, and will turn off.  It will turn on again when needed.  I do this and it's often only turning on for two minutes every twenty if that, and keeps the room nice and cool.

If you have to be in a larger area, let's say two rooms.  Do the same, but when the air powers down, open untack the sheets or open the doors.  Make sure to tack up the sheet if needed and close doors in the second room.

And if you are going to have windows open and you are going to use a window fan, point it out the window, not in.  Hot air moves higher and easier, while the breeze might feel nice your house is in shade technically, and still air will be colder inside than outside. Blowing the fan inwards invites hot air, while blowing it out the window leads to temperature drops in the immediate area more effectively.

 

[Astromech]

I do do those things. I guess my post is a little confusing, but I was mostly wondering about manually turning your AC off while not at home, which I have always heard is a bad idea. I take it from your message it is just a myth though. Thanks!

 

[$t3v0]

I'll just live my life the way I've always lived my life. Recycling is just about all I do.

We live in an age were we simply CANNOT prevent this inevitable change in climate from happening. Sure, we can slow it down and drag a few years out of it for the benefit of our futures, but we certainly can't stop it.

We're an evolved race and we create harmful substances that are causing these problems. Take everything away that DOES cause global warming and we'd be taking a step down in evolution. Can we not just fire a missile at something? That always seems to be a good method.

One final thing is the sudden popularity with celebrity shout outs regarding global warming. When I see Justin Timberlake TELLING me to turn off my TV when I'm not using it, It makes me want to leave it on. Sure, that's absolutely, rediculously, sickeningly, shockingly sad ... but who gives a shit.

Propaganda from celebrities never makes me think differently than if any Tom, Dick or Harry was telling me the same thing. I can fucking guarantee that most have just a big of carbon footprint as anyone else. All you have to do is watch Cribs! A flat panel LCD 50" TV in every room, Cars that stick the finger up to ANY form of preventation to global warming and other pointless gadgets that don't do the planet any justice at all. This is kind of contradicting what I said above, but the point I'm making is on a different key.

 

[Junk-Man]

The earth is a lot tougher than the enviromentalists would have you believe.  If it weren't, then we wouldn't be sitting at our computers typing right now.  Back in the age of the dinosaurs, it was actually hotter than it is today.

 

[___]

The earth was much different back then in many ways besides climate, and we could not have survived in it for more reasons than fear of giant predatory reptiles, any more than they could survive in our current climate.  It's not a matter of whether we'll completely wipe out all life on Earth.  I believe that's probably impossible in any scenario except perhaps throwing it out of orbit somehow and plunging it into the sun (even in deep space I imagine some microbial life would find a way to survive for a very long time).
It's a matter of whether we'll render it inhospitable to ourselves, or to the growing number of species that have been our evolutionary companions for millions of years, with which we are more interdependent than we would like to believe.  Or whether, in the likely circumstance in which we do cause moderate to severe changes but persist through them, we will be able to preserve all the comforts and excesses of modern civilization.

 

[Samboy]

To be honest, however... why does it really matter? I mean, this global warming thing. Wouldn't it be pretty cool to see what happens when the Polar ice caps (supposedly) melt? I'm all for recycling and all that, and turning off things. But that's because of fossil fuels, not because the ozone's gonna fuck up and we're all gonna die.

Go on, hit me.

 

[Yoshine]

hahaha I piss of alot of hippies don't I!

 

[mawk]

That a point of pride, or are you hanging your head in shame? The world needs more hippies. Making it hard on them isn't a good thing.

You people who enjoy being belligerent on the unconventional side of arguments just for the sake of being belligerent on the unconventional side of arguments are a mystery to me. I like to have my viewpoint challenged, it helps refine my knowledge. But people who challenge things based not on fact or love of proper debate but instead a need to pull people's chains are doing this for all the wrong reasons, in my honest opinion.

Moving back on topic, I hope eventually we find some ecologically sound way to remove carbon from the atmosphere in great volumes. Like scrubbers that work on the atmosphere instead of industrial exhaust. While it wouldn't stop people from being wasteful douchebags, at least we'd be able to avoid destroying most of the planet.

 

[Faeroe]

Nah, I don't think Global Warming itself is a real major threat, but, I believe the real pressing issue here is the air quality.  Where I live, the most common form of disease is respiratory; mainly because of the pollutants and carbons plauging the air.

 

[Venetia]

Screw global warming. You won't see the full effects in your lifetime, so fuck it entirely, up and down, on the bed, on the hammock, in the kitchen. Forget global warming.

Pollution affects us right now.

The air, the water, the sea, the land. Especially around big cities, it's like living in a noxious cloud where you can only drink the bottled water because the tap water'll give you who-knows-what.

I lived in Los Angeles as a kid. (Yes, I know, I've lived all over in a number of states. Texas, Kentucky, Arizona, California, Florida.)

There were these things off the coast, you could see them plainly if you stood on the beach. We called them the "Oil Islands". They were basically that: refineries and such located on man-made islands and rigs about a mile or more off the coast of Long Beach. Every day around 3, the tide would turn blood red. I'm not even shitting you, I wish I was. Sometimes it was rust-colored, sometimes it was bright red. Nothing lived around there, no dolphins, no fish, not even sand crabs. Birds even avoided the area. If you stepped into the Red Tide, your flesh would break out in hives like you wouldn't believe. It was disgusting, and smelled like oil and vomit and death. The Oil Islands pumped out smog constantly. Rising grey stacks, plumbs of smoke. The oil folks said it was "steam". What kind of steam looks purple at dawn?

(Don't believe me? Here's a satellite image. I lived just one block inland from the beach in a POS, ghetto motel that had been converted into a POS, ghetto apartment building.)

The purple clouds, I nearly forgot. If you're ever driving across the 210, coming down from Alta Dena, and you pass these bluffs overlooking L.A., and it's morning, you'll see the strangest, ugliest thing in your life. It's like ... A cloud is sitting on Los Angeles. It's not fog, though. It's purple. Not lavender, but a greyish, darkish purple. It stagnates over the city until the noonday sun burns it off.

Every year or so, clean-up crews have to re-paint buildings in nicer areas, because the paint literally burns off. Acid rain. My dad worked downtown, and within a year, all the paint on the roof of his new Audi had burned down to the primer.

Oxygen bars became popular down there in the 90's. Why pay for oxygen? Because you can't breathe it otherwise!

The water from the tap sometimes runs BROWN. Like, someone just ate 40 tacos and had the Hershey Squirts--brown-brown. Tastes like a penny that's been sitting on the sidewalk. Freaking horrible.

Along with hotdog vendors and sunglasses vendors, there are vendors selling eye drops, because it'll burn your eyes on some days if you're a tourist.

Good lord, the lot of that county is the wart on the ass of America. It's so incredibly disgusting, I can't believe it. I think it's as bad as it is because it's in a valley, but if you want to see the effects of pollution, take a stroll down to the ghettos of Long Beach or downtown L.A. sometime.

It makes me sad when I hear some people say pollution isn't a problem.

San Diego is gorgeous, though :P

 

[___]

There already are carbon scrubbers, they've been around for millions of years.  There's two problems with them, though:  first off, you can't destroy carbon, you can only move it around (well, technically you can at the atomic level with huge amounts of energy), and we've been really busy for the past 200 years finding ways to move it back into the air.  The second problem is that we have this funny habit of destroying the carbon scrubbers en masse for stupid reasons.
Anyways I know that was kind of a childish way of putting all that, but I guess my point is: why try to replace a system perfected over millions of years with something less effective.  Even expressed in terms of pure profit/loss I can't help but think it'd be a lot more expensive in terms of money, manpower, and politics to develop and deploy that kind of technology than it would be to simply stop behaving like spoiled children in regards to the one already in place.

Oh, thanks for that vivid image of the cancer that is L.A.  As bad as it is down there, Bakersfield and the whole southern San Joaquin valley is even worse, in terms of air pollution.  L.A. has done a lot to clean up its act over the past decade, but the blight is has created goes far beyond the visible boundaries of the city.  The whole Mojave desert is literally dying off because L.A. is syphoning off its water supply.  When I was a kid I lived out there; there used to be all kinds of wildlife.  Lizards of all varieties, ground squirrels, all kinds of different birds.  We'd go out catching them, sometimes bring in literally buckets full of animals (we usually let them go at the end of the day or after a few days of showing them off, they didn't like to eat in captivity). 

Thanks in part to depletion of the aquafiers due to Los Angeles sapping all the water at the source, the plant and small insect life that supported those animals is slowly disappearing.  The whole ecosystem is falling apart, and where there was once a fragile structure of life it's all slowly going to sand and complete desolation.  You'd be lucky to find half the species of reptile out there now, only 20 years later, or even sight some of the ones that are rare now but used to be plentiful enough that we'd spot them by the dozen in a day out in the desert.

Besides that, the dust itself has gone toxic in some places due to massive amounts of waste dumping done there back in the 40s and 50s by the U.S. government.  There are three distinct kinds of cancer found only in the valley I used to live in for instance due to the toxicity of the dust that blows in during the frequent severe wind storms.

The Salton Sea is another example of the ecological disaster that SoCal is slowly becoming.  The whole area is literally poisoned.  Somewhat tangentally, some "futurists" theorize that eventually we'll actually adapt to the poisoned environment we're creating, become some sort of post-human species with actual evolutionary dependency on our technology and the waste it produces.  Won't that be interesting to see.

 

[sixtyandaquarter]

If anyone wants to say pollution doesn't effect us now, I'd recommend researching the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island New York.  Formerly the largest landfill in the world, at 2200 acres (890 hectares), it has raised the cancer rate for Staten Islanders by an estimated 20% increase.
Oh, but that's not pollution because it's a landfill.  I've heard that argument before, and don't insult your intelligence by trying to say it.

 

[Samboy]

Screw global warming. You won't see the full effects in your lifetime, so fuck it entirely, up and down, on the bed, on the hammock, in the kitchen. Forget global warming.

Wow. I... um, well... OK then.

I've heard this from a friend recently, and we discussed the possibility of making AIDS airborne. How many would that kill? At least everybody in the country, we guessed. Until it traveled overseas, screwed a few more people and then there we go. Another country wiped out.

Global warming is nothing compared to the viruses that may/will be available in a few years time. Think of all the viruses we have now, think of how many injections we need to get in our life. How did they survive before injections? Go figure.

So yes, don't worry about Global warming. There are worse things ahead of us. We'll all be dead by 3000. I promise you.