What do YOU think?

With more and more people becoming aware of global warming, Do you think there is actually a chance that we could survive this and make the earth balanced again?

 

I think that we done screwed things up for generations to come, hopefully our children will be able to assess the problem and fix it.

 

We cannot bring the earth into balance. We can only put it out of balance. (key word of the day: homeostatious. I probably spelled that wrong) The most people can do is limit their effect in creating a disequilibrium of energy flows.

 

If we are able to pass on our awareness onto the future generations, then maybe.

 

I think the current media hype and political concern about global warming is just that. Hype, and it makes me suspicious as to the motives for pushing it to the fear level.

Mother Nature will win out, she always does.

You now have one more thing you are afraid of, something else that can be used to manipulate your lives.

 

I think we could stop the problem if people actually gave a shit.

If people stopped driving their huge trucks (when they don't NEED a huge truck.. I can understand if you need it for business purposes or something), if people stopped using lawn mowers so much, if people got off their fat asses and walked or rode a bike somewhere instead of drove, then yeah maybe. But are people gonna stop doing that? I don't know. Those people are idiots!

They should stop SELLING those things. They have to stop making huge trucks. I have to put that bumper sticker on my car that says "Nice Truck, sorry about your penis." (Yes I'm one of those people that thinks I can change things with bumper stickers.)
The government needs to do something about it but unless we get some environmentalists its not gonna happen.

 

I walk or carpool everywhere I go in MT, I will NEVER drive a car until I find an affordable environmently safe fuel....

 

The earth is a complex dynamic system. For the greater part of its 5.5 billion year life span was inhospitably harsh offering provious for no life form. Reason being: the whole damn thing was covered by pools of molten iron that spouted sulfuric gas into the proto-atmosphere. Just as the earth's inner core (the cause of the magnetic feild, which protects the earth's atmosphere from total dipersion by the radioactive solar winds) is currently molten liquid flows. Over hundreds of millions of years this comic fire ball cooled down. It was struck by extra terestrial bodies containing water in the form of ice. Warm sink holes which would become the oceans offered the perfect environment for the chemical reactions essential to creating amino acids from simple proteins. Amino Acids, being the basic building blocks of life, constitued the first simple organism. The organism that made it possible for the exisdtence of life as we know. These unicellular bacterium motablized the sulfur laden air, converted it to energy and released as a by product carbon dioxide and oxygen. These two gases, although not the primary constituents of the atmosphere (Nitrogen is something like 70% of the air), are key to the evolution of the biosphere as we know it.

What the hell was my point in this short story that lasted 5.5 billion years? What the hell does it have to do with the response to my original statement?

I went through all that shit to demonstarte that all celestial bodies are subject to their environments. Both the environment in which creates and provides the means for it to persist and the environment which is internal or terestrial. Latter is permenantly engaging the planet in a feedback mechanism whereby changes in one thing effect changes in another and so on you get the point. This internal environment and its characteristic feedback mechanism is incapable of effecting the external environment (or the greater solar system, universe, whatever,). However, the external environment, being the beginning point of all matter and energy can surely effect the internal environment and of cousre is the reason life exists on earth or anywhere else (if it can be found). Human beings have the profound ability to relentlessly consume goods produced using energy intensive methods. In doing so, we are athropogenically (some would legitimatly argue that people and their devices are natural, Personally i disagree) altering the chemical composition of the earths faculties. These alterations are in essence human supported energy flows. When we stop this business the earth like any other natural system will reach its lowest possible energy state.

Thats what I was refering to by homeostasis. The natural process of acheiving equilibrium invoving inputs and outputs. In this case energy and its various elemental forms. Now, I am not trying to say that a new equilibrium will look anything like earth we know and love. It would likely resemble Vensus in atmospheric compostion... No life no chance for life. But the point remains.

responses please.

and no I do not think we should destroy the earth. If that is what you got out of this, I apoligize to myself for wasting time.

 

there's possibly, hopefully, a chance. and no, it isn't media hype. if anything, the media pets of the corporatocracy, part and parcel of it themselves, have been hyping, until VERY recently, the ignore it and maybe it will go way idiocity.

the use of combustion to generate energy and propell transportation really is threating the entire web of life with overloading nature's cycles of renewal. a big part of the problem is how many of us there are, in proportion to other species and their neccessary habitats and ecological niches.

if there were maybe a 20th as many of us as there are or less, we could probably all get away with driving suv's and spraying ddt indiscriminately. but there arn't 1/20th. there's as many of us as there are, and that number keeps growing, and not just growing by dribbles and drabs, but nearly expotentialy.

this is why every 20 years or so, what was introduced then to replace what existed before because it was safer for the invironment, has to be replaced by something even safer, and often, less effective for its intended purpose.

so population IS a BIG part of it. but so is the other end of it. how that population lives and how that way of life affects everything, including weather patterns and ultimately the web of life itself, which IS by the way, where every molicule of the oxygen in the air you need to breathe to stay alive comes from.

thus no web of life no humans.

and the whole thing is, all this comfort zone we've become so emotionaly attatched to, we DON'T have to give up and go back to some sort of dreary 'primative' existence. although i also know from first hand experience, that the drugery of it, is what truely IS being overhyped. believe me, you COULD survive, and quite happily and graifyingly without television and credit cards, suv's and cell phones, even this internet, though this at least is redeamingly useful.

so there's two things mainly, besides population itself, that are the cause of the problem and offer fairly streight forward and simi-obvious solutions to it.

transportation and electricty, the later often euphamisticly refered to as "energy". yes i do that myself as it seems to have become the convention of the language.

well wind solar and hydro are proven tecnologies that don't dump carbon and don't have the problems of nuclear and the pie in the sky of hydrogen, the latter may become a useful part of the solution at some future time, but waiting for it to we don't need.

alternative fuels are still fuels and that means burning and that means still dumping carbon, so that isn't a real solution, though they may have their place for home heating and cooking.

if the wind,solar,hydro combination doesn't produce as much 'energy' as cheeply as oil, which, incase anyone's forgotten, WILL run out at some point, none the less DISTRIBUTED use of them, i.e. shingling EVERY roof with photovoltics, bristling every hilltop with windmills, equiping EVERY dam with hydrogenerators (you'd be surprised how many arn't and wouldbe,couldbe, shouldbe!) is certain to be sufficient to provide the essentials: a refrigerator, enough for a small computer and internet connection, and to recharge the energy storage mechanisms on board small form factor, guideway based public transportation.

and that latter can, and at some point may have to, satisfy whatever real demand remains for mechanical transportation other then human or animal powered and other then where population densities really are too low to support it (which is a hell of a lot lower then most people immagine, and WAY lower then where MOST people these days actualy live!).

and if you live in a place where there is any kind of public transportation that you CAN use, then for gosh sakes and by all means USE and SUPPORT it!

(and likewise if you really MUST drive, i mean nothing wrong with the occasional weekend road trip, but i mean like part of your everyday shopping or commute to work, then again for gosh sake get something that consumes a MINIMUM of whatever kind of fuel it runs on. consdier two wheels instead of four. WAAAY better fuel milage there. or electric; i.e. stored energy of some kind, or even hybred, although i consider the latter over rated as well as over priced. but the point here is, no matter how clean a car can be made, that's still no sort of a long term solution becuse you've still got signifigant habitat loss for roads to drive them on and places to park. and yes, guideway based systems do consume a LOT less of it, in addition to being generaly far more energy efficient as well)

which is where my dream of little people sized "trains" comes in. not everyone is going to like that solution i know. i get flack every time i mention it. mostly with people who were born emotionaly attatched to the automobile and lack the sense to immagine anything else.

but eventualy, if we're still arround as a species, when the oil finaly and actualy does 'run out', i think the'll find the concept beats the hell out of walking, which that, or human powered, i.e. bicycle level tecnology, or horses/critters are what will remain as options. and that last, going back to beasts of burden is improbable unless population levels, and thus densities, signifigantly diminish, however romantic some might otherwise find the proposition.

as fur nuclear, and all the other schemes to keep the generation of energy centralized and in the fewest possible fattest hands, well that box of thinking is part of the problem too. maybe the biggest and most fundimental part of it.

so instead of everyone driving a car and CONSUMING energy, everyone generating and shairing energy, and wherever possible riding small form factor shaired transportation and living in small, inexpensive to heat and cool houses, are a neccessry future, who'se only alternative, if we adamantly retain our emotional attatchment to our wasteful ambient assumptions, may be for there to no longer be an us, when there is no longer sufficient diversity of life for there to be sufficient vegitation to turn enough of that co2 back into o2 and the biopolymers of their own cellular structure, for us to continue breathing and thus the web of at least animate life, to continue to exist.

and weather pattern chainge isn't the only problem with a very real potential thermal runnaway scenario either. what it is though, is, among other things a real cannary in the coal mine, that we are screwing up and we'd better wise up.

and really there's no other obstical to that up-wising then the politics of emotional attatchment to familiar assumptions and the vested interest of the few who get fat, at the expense of the rest of us, off of them.

=^^=
.../\...

 

It may be possible, but the greatest opposing force that we face is the fact that our economic system is set up in a way that promotes, need, and succeeds with an increase in manufacturing and comsumption. The economic system of this world is a beast. Even though, I have no alternative as an answer except for living a tribal/clan lifestyle of gathering. The world population is too large to survive on just gathering without food production, so instead of commercial agriculture, horticluture (gardens) should be promoted with permaculture principles.