Global warming is it really happening

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by some_guy01, Oct 5, 2001.

Page 15 of 17
  1. fireguy_31

    fireguy_31 mors ante servitium Registered Senior Member

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    Okay.....


    I disagree Edufer, I would suggest this methodology is, and has been, exclusive to traditional scientific method. You made reference to "statistical twisting" several times throughout your argument, basing many of your assertions on this claim. Well, that is why statistical information is gathered in the first place, to prove or disprove anything whatever. So yeah, twisting statistics is no more an oxymoron then the phrase running fast.. That is it's purpose, any entry level statistics course will teach you that. So, discrediting Tuxil and Brights book through this discourse oozes hypocracy and is misleading.


    The same web site you provided, to my amusement, also provides statistical proof of dramatic increases of CO2 emissions in our atmosphere since the modern era began. A DIRECT correlation has been made between the advent of asthma in developing lungs and CO2 emissions, so don't bother arguing it... I'll offer the "Human Experience" in support of what I claimed earlier. As I sit here writing this, in my inner-city appartment, vehicles are continually driving past. I can hear and see them day and night. Now, knowing there is a correlation between CO2 emissions and asthma I would presume raising a child, with developing lungs, in this area would dramatically increase their chance of developing asthma, because of the high traffic volume and the CO2 emissions they produce. Now i know this claim is not a scientifically proven fact but, as I suggested earlier, it is common sensical and a result of the human experience.. Believe me, the human experience IS valuable!

    As far as sustainability goes I am in support of it. 100%. The multi-billion dollar question is, "what does sustainability mean?" Allow me to propose my position on this definition debate. First of all i will refer to sustainability within the context of natural resource extraction. With that said, my belief is that EVERYONE has a right to participate collectively in making decissions regarding resource exploitation. After all, it DOES affect EVERYONE! I am disgusted that, at present time, decissions regarding resource extraction are unilaterally made through economic considerations without public input. Do we not have a right to participate in decissions that concern our natural environment? Consider this; the NRA in the USA has successfully lobbied for the rights of gun owners. Whether or not you agree with their efforts is immaterial, the point is people are provided an avenue to exercise their democratic right. It's funny that when people like me speak out against environmental destruction we are classified as granola eating tree huggers who don't understand the issues but, when a person who owns a machine gun speaks out we say it is their democratic right to do so..Don't you think our natural world deserves that same scruitiny? Or are people afraid of the human experience?

    I got one question, these millions of variables you speak of, and to some extent science has placed a lot of faith in them, can they be proven to exist, and better yet can they handle the increase of pollutants caused by human activity? I may be out of date on this subject but as recently as two years ago I researched that exact topic, and I found that it is a very misunderstood theory.. That theory is exactly that, theoretical. I don't know about you but I am not willing to place the health of the planet on some unproven theory. Especially since we regard these processes as naturally occuring, and the pollutants they must deal with are, for the most part, non-natural occuring. Again, common sense!

    Okay, you have a good point there. I will concede that I have appeared to be very anti-science up until this point. Let me say for the record that I am not anti-science.. I can't be, otherwise my comfortable existence would be conducted in vein.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    But I would NEVER go so far and say that knowledge equals science, or vise versa. To demonstrate this I will provide a scenario that is derrived from both the human experience and anthropology.(not science)

    Aboriginal Peoples have existed, and continue to exist, for more than 3,000 years. They have done so without any traditional modern or antiquated scientific influence. Everything they knew -- I say knew to mean traditional -- was through experience. And they thrived for thousand of years until incursion, where the popular scientific community viewed them as savages and inept.

    Our own society, which has been dominated by scientific review and discovery, is barely 150 years old and the issues we face are grave in nature, for all mankind.(Arguably some of those issues are naturally occuring, but equally some are the result of human activity through scientific discovery) I think we could learn something from a society that didn't place a lot of stock on scientific method and relied instead on the Human Experience. Can you see the irony?

    All I'm saying is that human experience is valuable and should be taken into account when decisions and actions are made with regards to our natural world.. Don't you agree?


    P.S.
    Fraggle, yes I am extremely patient and aware of everything I say. Maybe that virtue and awareness is something you should put into practice.

    Oh yeah, MARS = EARTH! lol Come on guys, I've heard better theories in support of your argument from mediocre minds.. There are a lot of variables with that argument which you conveniently ignore, and you know it!

    PSS
    I think this debate is actually going somewhere. Thanks Edufer!
     
    fireguy_31, Mar 15, 2003
    #281

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  3. fireguy_31

    fireguy_31 mors ante servitium Registered Senior Member

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    I made a false statement....

    Sorry, gun ownership is not a democratic right, but rather an entrenched right provided by the US Bill of Rights.
     
    fireguy_31, Mar 15, 2003
    #282

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  5. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Statistics and Solar Flares

    Hopefully, entry level statistics courses come with some grain of ethics, although considering the state of our largely government-sponsored education industry, that is a stretch. In my class 40 years ago they spent quite a bit of time teaching us to recognize the various ways that statistics could be juggled to support fraud (the manipulation of another's behavior, intentions or beliefs by lying). And also a fair amount of time instilling in us a sense of honor and responsibility so that most of us would not do that and would rat out those who did. Judging from the exploits of recent business school graduates I guess I don't have to ask if they still teach it that way.
    Well then you should join the libertarian movement. We maintain that most of the resource issues such as clean air and water can be quite properly sorted out using existing tort and easement law. The problem is that like the Constitution itself, the government conveniently ignores any legal principles that don't serve its own purpose of securing complete control over every aspect of our lives in order to maximize the profits of their corporate campaign donors.
    As I say, you sound like a libertarian who just never knew there was a community to belong to. The corporation is a convenient creation of the government, to replace the outmoded concept of aristocracy. These "artificial persons," as many law texts refer to them, cannot be effectively governed by their creators because many of them are as rich and powerful as a large city. The entire concept of a "free market" assumes a relatively level playing field of suppliers and consumers of approximately equal power. The whole model breaks down when workers have to form their own corporations (unions) in order to negotiate a living wage. There is no way that our current economic/political model can be expected to serve the interests of the average citizen when it comes to environmental issues. It has been carefully constructed to consolidate the supremacy of corporations.
    Aren't you missing a zero or two there, or are you using "aboriginal" to mean something other than "neolithic?"
    "Thrived?" Most people lump the Mayas in with all the other "aboriginal" pre-Columbian peoples of the New World, even though their villages had grown to the size of the earliest cities and they had primitive metallurgy. They killed off their own hopes of becoming a true "civilization" by cutting down their forests and running out of building materials.

    There is another thread on SciForums about mammoths, but the gist of it is that there is fair support for the theory that "aboriginal" humans destroyed their own food supply by killing off the megafauna that survived the ending of the ice age. They were by definition too big to be killed by other predators and there isn't a lot of evidence for any other cause of death.
    I think that science has occupied its place as a motif in our culture since the Enlightenment, but that's just arguing over details. What matters is that whether our problems are the direct result of science, mistakes made by people who haven't quite learned how to use science wisely, or just bad luck because Mother Earth has been in a bad mood for a few decades, science and scientists are rising to the challenge and doing their part to solve the problems.

    The science of economics has recently provided the startling revelation that birthrates DECLINE as prosperity increases. Even in the Third World, where per capita GDP has risen from ten dollars to several hundred, the typical family size has fallen from ten or fifteen to only six or eight. Another science, cybernetics, makes it possible for those countries to jump from the Stone Age into the Information Age without having to first go through the Indstrial Revolution, spend trillions of dollars they don't have on the construction of factories, foul their air and water, and work their children like draft animals.

    The last time I taught a class in software project management, 75% of the IT shops in the world that had attained SEI CMM Level 5 were in India. (If that's gobbledygook, all you need to understand is that only a few DoD contractors have reached Level 3 and that Microsoft-quality software is typical of Level One.)
    I'm patient enough to hand-raise a baby parrot from an egg. I just didn't feel like searching through 15 pages of this thread for my last post. Perhaps I just haven't mastered the SciForums toolset.
    Why do you keep ignoring the specific issue here? Mars does have ice caps. Mars's ice caps are receding. Mars doesn't have a human population. Therefore global warming can occur without human activity. The variance in the sun's energy output, which could not be measured accurately until recently, seems intuitively to be a major factor. Perhaps it also is on Earth. There's nothing remarkable about that line of reasoning.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Mar 15, 2003
    #283

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  7. fireguy_31

    fireguy_31 mors ante servitium Registered Senior Member

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    The Crux....

    Thank-you for staying with the topic and presenting some interesting points Fraggle. I think this thread will now deal with the crux of the issue.

    *As I Chuckle*
    I read with some humor your statement;



    You are probably right on the mark with that statement. I have been called a socialist, Marxist(That I am), leftist, bleeding heart liberal, an environmentalist(my personal favorite), and even a Nazi in another thread. I would like more information about this movement, because it sounds like a fantastic place!

    As I read your response I agreed with the majority of what you said;

    You got my cynacism and I applaud you for that.. The only thing I was taught in stats. was that I could prove anything I wanted to through statistical analysis, all you have to do is manipulate the question..

    I do, however, call into question the assertion that;

    As you well know Tort and Easement Law deal with the issues reactively, I believe a pro-active approach is required.

    I agree that our current society does not accommodate issues from average citizens, but that does not mean I am a defeatist either. I TRULY believe in democracy and that a collective public voice will reign supreme in the face of political and/or economic desires. My feeling is that apathy plagues mankind at the moment and we are oblivious to the real issues that need real attention and real action.

    In regards to my reference to Aboriginal Peoples I was speaking about North American Indians. I'm sorry, I should have been clearer on that point. And yes, they thrived!!! That is until incursion. It appears that not only is our modern western society environmentally destructive but also culturally destructive as well.

    Okay, now its getting good!!!
    Your assertions, albeit true, are void of other variables. First I refuse to use GDP as a measurement of economic well-being becuase military spending and clean-up expenditures are factored in.. The GDP of the US will definately rise this year because of military action in Iraq, but would you say the economic health of the US is better because of it?? Hardly.. I propose another more realistic indicator; the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) You can find info. at http://www.rprogress.org.

    A problem with the belief that the future of developing countries is economically bright is that there isn't enough wealth to go around, the earths carrying capacity is proof of that. The Nation with the highest ecological footprint in the world is bestowed upon Americans at 9.6 ha/person. The lowest is Bangledesh, at 0.6 ha/person. The world average, in 1995, was at -0.3 ha/person. Not a great disparity but one that does require some real attention. Now, for Bangledeshi's to enjoy the same wealth and luxuries that Americans do the Earth would have to grow to 10 times its present size to accommodate the added resource pressure. Look around your household, absolutrely every single possession you have was derived from the generosity of the Earth, nothing comes out of thin air. You see, there is absolutely no hope for third world countries, even if their populations do decrease because the Earths carrying capacity is already working in the red. Unless, you me and every other person in N.America agrees to give up some of our luxuries.. Yeah, like that's gonna happen, just ask any SUV driving yuppie to give up that SUV b/c it is wastefull, and you'll see the greed that is in us all. Besides, George Bush would invade any country that poses a threat to the American way of life.

    It lacks variables such as the atmosphere of earth, the heat generated by the earth and its causes, it doesn't take into account that Mars is on a completely different orbit around the sun and what effects that has, we don't know how long the ice caps on Mars have been there or how long the caps have been melting, if they always have been, and if not why are they, it assumes that the absence of life is good for a planet(remember everything is in balance), and so on and so on.... C'mon, your testing me aren't you?

    To figure out your eco-footprint go to http://www.wwfcanada.org/footprints/web_of_life.htm
     
    fireguy_31, Mar 15, 2003
    #284
  8. fireguy_31

    fireguy_31 mors ante servitium Registered Senior Member

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    667
    fireguy_31, Mar 15, 2003
    #285
  9. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    The Paradigm Shift is real and far-reaching

    For starters just search SciForums for “libertarian.” I have posted the essence of the philosophy in a couple of places.
    Pretty much everything an authoritarian (the total opposite of libertarian) government does is reactive. Most of the laws and regulations don’t come into play until someone violates them. The only exceptions are to serve their own despotic purposes, such as shooting religious wackos or confiscating medical marijuana. Do you think the reason for this might be that ONLY the government feels much of an interest in enforcing its own flagrantly unconstitutional set of laws? If laws reflected the consensus of the citizenry, the citizenry would be more proactive about preventing, rather than punishing, violations. A nation with an incarceration rate that rivals the cesspools of history – the USSR, the Mao Dynasty, Apartheid-era South Africa – obviously uses laws to intimidate rather than to serve its people.
    That will only happen in one of four ways.

    1. The bureaucrats who staff The Employer Of Last Resort and their “elected” bosses wake up one morning with a conscience. Ha ha, I guess there are only three ways.
    2. The electorate wakes up one morning and remembers that we have a Constitution, and starts using the primary process to get candidates on the ballot who pledge to bring it out of retirement. If they keep throwing more of us in jail that could very well happen.
    3. The huge minority of the population who have been severely harmed by the government’s misdeeds take up arms against it. The government’s own fear of that scenario, as manifested in its push to reduce the quantity, power, and secrecy of privately owned weapons, suggests that this is not as unlikely to occur nor as unlikely to succeed as you’d think.
    4. The libertarian movement and Party gain strength. It won't take much. The Socialist Party never won a major election in America, yet their entire 1920 platform was eventually adopted by both the Republicans and Democrats, in order to keep them from becoming strong enough to threaten the comfortable duopoly.

    It certainly plagues mankind in the USA. As I said, 70 years of authoritarian government disguising itself as a concerned, benevolent, but autocratic uncle, can do that to a people. Especially once it gets its hands on the education and communication industries.
    Your numbers are still way off and I’m not just being pedantic, I think it makes a big difference. The Amerinds, whose descendants created all of the New World’s true civilizations, have been here since about 13,000 BCE. The Na-Dene, who populate the western U.S. and southwestern Canada and never entered the Bronze Age, arrived in 4,000 BCE. The Eskimo-Aleuts came over in 2,000 BCE. The civilizations that sprang up south of the Rio Grande took most of the wrong turns that our own ancestors did, without their help. Slavery, despotism, lack of concern for the environment, conquest and humiliation of their pre-civilized neighbors.
    They “thrived” in exactly the same way the European invaders “thrived.” They hiked across the Bering Land Bridge into a world that was un- or under-populated (depending on which wave we’re talking about), and was full of unexploited resources waiting to be exploited. Without modern medicine, their high infant mortality rate kept the population from exploding so they were able to prosper as hunter-gatherers for millennia. As I recall, the pre-Columbian population of what is now the US and Canada was around one million. Even the Aztec and Inca civilizations that the Europeans encountered had still not discovered the basic principles of aseptic surgery and public health, so their very slowly growing populations were still able to live off of the sweat of the farmers they conquered, whose largest domesticated animal north of the Andes was the turkey.

    Rather than “thriving,” they were simply using up the resources that were here because no previous humans had exploited them. Given a couple thousand more years and they would undoubtedly have repeated the follies of the Mesopotamians and North Africans, turning farmland into desert. We Euro-Americans are “thriving” on the land we confiscated from them despite a population 2 ½ orders of magnitude larger, simply because we have more thorough ways of depleting resources than they did.
    No. But if you use Toffler’s adjustment factor, which includes goods and services that people produce for their own consumption, the post-industrial economy is improving the lot of the inhabitants in many developing countries. The ability of Uruguayan women’s cooperatives to get their dolls and other crafts into NYC boutiques via Internet commerce, without passing through the hands of five middlemen who extract most of the profits, is a typical example. Cellular telephony, which does not require first building a collossal infrastructure of transcontinental wiring, is another. Offshore outsourcing of software development to Pakistan and Estonia is yet another. Don’t underestimate the positive impact of the Paradigm Shift.
    Sorry, I couldn’t get there from their web page. Perhaps it’s the inadequacy of my quintagenarian’s navigation skills. But you’re hardly going to impress a libertarian by citing the World Wildlife Fund as an authority. They have an axe to grind almost as big as the government’s. This is one of the many green=red outfits that refuses to take the Hyacinth Macaw or the Palm Cockatoo off their Most Highly Endangered Species List, because to do so would acknowledge the fact that private enterprise (commerical aviaries) creates huge numbers of these birds every year.
    Once again, you’re lagging behind the Paradigm Shift, using an Industrial Era definition of “wealth.” The “wealth” of our era can be created by pushing a button, using no resources except a few microwatt-seconds of energy. Because of the post-9/11 recession, I had to take a job far from home. I’m living in one room with an attached bathroom, not much of a footprint so far. My possessions consist almost entirely of datastores and the hardware/software to use them. A laptop computer, a small TV, a telephone, a walkman, a discman. A music collection that fits in one drawer and some hard-copy books and magazines that take up another. I have a car, but only because my employer hasn’t figured out how to manage people they can’t watch. Ninety percent of my actual job duties can be performed over the internet without leaving this room.
    Again, only if you assume that the people of Bangladesh are dying to recreate the Industrial Era. I’m fairly certain they’ll be happy not to.
    I already did that, a few lines above, and proved you wrong. And I’m almost bloody SIXTY years old. I’m sure you younger folks can do an even better job of making yourselves happy and prosperous without a huge daily fix of petroleum and steel.
    Repeat after me: PARADIGM SHIFT! This ain’t your daddy’s Industrial Era economy.
    Telecommuting is already catching on despite the protestations of the Theory X managers of my generation. Your generation will make driving obsolete except for recreation. Even if Americans continue their love affair with 5,000 pound trucks, they will drive them a whole lot less so they won’t burn as much fuel and they won’t have to be thrown away and replaced as often. And taste in vehicles is fickle. I doubt that the SUV fad will last any longer than the motorcycle fad of the late 1960s and 1970s.
    I only test people who sign up for one of my classes and expect to be tested. You just admitted that Mars doesn’t have most of the complicating factors that have been fraudulently used to justify a green=red spin on global warming. OK, so maybe its orbit is more eccentric than Earth’s but you’d think someone would have told us by now. It would be pretty anomalous for an inner planet. Besides, factoring that into the calculation of average surface temperature would be a piece of cake. I don’t personally know how long the Martian ice caps have been melting, but the astronomers who did the primary research that was abstracted into the popular press articles I read did. They seem pretty convinced that there is a good correlation with what’s been going on at our poles and that both correlate with measured variance in solar output made possible by off-planet telescopy. If you can read astronomers’ jargon I’m sure it won’t take you two minutes with Google to check this out.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Mar 16, 2003
    #286
  10. Edufer

    Edufer Tired warrior Registered Senior Member

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    791
    WWF = World Wide Fraud.

    This thread started on a “global warming” issue, but in the last few posts have gone into philosophy, anthropology, Marxist and libertarian politics, and finally into a shopping center catalog. The website given by <b>fireguy37</B> belongs to the <b>WWF Canada</b>, and the most notorious thing in all their pages is how desperate this people is about getting money from the site’s visitors. <b>“Buy, donate, adopt a tiger, a bear, a wolf, etc”</b>. Just take a look at the Tiger adoption page at: http://www.wwfcanada.org/PandaStore/PandaDisplay3.asp?ItemID=DR624AT&Category=2 Where you can see the <b>“Tiger Adoption Kit”</b> consisting of

    * An adorable 5" plush tiger toy by RussTM
    * A personalized adoption certificate
    * A letter that identifies you as the gift giver
    * A four-page report that details the work that you will be supporting to save Tigers.
    * A $30 tax receipt will be issued and sent to you as the purchaser

    This is the same type of scam employed by Greenpeace in their fund raising campaigns. No wonder the Canadian government has revoked Greenpeace’s “non-profit” and “charitable organization” status, and is on the WWF’s tracks now. Regrettably, the <b>WWF</b> belongs to Her Gracious Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II, and her loyal husband, Prince Philip, so there will be not too much advance in that direction. Canada is part of the Commonwealth, doesn’t it? Brits don’t spit on their Queen’s barbecue.

    I know quite a lot about these people, the way they behave, and why. It would take a full encyclopedia to detail all the wrongdoings of the WWF, but I would refer you to the not well known <b>“Phillipson Report”</b>, by Oxford’s professor John Phillipson, commissioned by the WWF itself on the society effectiveness on “saving animals from extinction”. The report comprises 252 pages, whose conclusions were <font color=blue><b>“the least thing the WWF knows about is saving animals”</b></font>. The report condemns the incompetence of the organization to an extent that made Prince Philip order his general director Charles DeHaes to tell Philippson to moderate and suppress many chapters or, if he refused, keep the report secret, away from the public.

    They kept it secret, but Philippson did not. So we learned that way about the <b>“Black Ivory Report”</b>, also commissioned by the WWF and conducted and written by Ian Parker, a white hunter in Nairobi; about <b>“Operation Stronghold”</b> and <b>“Operation Lock”</b>, where prominent SAS commandos (Special Air Service), send over to stop the ivory illegal trade replaced the poachers and kept with the ivory trade themselves. Making this thing short (if you can resume 250 pages in one post without losing the essence of the report):

    1) The report made in 1972 by Ian Parker showed that the WWF knew that the family of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s president, was dealing heavily in the illegal trade of animal parts, and her daughter Margareth was the executive secretary in a company trading rhinoceros horns and elephant tusks to the British colony of Honk Kong. Few hours after presenting his report to Sir Peter Scott (then head of the WWF) Parker was kidnapped and sent to the infamous Langatta Road police station in Nairobi, where he was beaten and tortured, threatening him to kill his wife if he made public the report. The report was kept hidden until Kevin Dowling uncovered it when doing the documentary called “Ten Pence in the Panda”, in 1989, for the British Independent Television Network.

    2) According to the Phillipson Report, after 23 years of collecting funds from donors through the lovely image of the panda, the WWF realized that the panda was on the verge of extinction, and launched in 1987 another aggressive campaign to collect more funds. The WWF spent from 1980 4,493,021 Swiss francs in eight projects, as said by prof. Phillipson: <I>“in spite of a team of 43 persons –23 of them alleged scientists- the panda reproduction has been unsuccessful and the results from the research has been insignificant… the labs, at a cost of 530,000 Swiss francs are utterly impractical … the absence of competent advisory, the lack of training of the personnel, and the bad administration have produced a ‘dying’ laboratory.”</I>

    3) In 1963, Sir Peter Scott, head of the WWF, recommended to the Uganda National Park Administration <b>the killing of 2,500 elephants</b>. The job was given to Ian Parker (the white hunter later mugged in 1972 on orders by the WWF), that <b>also killed 4,000 hippopotamus</b> in the same operation. The reason was the Malthusian: <I>“some must die in order for the species to survive”</I>. Later was discovered that Sir Scott wanted the elephants <b>out of a mahogany producing area</b> (his own) and the elephants were a nuisance. Today there are in Uganda less elephants than those killed by the WWF orders.

    4) In 1975, the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, founded by Russell Train, president of WWF USA, (a former EPA administrator too!) hired Ian Parker (once more) for <b>killing virtually all elephants in Rwanda</b>, with the excuse that they could not be protecting the gorillas and the elephants at the same time, so the elephants had to go. One of Diane Fossey assistants (“Gorillas in the mist”…) later said that the elephants were killed because the region was good for producing pyrethrum, a “non polluting” insecticide. Years later, a synthetic substitute was discovered and the pyrethrum from Africa went down the drain, along with Uganda’s economy and the vanished elephants.

    5) In 1986, Clem Coetzee, a former Rhodesian mercenary, got a Honor Medal from the hands of Charles DeHaes, head of the WWF, for supervising a campaign where 44,000 elephants were killed in Zimbabwe. According to the WWF, “this was done for protecting the environment”.

    6) In 1989, the WWF called that year the “Year of the Elephant”, launching another campaign for raising funds to help Ugandas’ elephants (save Nell, the elephant). With those funds, the WWF mounted a camp in the border between Uganda and Rwanda, and accumulated there heavy paramilitary equipment, even though ALL the elephants in Uganda were in Murchison National Park, 1,000 miles away. Curiously, was from the WWF camp where the invasion by the Rwandan Patriotic Front was launched –using the guns and ammo of the WWF.

    There is <b>PLENTY MORE</b> in this subject, as the way the WWF helped to exterminate most of the rhinoceros on Africa, especially the black rhino, but it would take a full book to expose all of it. So I will tell you my personal experience with “saving animals”. In 1994 I started to build a small lodge (or an “operations base”) for Adventure Travel and Eco-tourism in the Bolivian Amazon that I called <b>“Lodge Anaconda”</b>. Due to many problems I could not finish the building –it is 80% complete- so I started to look for a partner to complete the project. I got in contact with the Bolivian representative of <b>Europe Conservation Foundation</b> (part of the <b>Green Cross Foundation</B> operation of Mijail Gorbachov), and my project was approved by the Swiss Congress (the Swiss were giving the money) and everything seemed to be nice, until I came to know how they operate, and why they do the things they do. As my convictions were not the same as theirs (that’s why I am still poor and they are rich), I said good-by and kept going alone in my project. If you want to take a look at the project, just go to my page: http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/photoEng.html and see for yourself. Nice pictures of the Amazon jungle, trips downriver, guarayo indians, etc.

    One of the business this people was investing in Bolivia (and my project would fit there perfectly) was a $5.000.000 spa and hot springs resort, in the San Javier region, in mineral waters highly radioactive –hence their curative and healing effects. They wanted me to promote the <b>“save something” racket.</b> They already are selling their <b>“Save or Adopt”</b> a whale, a wolf, a tiger, a panda, etc., beginning at $35 for a nice framed world map with two red coordinate lines showing the place where your adopted whale is located at the moment of your adoption. <b>(!!!!)</b>, and a framed honor certificate with your name in golden lettering. They wanted I did the same with the “jaguar”, the “ocelot”, the “macaw”, the “tapir”, and <b>“selling” one hectare of forest to be protected.</b> This is fraud: you cannot sell a piece of land that belongs to someone else, in this case the Bolivian state. The scheme was the same: framed maps and diplomas, and some other marketing tricks to improve the fund raising (50% for me, 50% for them). The buyer of an hectare was entitled to visit is “estate” whenever he wanted –but he had to pay for the airline tickets, transportation to the jungle, lodging, food, and drinks- that where at affordable prices by the company. This made me angry.

    I would say this was another version of the famous “Nigerian Scams” –help to take stuck money out from Nigeria, et) – help us to save those lovely animals you have only seen on TV. So I said no to a brilliant opportunity to make a fast buck, and a lasting one too!.

    So I believe I am entitled to stay skeptical on matters attached with the “environmental” label. I research deeply on the subject before giving any judgement. And as I have a solid and broad knowledge on matters as physics, chemistry, optics, biology, medicine, physiology, toxicology, statistics, anthropology and ethnology, etc, my long and well researched conclusions makes me to be aware of anything that includes environment, fund raising, and geopolitics.

    Before getting the hell out of this thread, I would suggest that we return to the “uncertainties of global warming” topic or start a new thread in other place away from “Earth sciences”.
     
    Edufer, Mar 16, 2003
    #287
  11. fireguy_31

    fireguy_31 mors ante servitium Registered Senior Member

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    667
    Back to the point.

    Fair enough Edufer. Like most other debates i participate in the topic always shifts to sociopolitical ranting. I'm sorry!

    Back to the topic. I am sorry to hear your experience with the WWF was unpleasant, to say the least, and I agree that it has become a special interest group intent on getting rich from a persona that appears warm and fuzzy in nature, and is conveniently protected by a bourgeoisie. I agree with you, I do not support the WWF whatsoever and i can also supply personal experiences that would support your claims. I simply referred to their website not as an authority on the issue, but rather as a site to figure out your eco-footprint.

    I have worked in Natural Resources for over ten years and -- I cannot reveal specifics -- the scientific processes, bureaucratic jargon, and external influence involved in studies that are concerned with natural resource management makes it just as suspect as the WWF, believe me!! These studies are published and passed off as non-partisan and neutral revelations about the health and condition of our natural environment. From a person who works on the inside; DON'T TRUST ANY OF IT!

    My "leftist" ideals and beliefs are a result of personal experience, not just academic review.

    Here is my belief; "Global Warming is occuring, present evidence is divided between the anthropocentric view and eco-minded view as to whether or not human activity is contributing, in a detremental manner, to this process. Through personal experience, education, and common sense I cannot believe human activity has not contributed, in a detrimental manner, to the warming trend here on earth. Maintaining the status quo, ie: burning of fossil fuels, will increase those detrimental effects."

    There it is in a nut shell. And I promise to stick with the topic, although I will be arguing with both hands tied behind my back because of my chosen profession. Well maybe just one hand, I do, afterall, have to type!

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    And Fraggle, maybe we can carry on our debate in another thread. I see some problems with the libertarian movements platform... like that's a surprise!!(and i mean that in such a way as to poke fun at myself because, i hardly every agree with any theory whole heartedly)
     
    fireguy_31, Mar 16, 2003
    #288
  12. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    Numbers?

    Humanity may indeed be contributing detrimentally to the phenomenon of global warming. It stands to reason that increasing the overall rate of oxidation on the planet's surface will increase the positive or decrease the negative slope of the average temperature graph.

    The question is:

    Is our contribution significant? To my knowledge no one has even determined the impact of variation in solar radiation on the rate of shrinkage of the Martian ice caps, which don't have as many variables to sort through and will be a much easier bit of math. If for the sake of easy calculation the current rate of change of the earth's average surface temperature is plus .1 degree per year, and we find out that .0999 degree of that is due to the sun going through a warm phase, our own .0001 degree contribution to that is insignificant. By the time enough years go by that our own ineptitude has increased the temperature by a hundredth of a degree, the sun will have raised it by ten -- or since that would be a hundred year span, the sun may have cooled and the earth's temperature might be dropping again despite our best efforts to slow what will then be called "the alarming spectre of global cooling."

    Without knowing

    1. What percentage of the temperature rise is due to human activity and what percentage to solar fluctuation, and

    2. When is the sun going to get tired of overproducing and settle back down to a "normal" temperature, or perhaps even "subnormal",

    ... we're not only experiencing a spell of global warming of indeterminate duration, but we're also working in the dark.

    At this point, all we know for sure is that anyone who is collecting government grant money or tax-deductible charitable donations, for the purpose of studying a problem, is the LEAST likely person on the entire planet to tell us the truth about said problem.

    Power currupts. Even solar power!
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Mar 17, 2003
    #289
  13. BatM

    BatM Member At Large Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    408
    Re: Numbers?

    That may apply to anyone collecting grant money -- be it government, charitable, or corporate in origin.

    Greed is universal.

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    BatM, Mar 17, 2003
    #290
  14. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    Numbers?

    Oh absolutely.
    Well, let's see. There was Jesus. And I think there was a guy in Iowa once who wasn't greedy. Maybe a few others. And you and I of course.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Mar 17, 2003
    #291
  15. BatM

    BatM Member At Large Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    408
    Re: Numbers?

    Well, since all the people searching for the truth of the problem are "the LEAST likely person on the entire planet to tell us the truth about said problem" and everyone else merely tells us when those people are not telling the truth, then I guess we're pretty much up the creek without a paddle on this issue. :bugeye:

    The exceptions that prove the rule...

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    BatM, Mar 17, 2003
    #292
  16. fireguy_31

    fireguy_31 mors ante servitium Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    667
    That's the point!!

    Good job of summing it up in a nutshell BatM.

    The way I determine which side of an issue to agree with -- that is when the evidence presented can be considered corrupt -- is I just ask myself who will benefit(or has the most to lose)in the debate. i would love to believe peoples motives are altruistic but the major players in this debate are concerned about the tens of billions of dollars(so they say)at stake, and not the environmental aspect of it.

    Look at the US(the strongest opponent to the Kyoto Protocol)and keep in mind that it is the purest embodiment of the capitalist ideal, where everything is determined in accordance with economic interests. The environment will take a back seat everytime, that is until it starts affecting the bottom line, and it will. I just hope by then it isn't too late.
     
    fireguy_31, Mar 17, 2003
    #293
  17. BatM

    BatM Member At Large Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    408
    Publicly debate the othe "major players"?

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    BatM, Mar 17, 2003
    #294
  18. fireguy_31

    fireguy_31 mors ante servitium Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    667
    Andre

    I would never question your convictions Andre, what I do question is your sources reliability. Big players provide so called evidence, you and I can only wade through that bull-shit and take what we can from it.
     
    fireguy_31, Mar 17, 2003
    #295
  19. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    Just be a player, not a major one.

    Why do you want to become just one more "major player" when we already know that power corrupts? Easier to become "a player" and encourage others to do likewise. Power distributed equitably so that it remains primarily the power to shape one's own life, and to a lesser extent the power to teach others, is less corruptive.

    If you live in one of the many states that allows the citizens to create their own legislation through the popular initiative process, you already have the power you need. You just need to use it. Collaborate with a couple of legal scholars from the nearest university and draft an initiative directing the state's judicial branch to apply tort and easement laws to environmental issues. Render it into everyday language that the voters will understand.

    If someone deprives you of the right to enjoy living in your home by creating pollution that enters your airspace, they have committed a tort.

    If someone begins to clear-cut a mountainside so that next winter tons of mud will slide down into the yards of the town below, they can be stopped and required to purchase an easement to utilize each of those yards as a mud repository.

    It's also possible that the easement theory could apply to air pollution, but that is a more difficult approach to the case, without a very encouraging history of precedents.

    As the bumper sticker says, think globally but act locally.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Mar 17, 2003
    #296
  20. fireguy_31

    fireguy_31 mors ante servitium Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    667
    HERE HERE FRAGGLE!

    HERE HERE FRAGGLE!!
     
    fireguy_31, Mar 17, 2003
    #297
  21. fireguy_31

    fireguy_31 mors ante servitium Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    667
    I tried...

    Hey Andre, i did go to that other thread you were talking about and did a little research on your sources. Let me say that I am no scientist so wading through that jargon gave me a headache. I checked the source from Berkley regarding the stacking whatever. Just when I thought I had a grasp of what they were saying, they used another piece of scientific terminology which threw me off once again. BUT, I did do a search on the stacking theory and had no problem finding several other theories which, I think, disproved it and other contrary theories. You know, I have no idea what all this means but it doesn't disregard any logical argument made here. Science alone, without any other input, is lame. I'm paraphrasing Einstein.
     
    fireguy_31, Mar 18, 2003
    #298
  22. odin

    odin Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,098
    odin, Mar 25, 2003
    #299
  23. Edufer

    Edufer Tired warrior Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    791
    It does, of course

    Hi, odin!

    Yes, solar activity is the major driver of climate changes in earth. Remember that between 1615 and 1700, durng the so called Maunder Minimum, solar activity was almost nil, as there were almost <b>NO SUNSPOTS</b> during that period, and that coincided with the terrible colds of the <b>Little Ice Age</b>.

    See this scientific article by Dr. Theodor Landscheidt about the influence of sunspots and solar cycles on US droughts:

    http://www.john-daly.com/solar/US-drought.htm

    It really tells a lot!
     
    Edufer, Mar 25, 2003
    #300
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