Global Warming..., Your concerns...

It's not new at all. Darwin and his research were openly condemned by religious authorities as contrary to the teachings of the Bible.

really? I didn't know this. Well, luckily (though there are exceptions) nowadays his hypothesis were proven well and his teaching is broadly accepted and tought in schools and science.

I'm with Coin on this one. That one line from VG555 caught my eye as well. I'm thinking that VG555 may be funnier than I had initially anticipated.

The "water vapor is a greenhouse gas" thing is interesting too because unlike transparent CO2, water vapor has a negative greenhouse feedback in the form of albedo. Cloud-cover acts to hold in the heat but also to reflect a lot of the sunlight. This can actually be a huge problem if we're talking about global cooling since snow/ice also has a high albedo that further cools the earth.

With global warming, the thing that comforts me a little is that I don't think we'll ever get the earth to the point where human life will go extinct. There are very simple techniques that humans can use to dramatically reduce the temperature of the earth. Recently people have been talking about the injection of a high-albedo substance like SO2 into the upper atmosphere. This is similar to what triggered the "little ice age" in the 1600s - when volcanoes spewed SO2 into the skies. We could literally inject so much SO2 that we could start the next proper ice age. The amount of control we could exert kind of horrifies me. People have already brought up the question of what we could do if some small third-world country decided that high temperatures were killing off too many of its citizens and that it was time to cool the world down. The SO2 injection scheme is very cheap and easy to do, but if anyone screwed it up it could be disastrous. As bad as roasting to death under the sun's greenhouse would be, freezing to death under a sulfur dioxide sky would be equally bad. This could become a major issue during our lifetimes.

Rofl, you guys are ridiculous.

"Oh, no! Someone mentioned God! I'm offended!"

*legions of people get offended*

"Wait! He's actually mocking Christians! Whew, for a second I thought he was being offensive!"

*everyone breathes a sigh of relief*

We have less (in terms of productivity) than we had in the 60s according to the Newsweek article I cited earlier. Not sure what a longer-term comparison is.

I'm not against studying the topic, but I was always told "scientists" are the ones who told us ethanol would be okay. Granted, the focus on ethanol is purely political for corn-growing regions, but now that we know it's worse in greenhouse gas emissions than oil (if you factor in all areas of production), I'm really skeptical about most of these preemptive actions people are suggesting. Especially when they're usually more expensive than oil. (Except nuclear power. Nuclear power FTW.)

So let me get this straight. You're all for listening to mainstream scientific thought, but not mainstream economic thought?

Any economist could handily demonstrate the inefficiency of government spending money, social programs, endowments for the arts and sciences ... I'm not saying it's bad, but it's laughable to think that it will help the economy.

I agree. Which is why it would help to have alternative energy sources like nuclear power plants. If the political class (my euphamism for American liberals) stopped screaming "Chernobyl" every time we wanted to install a nuclear power plant, it would help an awful lot.

For not taking political sides, you sure do use an awful lot of political points that ignore mainstream economic thought. You should read about the UCLA study that determined FDR prolonged the Great Depression by 7 years. An awful lot of children starved, because liberal economic thought said that the government could work as a solution. If FDR hadn't been so big on regulation, the initial hit would have been harder, but not last as long. Quite literally, less children would have died on the streets.

Not all regulation is bad. It's good to prevent monopolies, break up existing monopolies, give workers rights (something we could use a lot more of in my particular state), but this is generally referred to as a branch of "deregulation." But if we stopped use of all oil over the next ten years, there's no doubt that it would hurt the economy. I understand that's an absurd scenario, and it weakens my point, but that was the sort of change I was referring to.

So I don't entirely disagree with you on what should be done, because I seem to be addressing the usual "talking points," you seem to be having a more reasonable conversation. So I'll agree that you're partly right, and I'll stop nitpicking.

As far as your thoughts on the SO2 solution, I know virtually nothing about it, so I won't comment. I will agree that it certainly sounds disturbing, though.

This post has been edited by 2awesome4apossum on Feb 19 2011, 07:16 PM

And you, with that line, are generally offending everyone on this board.
Fishing for a suspension Possum?

Water vapor are not clouds. Clouds are liquid water forming microscopic droplets suspended in the air. Water vapor is a gas. Clouds reflect sunlight, but water vapor doesn't, it absorbs infrared rays scattered by the earth's surface keeping the planet warm.

On the religious issue of the superiority of humans, yes it would be a very inconvenient thing to have to ride a bus because you are dependant on its schedule, and would be inconvenient to ride a bike because they go so much slower than cars and one would have to completely change their way of life not just in travel. They'd have to do all kinds of things including using more expensive technology just because it used less electric power. That would hurt their pocket book, and some might go broke trying to stay environmentally friendly. Many other things as well including new government regulations that would MAKE us do the inconvenient things so we wouldn't fall back onto doing the easy (but more environmentally unfriendly) things would have to be put into place, practically transforming the US government into a tyranny. No God would not want that to happen to humans, for humans are the most important thing in God's eyes. God would not want us to have to endure that kind of inconvenience just for the sake of an animal that might go extinct otherwise. And I'm not mocking Christians. I AM a Christian. Maybe I didn't express myself well, but I do believe God values humans infinitely more than animals. That is why God gave us a soul, so we could go to Heaven when we die, but no other animal has this. I believe when a non-human animal dies, they just cease to live and have no after life.

This post has been edited by Videogamer555 on Feb 19 2011, 08:37 PM

Possum - I don't know jack about economics. When I think about scaling back fossil fuel use, I imagine a worst-case-type scenario to be making time go in reverse and returning to the horse and buggy days. I don't think that's something we should aspire to, but the fact remains that fossil fuels were not in use back then and children did not all starve as a consequence. There's obviously ways to make this work.

VG555 - Water vapor becomes little droplets of condensed water when they raise higher in the atmosphere and cool down. Unlike CO2 which doesn't form reflective sheets when it cools down, H2O does. Clouds are formed from water vapor. If this didn't occur, we'd get a runaway situation where the earth would heat up from H2O and then more H2O would evaporate and that would only make the earth hotter so that more H2O evaporated. That's not the way things work, right?

Ok, that's it, I close this topic. And people: leave religion out of a videogame forum.

Thanks

Edit:
To further clarify the closing of the topic:
This is a general topic forum where you can freely discuss interesting topics of science and also religion. But I prefer a liberal talk about it, and every religion (christianity, paganism, buddhism, hinduism, islam, etc.) is in its core a pure thing and all religions are on the same level at a spiritual point of view. Every religion should welcome the other religion with respect and everybody can freely post his convictions if he feels for it and doesn't offend other people or their believe.

What we do not like here at the forums are extremists, which are present in EVERY religion (not only found in recent islamic terroristical acts). This topic went to the border to get abused by extreme convictions, therefore it is now closed.