[noflash]

Why is it so devisive? People have stubbornly chosen sides and are convinced we do or don't affect global climate.

Anyway, I plan on seeing th emovie this weekend. Here's it's website if you don't know what I am talking about.
http://www.climatecrisis.net/

...and why the animosity towards Gore?

[deutschmann59]

I heard an interesting theory on global warming, that makes sense to me and makes me think we really are responsible for the crazy weather we've been having.

The fossil fuels we are burning is releasing carbon into the atmosphere, but this carbon from the fossil fuels have been underground for millions of years and now we're releasing it all into the atmosphere, setting off the whole balance.

That's why people say ethanol is better...in that they are using carbon from corn and other plants to ferment the alcohol, but the plants are above ground and so we aren't digging this up old carbon--we're re-using and "cycling" the carbon. It kind of makes sense to me...

Too bad the E90 doesn't run on E85

[Squawks]

People believe it's the result of mankind's activities but that may only be partly true because what would account for the previous ice ages in the past?

The earth cools down and heats up in a relentless cycle.

It is undeniable, however, that mankind has destroyed much of the ozone layer and introduced man-made pollutants to the world.

It is quite debatable to argue how much of mankind's activities actually contribute to global warming. Note that some of the world's greatest air-polluters are actually natural: e.g. the Sahara Desert and "dust deserts" where tons of debris/dust gets blown into the air on a daily basis.

[KC Bimmer]

The earths climate is ALWAYS changing and naturally swings from being hotter to cooler and has done this for thousands of years. Does man's interaction contribute? I believe so, but not as much as Mr. Gore and others would have you believe. I bet they don't bring up the fact in the movie the average temperatures as a whole have been DECREASING every year since 1998.

[Squawks]

Originally Posted by KC Bimmer

The earths climate is ALWAYS changing and naturally swings from being hotter to cooler and has done this for thousands of years.

That's true, but note that what today's scientists are arguing is that fact that the earth's temperature changes have been quite surprising taking note that we've only been measuring its temperature for less than two centuries. They take into account the Earth's endogenous behavior of harmonic changes in temperature but what they found is that the changes are becoming much more aggressive and how such changes could have arisen from mankind.

I agree with the scientists for most of their points, including the fact that mankind enhances global warming not by polluting the air but instead, destroying our natural ecosystems which include but are not limited to wildlife, forests, and oceans.

[vladinecko]

weather is a very delicate and an extremely complex phenomenon. though the burning fossils theory makes sense and is real, it is very hard for me to believe the weather would change so dramatically in only 30-40 years (taking that we've been dumping CO2 into the atmosphere since 60s - 70s). however, i'm not opposed to the idea that we might have just overused gasoline-powered vehicles a little too much.

i'm skeptical about the theory because we've seen many dramatic weather changes throughout the history (the little ice age for example). so one can never be sure if this is something nature simply intended to do or if it is in fact our fault. our beloved mother earth might simply be having just a bad case of hiccups right now.

[docbolo]

liberal propaganda fueled by junk science

[deutschmann59]

I've also heard something about the o-zone layer. You guys that know more about it, tell me is this true:

When aresol sprays were released into the atmosphere, their microscopic particles go high up into the ozone layer and the particles actually have a relfective property that actually deflects rays from the sun. And that's what's depleting the ozone layer. I dont' understand that, though, because as it said the particles are microscopic. Plus, isn't ozone (O3) naturally produced?

[Squawks]

O3 is naturally produced. That is why the Earth is actually 'regenerating' its ozone layer from the massive damage mankind did to it. It is undeniable that mankind destroyed quite a bit of the ozone layer. That is an accepted fact among scientists.

O3 is destroyed from Chlorofluorocarbons, aka CFCs. The chemistry behind it may be elucidated by fellow chemist Doc Bolo. It's an interesting chemical reaction - here is a website for the nonliterate (in chemistry): http://www.chemheritage.org/educatio...ings/O3end.htm

EDIT: Ozone is naturally produced by exciting single oxygen diatoms so that you would get highly reactive single oxygen atoms, which eventually fuse with oxygen diatoms to form O3 (aka ozone).

[vladinecko]

Originally Posted by sharp1183

I've also heard something about the o-zone layer. You guys that know more about it, tell me is this true:

When aresol sprays were released into the atmosphere, their microscopic particles go high up into the ozone layer and the particles actually have a relfective property that actually deflects rays from the sun. And that's what's depleting the ozone layer. I dont' understand that, though, because as it said the particles are microscopic. Plus, isn't ozone (O3) naturally produced?

well, that's a different issue, really. ozone is here mainly to protect us from the deadly UV (B) rays, which, ironically, also create ozone (and destroy it). the aerosol sprays have been banned in many countries and it's been now proved the ozone layer is slowly recovering.

ozone is basically oxygen molecules in upper stratosphere hit by UV light and split into individual atoms that then pair up with unbroken oxygen molecules creating O3. UV light then hits them again and splits them up into O2 and an oxygen atom and the cycle continues.

why aerosol, or freons, destroy the ozone layer is a little more complicated issue but there are basically particles that hang around up there for a long time forming different chemicals and thus disabling O3 from being created.

[ed328ci]

It's both. The Earth does have warm / cool cycles, but the pollutants that we are spilling into the air is altering and accelerating that process.

[rchanou]

Originally Posted by Squawks

That's true, but note that what today's scientists are arguing is that fact that the earth's temperature changes have been quite surprising taking note that we've only been measuring its temperature for less than two centuries. They take into account the Earth's endogenous behavior of harmonic changes in temperature but what they found is that the changes are becoming much more aggressive and how such changes could have arisen from mankind.

I agree with the scientists for most of their points, including the fact that mankind enhances global warming not by polluting the air but instead, destroying our natural ecosystems which include but are not limited to wildlife, forests, and oceans.

[KennyVendetta]

Would it be left wing propaganda if a Republican funded this movie? What the heck does politics have to do with this?

Are we destroying the Earth? Yes and no. I don't think that we can destroy the Earth. But we can definitely make it act funky. Even if we to use every single nuclear, hydrogen, and atomic bomb at one time we couldn't destroy the earth!

We would all be dead and life would still exist, although it would be in microscopic form.

Are we doing things to affect weather patterns, glacial melting and ozone depletion? Umm...yes we are and unless we work harmoniously with the Earth (recycling, alternate fuel sources, etc...) we will kill ourselves...

But the Earth will remain...

[docbolo]

Read this:

Getting it Wrong: Prophets of Environmental Doom Are at it Again


Written By: Dave Gorak
Published In: Environment News

It was only 20 years ago that many environmentalists and energy gurus were predicting a bleak future for the world at the end of this century. The millennium would bring dramatic shortages of fossil fuels, they said, leading to nightmarish social and economic disruption.

A quick look around, particularly in the United States, illustrates just how wrong they were.

So now a new generation of alarmists has taken their place, using the same slipshod research methods to promote their global warming argument. In this latest doomsday scenario, humankind may one day find its world slowly suffocating in greenhouse gases created by man’s unrelenting use of those fossil fuels that should have disappeared by now.

But the current crop of prognosticators will be as wrong as their predecessors, predicts Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow with the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Doomsayers then and now share a flawed approach to predicting the future: a failure or unwillingness to understand technological progress.

Yesterday’s prophets of doom did not expect such things as super-computing technology and the advances in geophysics that have made possible dramatic changes in fossil fuel exploration and recovery. Nor did they anticipate how human ingenuity could produce conventional power plants and vehicles far more efficient than those in use just decades ago.

Today, says Mills, "without apology, and perhaps in part because of the absence of any mechanism for accountability, the same old crowd is at it again.

“Environmentalists and self-anointed energy experts were wrong 20 years ago. What credibility do such organizations and individuals have in making similar, often identical, energy technology forecasts today? Based on the record, the answer should be none."

Mills, a science advisor to the Greening Earth Society and president of Mills-McCarthy and Associates, a research and consulting firm specializing in technology strategy focused on the energy industry, is the author of "Getting It Wrong: Energy Forecasts and the End-of-Technology Mindset," a report published in July 1999 by CEI’s Environmental Studies Program.

Mills notes that if energy technology forecasting were a mutual fund created 20 years ago, it would have been bankrupt long ago and destroyed by market forces.

"But because energy forecasting is directed at influencing federal and state policies and entails the use of taxpayers’ money, there is no ‘natural’ market for accountability,” he notes. “Clearly, being politically correct in energy forecasts means never having to say you’re sorry, even if you are wrong.

“We imperil the nation’s economic and energy future by ignoring the lessons of history, and by basing policy on energy and economic forecasts made today by the same community of ‘experts’ offering the same flawed nostrums as 20 years ago."


No Blue-chip Forecasters, These

So how far off were the energy ‘experts’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s?

Among their dire predictions was the one about running out of fossil fuels, forcing us to rely increasingly on such renewable energy sources as solar energy and windmills. But in fact, oil and natural gas reserves have increased by record amounts, while consumption in the United States has remained at about six billion barrels per year and world consumption has risen by 2.5 billion barrels a year.

Windmills and solar power, notes Mills, contribute just 0.5 percent of the nation’s energy.

In 1975, the prestigious National Geographic magazine joined the environmental crusade, devoting an entire issue to the energy "crisis." In that issue, the magazine predicted the following costs of energy in 1995 (in dollars per million BTUs of energy):

coal, $3 to $5 -- actual price today, roughly $1;
oil, $6 to $11 -- actual price today, roughly $3;
natural gas, $4 to $8 -- actual price today, roughly $2.
"The U.S. and the world’s economies are inextricably anchored in the use of abundant and low-cost fossil fuels," Mills writes. "Today the economies of the world use the energy equivalent of 60 billion barrels of oil a year. Fossil fuels supply almost 90 percent of all of that energy; oil alone supplies 25 billion barrels of the world’s energy. And fossil fuels have provided 86 percent of the growth in energy supply over the past two decades. All this occurred as the average cost of fossil fuels collapsed over 40 percent from the brief peaks reached following the ill-advised OPEC oil embargo of 1973."


Our Electric Economy

Demand for electricity also was projected to decline, and with it the need for coal as an energy source. Since 1977, however, demand for electricity has skyrocketed 70 percent. Coal has supplied two-thirds of the increased supply of electricity.

A major factor contributing to the increased use of electricity is the energy requirements of personal computers and the companies that manufacture them. The computer’s share of electricity in commercial uses nearly equals the lighting load. "A billion PCs on the Web means electric demand equal to total U.S. output today," predicted Mills in a May 31 Forbes magazine article, "Dig More Coal."


The Power of Human Ingenuity

Today’s breed of hand-wringing environmentalists is attempting to accomplish what Mills termed "the equivalent of worrying about finding better lamps to burn whale oil at the dawn of the age of electric lighting. Better to let science and technology flourish.”

"Unless one presumes that the progress of science and technology has ended, that no significant new basic discoveries and technologies are possible, it is ridiculous to engage in plans to manage, anticipate, or direct technology over time periods beyond 20 years. Yet this is precisely what many in the expert community engaged in promoting the theory of global warming are attempting to do. We are being asked to put at risk trillions of dollars in investment in existing energy technologies on the basis of 20 and 20-plus year technology forecasts that have no validity.”

[noflash]

blah, blah, blah...

[nostrum09]

Originally Posted by docbolo

Read this:

Getting it Wrong: Prophets of Environmental Doom Are at it Again


Written By: Dave Gorak
Published In: Environment News

...

Mills, a science advisor to the Greening Earth Society and president of Mills-McCarthy and Associates, a research and consulting firm specializing in technology strategy focused on the energy industry, is the author of "Getting It Wrong: Energy Forecasts and the End-of-Technology Mindset," a report published in July 1999 by CEI’s Environmental Studies Program.\

...

And what you posted is oh soooo unbiased.</sarcasm>

A quick search on 'Greening Earth Society' brings up numerous links to the fact that it is backed by the 'Western Fuels Association.' This organization is for the use of coal for electricity generation.

Now I wonder why a science advisor to an organization that indirectly promotes the burning of even more fossil fuels would say that global warming is nothing more than a bunch of environmentalists overreacting...

[Squawks]

Nostrum is right. It's like listening to a scientist who claims tobacco doesn't cause cancer and under scrutiny this guy has thousands of shares in Phillip-Morris.

[just4kickz]

well i mean personally from what i've learned in my environmental studies... there are obviously ice ages and what not that change the global temperature by extreme amounts... and there are also times when the world is simply hella hot... im being vague because i dont remember that much from the class... it was kinda too indepth for me to grasp everything... but anyways on a seasonal scale, levels of CO2 go up and down yearly... but on a global scale its been increasing pretty rapidly... i believe that this era's global warming is man made... i'm pretty sure that temperature increases in the milleniums before weren't as rapid as today's rate.

[Asiann]

I guess we will all have to sit and wait to see what happens in the future.

[bavarian19]

There is a natural fluctuation (over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years) with the temperature of the Earth. This most recent swing in temperatures is much more drastic than the previous cycles.

While I am no tree hugger, I do believe that something serious needs to be done about our consumption of natural resources... With our current govt. administration it will never happen, but we need to have a more serious gas guzzler tax in place. This will force auto manufacturers to look at improving economy (drastically), and to other possible sources of fuel...


On the same hand, I do not believe that hydrogen fuel is the answer to this problem. Knowing a few things about this topic, hydrogen is a highly combustible gas, and releases a lot of energy when it is burned. This is great when you have a controlled explosion in your engine, but in accidents, can cause some other really serious problems...

[docbolo]

THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!

I just know it. Fu8k the scientific method.

[just4kickz]

Originally Posted by docbolo

Read this:

Getting it Wrong: Prophets of Environmental Doom Are at it Again


Written By: Dave Gorak
Published In: Environment News

It was only 20 years ago that many environmentalists and energy gurus were predicting a bleak future for the world at the end of this century. The millennium would bring dramatic shortages of fossil fuels, they said, leading to nightmarish social and economic disruption.

A quick look around, particularly in the United States, illustrates just how wrong they were.

So now a new generation of alarmists has taken their place, using the same slipshod research methods to promote their global warming argument. In this latest doomsday scenario, humankind may one day find its world slowly suffocating in greenhouse gases created by man’s unrelenting use of those fossil fuels that should have disappeared by now.

But the current crop of prognosticators will be as wrong as their predecessors, predicts Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow with the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Doomsayers then and now share a flawed approach to predicting the future: a failure or unwillingness to understand technological progress.

Yesterday’s prophets of doom did not expect such things as super-computing technology and the advances in geophysics that have made possible dramatic changes in fossil fuel exploration and recovery. Nor did they anticipate how human ingenuity could produce conventional power plants and vehicles far more efficient than those in use just decades ago.

Today, says Mills, "without apology, and perhaps in part because of the absence of any mechanism for accountability, the same old crowd is at it again.

“Environmentalists and self-anointed energy experts were wrong 20 years ago. What credibility do such organizations and individuals have in making similar, often identical, energy technology forecasts today? Based on the record, the answer should be none."

Mills, a science advisor to the Greening Earth Society and president of Mills-McCarthy and Associates, a research and consulting firm specializing in technology strategy focused on the energy industry, is the author of "Getting It Wrong: Energy Forecasts and the End-of-Technology Mindset," a report published in July 1999 by CEI’s Environmental Studies Program.

Mills notes that if energy technology forecasting were a mutual fund created 20 years ago, it would have been bankrupt long ago and destroyed by market forces.

"But because energy forecasting is directed at influencing federal and state policies and entails the use of taxpayers’ money, there is no ‘natural’ market for accountability,” he notes. “Clearly, being politically correct in energy forecasts means never having to say you’re sorry, even if you are wrong.

“We imperil the nation’s economic and energy future by ignoring the lessons of history, and by basing policy on energy and economic forecasts made today by the same community of ‘experts’ offering the same flawed nostrums as 20 years ago."


No Blue-chip Forecasters, These

So how far off were the energy ‘experts’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s?

Among their dire predictions was the one about running out of fossil fuels, forcing us to rely increasingly on such renewable energy sources as solar energy and windmills. But in fact, oil and natural gas reserves have increased by record amounts, while consumption in the United States has remained at about six billion barrels per year and world consumption has risen by 2.5 billion barrels a year.

Windmills and solar power, notes Mills, contribute just 0.5 percent of the nation’s energy.

In 1975, the prestigious National Geographic magazine joined the environmental crusade, devoting an entire issue to the energy "crisis." In that issue, the magazine predicted the following costs of energy in 1995 (in dollars per million BTUs of energy):

coal, $3 to $5 -- actual price today, roughly $1;
oil, $6 to $11 -- actual price today, roughly $3;
natural gas, $4 to $8 -- actual price today, roughly $2.
"The U.S. and the world’s economies are inextricably anchored in the use of abundant and low-cost fossil fuels," Mills writes. "Today the economies of the world use the energy equivalent of 60 billion barrels of oil a year. Fossil fuels supply almost 90 percent of all of that energy; oil alone supplies 25 billion barrels of the world’s energy. And fossil fuels have provided 86 percent of the growth in energy supply over the past two decades. All this occurred as the average cost of fossil fuels collapsed over 40 percent from the brief peaks reached following the ill-advised OPEC oil embargo of 1973."


Our Electric Economy

Demand for electricity also was projected to decline, and with it the need for coal as an energy source. Since 1977, however, demand for electricity has skyrocketed 70 percent. Coal has supplied two-thirds of the increased supply of electricity.

A major factor contributing to the increased use of electricity is the energy requirements of personal computers and the companies that manufacture them. The computer’s share of electricity in commercial uses nearly equals the lighting load. "A billion PCs on the Web means electric demand equal to total U.S. output today," predicted Mills in a May 31 Forbes magazine article, "Dig More Coal."


The Power of Human Ingenuity

Today’s breed of hand-wringing environmentalists is attempting to accomplish what Mills termed "the equivalent of worrying about finding better lamps to burn whale oil at the dawn of the age of electric lighting. Better to let science and technology flourish.”

"Unless one presumes that the progress of science and technology has ended, that no significant new basic discoveries and technologies are possible, it is ridiculous to engage in plans to manage, anticipate, or direct technology over time periods beyond 20 years. Yet this is precisely what many in the expert community engaged in promoting the theory of global warming are attempting to do. We are being asked to put at risk trillions of dollars in investment in existing energy technologies on the basis of 20 and 20-plus year technology forecasts that have no validity.”

I think the US has the largest coal supply+reserves but coal is the worst of all these resources because it doesnt burn well and leaves crap like sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere which may be harmful to the general population. unless of course u process the coal into a more cleaner fuel... but i'm sure that method is pretty expensive too.