The Green Room

[Handlebars]

So should we debate weather or not the moon is made out of green cheese because it is 'opinion'?

Unless you're a conspiracy guy, you know humans have been to the moon, right?

 

[Handlebars]

1934 Dust Bowl. What caused that? Can you image the spin if that was today?

 

[Gordon71]

One could look at this another way. If we go big towards eliminating the use of coal,oil etc. and it does nothing to slow climate change it will still make the air cleaner and eliminate such disasters as ocean and pipeline spills making it still a winning policy.

 

[Handlebars]

One could look at this another way. If we go big towards eliminating the use of coal,oil etc. and it does nothing to slow climate change it will still make the air cleaner and eliminate such disasters as ocean and pipeline spills making it still a winning policy.

When you say "eliminating the use of coal,oil, etc.", do you mean eliminate its use as fuel, or to eliminate it?

 

[Gordon71]

When you say "eliminating the use of coal,oil, etc.", do you mean eliminate its use as fuel, or to eliminate it?

Gee,what do you think?

 

[Art Deco]

Gentlemen ... remember you have a handy "ignore" button...

 

[PedalUma]

We should produce more coal. All it takes is putting things that have produced oxygen, with imbedded carbon into the ground and letting time do the rest.

 

[Handlebars]

Gee,what do you think?

Never can tell how much someone might be against mining coal, drilling for oil, gas, fracking, etc. They're generally not environmentally friendly enterprises.

 

[Catalyzt]

Yeah-- what about the dust bowl, what about the ice age, what about that one article in 1972 that said it was getting colder, what about an alien invasion, what about what about what about....

There's enough of everything somewhere, or there will be at some point, so why is anyone getting upset about anything?

Oxygen is an infinite resource. Hell, there's even oxygen in the photosphere of the sun, even O16-- that's 16 oxygen atoms, not a lousy little O2. If you don't believe me, go to the sun's surface and check it out for yourself (at night, obviously, when it's safe.)

Why do people worry about polluting the air? There's even oxygen in carbon monoxide, so what's the big deal with car exhaust?

I was held down 15 seconds by a wave when I was body boarding last Sunday, and I was scared for a moment, until I realized: There's plenty of oxygen in water, all I have to do if I can't get to the surface is separate the oxygen atoms from the hydrogen atoms and recombine them!

I am such a silly goose! I should spend more time engaging in serious debate with random people I run into on online forums so I won't be such a fraidy-cat!

Sorry. It's been a long week, just had to blow off a little steam. I promise to be good for another week or two.

 

[Handlebars]

I am such a silly goose! I should spend more time engaging in serious debate with random people I run into on online forums so I won't be such a fraidy-cat!

Sorry. It's been a long week, just had to blow off a little steam. I promise to be good for another week or two.

Did someone ask you to engage?

 

[Handlebars]

Yeah, but only by 97% of them.

BTW, I thought it would be good to show the exact wording they used to produce the world famous 97% cheat.

This is what they claim in the research paper: "

We classified each abstract according to the type of research (category) and degree of endorsement. .... Explicit endorsements were divided into non-quantified (e.g., humans are contributing to global warming without quantifying the contribution) and quantified (e.g., humans are contributing more than 50% of global warming, consistent with the 2007 IPCC statement that most of the global warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations) .

So agreement with the usual normal IPCC type scientific quantified statement (over half or more than 50% of this warming is due to humans), that is what is being argued about. That we are the cause of over 50% of the warming.


But they soon found out that the percentage of papers that explicitly agree on over 50% causation by humans, is less than 1%


So they had to hold a secret online meeting to rule out the definition they say they are using ....but they left the meeting open by mistake and they got exposed.

This is their claim in the paper "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming"

quantified (e.g., humans are contributing more than 50% of global warming, consistent with the 2007 IPCC statement that most of the global warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations)

Okay, so we’ve ruled out a definition of AGW being ‘any amount of human influence’ or ‘more than 50% human influence’. We’re basically going with Ari’s porno approach (I probably should stop calling it that) which is AGW = ‘humans are causing global warming’. e.g. – no specific quantification which is the only way we can do it considering the breadth of papers we’re surveying.

Click to expand...

They ruled out the definition they claim to be using and never again mention that type of endorsement, the very type of endorsement which the paper says they are finding out- how much agreement there is on AGW being the majority cause of global warming since 1950.

 

[john peck]

¨Climate change´ is not our only big worry. Food production is just barely keeping up with population.
Ironically improved agriculture is directly responsible for over-population, more food, more people.
The problem being soil depletion, but more so the cost & scarcity of fertilizers. Fertilizers have enabled
corporate agriculture while driving the family farm under. This resource is getting more costly &
difficult to obtain. Prices hikes & shortages are inevitable.

 

[Art Deco]

Fertilizer contains ammonia, currently made from fossil fuels. Also insecticides and herbicides are currently made from fossil fuels. The really big issue for corporate farms now is the cost of diesel fuel that powers every piece of equipment from the tractors in the fields to the delivery trucks on the highway.

Basically industrial food production is like a monocrop. No matter what you are growing, you are always putting in fossil fuels and water to get crops out.

When fuels get too expensive, either food prices jump or food rots in the field, because it's not worth putting more money into harvesting it.

And the emissions from just the food sector are probably enough to heat the planet enough to guarantee poor harvests from the resulting bad weather.

The Green Revolution of the middle century that "fed the world" came with a vicious cycle of cheap fossil fuel dependence.

It sure beats starvation, but food now has to reflect the price of the equipment and fossil fuels used to grow and ship it.

BTW, did anyone ever notice that food and fuel price hikes aren't included in most inflation/cost of living indexes?

 

[Mulezen]

Off the top of my head times are a changing. I read somewhere the corn belt is moving north miles each year. California’s drought problems are ushering much more of the Israeli drip irrigation, and other methods. So there’s some progress but reducing the monoculture, in forests as well….should be the ultimate goal. Urban agriculture pioneered by pot growers is a step in the right direction…but a dissembling of Big Ag (Archer Daniels et al) including the odious feedlots is necessary. We must get back to a local food chain with all the benefits of a decentralized system. Michael Pollan’s books have influenced me.

 

[Art Deco]

We are fortunate to live in a area of family farms, including some Mennonite and Amish families, that aren't yet locked into the industrial farm system.

The Mennonites don't use electricity, the Amish use neither electricity nor diesel, only propane and coal.

Unfortunately, they mostly depend upon fertilizers, weed killers, and pesticides as much as horses to produce a crop.

Our small garden is organic, and produces a lot for it's size without any chemicals, but won't scale up to feed hundreds like a commercial operation must, without a impossible amount of labor.

I expect food shortages and frequent price hikes are a part of the new normal as well.

 

[Handlebars]

Off the top of my head times are a changing. I read somewhere the corn belt is moving north miles each year.

When Al Gore heated up the desire to make green fuel, land that had been fallow or never farmed became cornfield. His home state grows corn and so he did well for himself, never mind the land.

 

[Handlebars]

Off the top of my head times are a changing. I read somewhere the corn belt is moving north miles each year.

I couldn't find any articles saying that. Plenty of predictions though.

 

[Handlebars]

One could look at this another way. If we go big towards eliminating the use of coal,oil etc. and it does nothing to slow climate change it will still make the air cleaner and eliminate such disasters as ocean and pipeline spills making it still a winning policy.

Sure. And that is exactly what consumers did for over a century without any force. The average city people used to burn brown coal, then they could afford black coal, then could afford diesel, then natural gas, then electric. The skies cleared and buildings weren't coated in soot.

 

[Mulezen]

Michael Pollan’s An Omnivore’s Dilemma has several descriptions of small farms that punch way above their weight like one whose name escapes me near Staunton, VA whose bounty is truly amazing.

 

[Handlebars]

"Abstract

Cultivation of corn and soybeans in the United States reached record high levels following the biofuels boom of the late 2000s. Debate exists about whether the expansion of these crops caused conversion of grasslands and other carbon-rich ecosystems to cropland or instead replaced other crops on existing agricultural land. We tracked crop-specific expansion pathways across the conterminous US and identified the types, amount, and locations of all land converted to and from cropland, 2008–2012. We found that crop expansion resulted in substantial transformation of the landscape, including conversion of long-term unimproved grasslands and land that had not been previously used for agriculture (cropland or pasture) dating back to at least the early 1970s. Corn was the most common crop planted directly on new land, as well as the largest indirect contributor to change through its displacement of other crops."

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