Tom Toles for October 31, 2010

Tom, I never though i would have to ask you - what the hell are you getting at? Before i finished that sentence i think i got it , he is killing the newest The newest evidence evolutionary science has discovered . Right?

Very good point pavlov

There was an interesting show on History Channel International a few days ago about different ways life on Earth could come to an end.

Black holes, supervolcanoes, asteroids, etc.

The number one danger the show came up with is GLOBAL WARMING.

More deadly than nuclear war or pandemics.

harley, George W. Bush’s staff were looking for the End Times; note that the co-author (and believer) of the Left Behind series, Tim LaHaye, played a part. Our previous foreign policy was aligned with evangelical beliefs that Armageddon would begin with a war in the Middle East, but Israel had to be protected both (1) to enable it to happen, and (2) because Jews would convert en masse to Christianity. This explained The Bush Administration’s somewhat contradictory policy of engaging with the Arabs but being hard-line protectors of Israel without trying to get peace. They needed to protect Israel but make the final war possible. And I’m getting tired of your lame, ignorant, and aggressively ill-informed “opinions” on AGW, harley. You don’t make any sense, you don’t have anything to contribute, and you’ve rejected every attempt to educate you. The evidence KEEPS MOUNTING, but if anything you are getting even more aggressively ignorant.

Whatever the cause of previous mass extinctions and whatever the cause of this one, it’s true that it’s been shown to be remarkably difficult to kill ALL life on Earth. Some life will survive after virtually any imaginable cataclysm, and in whatever environment remains there will again be a gradual rebuilding to diversity.

However, what assurance do we have that HUMANS will be represented among the surviving species? We’ve only been here for the blink of an eye on the geologic scale, and if we disappear the planet will hardly notice we’ve gone. But frankly I find homo sapiens to be an endlessly fascinating species, and I’d like to see them stick around…

Spammers are causing web site readers to become extinct!

You evolve it, … we’ll kill it.

Carl Sagan used to warn against having a nuclear war because the dust kicked up by the bombs (aside from being radioactive) would obscure the sun and cause a “nuclear winter.”

You can see, on a small scale, how dust from Mt. Pinatubo in the Phillipines caused a little cooling in the early ’90s.

The current state of affairs is different, it is greenhouse gases that are causing heat to be trapped, warming the planet. Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone are the main culprits.

For Mt. Pinatubo info:

http://geography.about.com/od/globalproblemsandissues/a/pinatubo.htm

When you’re as pro-pollution and anti-environment as the smog-loving Harley, you can deny anything.

I don’t doubt that “industrial” folks are dumb enough to evade the history THEY created, and that goes to agribusiness as much as auto production, and within the next couple decades the outcome will be several billion deaths, having nothing to do with “nuclear war”. The “religious right”- including Jews, Christians and Muslims- will contribute their ignorance in obedience to faith- to make it happen.

The warning signs aren’t coming from “God”, but from gerbils- well and pika, polar bears, pigmy rabbits, and pandas. The “canaries” are dying like crazy in the coal mine, and humans (the dumber ones) are totally ignoring the warning, continuing to dig yet deeper.

HQ practices the conservative mantra; When in doubt, blame the muslims because scared westerners would believe A-NY-THING about those scary muslims.

He doesn’t know that if it wasn’t for christian eschatology, sucks millions of dollars from scared christians, maybe the State of Israel wouldn’t have survived this far.

The people who want to do something about global warming do not want to take away your first born. They don’t want to kill puppies. They don’t want to encourage pedophilia.

The only thing they want to do is to reduce pollution and make more efficient use of energy, improving the lives of all of mankind.

So why do people like Harley devote so much effort to fighting these desires? What makes people love pollution?

harley, I didn’t say Bush did, I said members of his staff. Go look up Tim LaHaye, it’s easy. Churchill, if “nuclear winter” has been debunked, that’s news to a lot of scientists, since effectively that’s what happened to the dinosaurs – vast amounts of dust kicked up into the atmosphere blocking the sun and causing rapid climate change as well as killing off a lot of plants, etc. That’s pretty well settled. We could do the same with nuclear weapons, quite easily. A good-sized volcano has a significant and measurable cooling impact on the environment; I can’t imagine how dust and smoke from a volcano is different from dust and smoke from a nuclear weapon.

“So why do people like Harley devote so much effort to fighting these desires? What makes people love pollution?”

Big Oil and the Party of No (never miss an opportunity to demonize the other)

I used to try to make things go away by denying them, too.

But then I entered kindergarten.

Besides global warming, not mentioned in the Actionbioscience newsletter,( I don’t think) is the loss of habitat of animals and plants (mentioned).

The Florida panther and the manatee are two animals at which people have thrown money.

Panthers suffered from lack of genetic diversity, so politicians bring in Texas cougars to breed. They build underpasses for the cats to go under roads. But the animals still are run over by vehicles, and killed by other panthers.

All the no-wake zones in the world are not going to save the manatees. A record cold winter killed a lot of manatees, and with diseases, culverts, boat propellers, 676 died so far this year, or 13% of the population.

When is it time to give up on some animals?

I amall for saving the environment, but at some point we have to face the reality that some animals can only survive in zoos.

Anthony, the cash-cow industrialists who have been making fortunes while ignoring the environment love pollution, because it saves them money. They actively fund think-tanks to come up with the twisted and selective “evidence” that people like Harley quote.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/thinktanks-take-oil-money-and-use-it-to-fund-climate-deniers-1891747.html

^ Krakatoa didn’t change the weather? I’m sure it did, just wait till I can look it up.

Of course Toba was the big volcano, 75,000 years ago, when mankind might have been reduced to as few as 5,000 people worldwide. This conclusion came from tracking mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed on by the mother, and its mutations can be estimated.

You realize that after dismantling warheads for decades we have agreed to have 5,500 nuclear warheads for the US, and a similar number for Russia.

The chances of having a nuclear war with Russia are not that great, I think, and North Korea, Iran and pakistan combined don’t have that many weapons (no documentation)

@myming where ever you are:

I tried to follow myming’s instructions to rid my computer of malware, and have made some progress. Computer locked up so thread was incomplete. I upgraded my Internet Explorer, and am hopeful that I can keep improving my computer’s performance.

Still hanging in there, thank you.

Agreed, Spaghettus1, but for some reason I don’t think of Harley as a rich industrialist making money off pollution.

But he seems eager to support them.

How many degrees and for how long does it take to cause a change in weather?

http://www.earlham.edu/~bubbmi/krakatoa.htm

The Skies Change

In the weeks following the eruption, fine fragments of tephra and dust that were propelled kilometers into the stratosphere began to make a ring around the equator. They would remain suspended there for years causing remarkable solar effects and atmospheric hazing as they bent the incoming light. Also the enormous volumes of sulfur dioxide gas molecules that were ejected into the atmosphere combined with water to make sulfuric acid. These acidic aerosols sufficiently blocked enough sunlight to drop the Earth’s temperature by several degrees for a few years. There presence in the atmosphere also created spectacular effects over 70% of the Earth’s surface. Effects such as halos around the sun and moon, and amazing sunsets and sunrises were seen. For years these particles would remain suspended in the atmosphere being the final reminder of the massive and fatal blast that occurred in Sundra Straits. At least for a time…

Apparently, churchill, you’re out of date. And, strangely, researchers who say nuclear winter is bad agree with Freeman Dyson that nuclear weapons are a bigger threat than global warming (presumably because it can happen faster)… http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1873164,00.html Also, James Hansen says Mr. Dyson’s own analytical work on climate and greenhouse gases is very limited, and strongly challenges it, saying that Mr. Dyson “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Dyson, by his own admission, likes jumping around, so it’s quite possible, given that climate issues are turning out to be quite complicated.

churchillwasright said, about 2 hours ago

“GOLFER: He didn’t say it didn’t change the weather. He said it had “negligible effects” There is a difference.

Aside from the reduction of the human population to 5000, I have no doubt the rest of what you posted may have happened,. Perhaps you need to revisit the definition of “nuclear winter”, because a temporary reduction of the Earth’s temperature of a few degrees for a few years isn’t it.”

Tell that to a frozen turtle or an overheated Polar Bear.

BTW you guys are entertaining, but should watch more PBS, Discovery, HD Theatre, National Geo, Science Channel, and History, and History Int’l before messing with me. And I read two newspapers. See you tomorrow

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So that’s your reason for promoting air pollution?

Church, c’mon. Have you ever seen Harley say anything against air pollution?

He gets points for being worried about water pollution, although I doubt he’d be in favor of any related legislation to that effect.

Sorry, Church, maybe I’m getting confused here, but my post “So that’s your reason for promoting air pollution?” was posted in response to Harley’s “cash-cow industrialists…” post.

Your post, an hour later, said “^ And when did you stop beating your wife?” seems to have been directed at me. If not, disregard my reply.

I think we have been posting near-simultaneously, but if you look at the present sequence of the thread, all should become clear.

Or, M Kitt, and Harley:

H2O (water) + CO2 (carbon dioxide) => H2CO3

H2CO3 is carbonic acid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonic_acid

One of the things that gets me is that when the Kyoto Accords came to congress for ratification, the Republicans said “We can’t possibly pass something that doesn’t have a market-based solution (cap and trade)”.

Now they get a proposal for cap and trade and they say “We can’t possibly pass something”

maybe, just MAYBE, there’s a point to be considered that says THIS WHOLE WORLD IS FUELED BY OIL and he who controls the oil controls the world . This is not just an old fart whining about his misfortunes, it’s hard @#$%#&^ fact. Wise up !

For you nuclear winter deniers, (you know who you are).

From wikipedia:

“A study presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2006 found that even a small-scale, regional nuclear war could disrupt the global climate for a decade or more.”

Debunked huh? Hahahahahaha!

churchill - apart from pirate227’s very appropriate remark above, there’s plenty of evidence that we HAVE made a herculean effort to change the environment, or AGW wouldn’t exist. But even ignoring that for the moment, as far back as the 1970s physicists came up with a relatively simple way to destroy all life on Earth above, say, microbial level. Place a series of H-Bombs around the “Ring of Fire” where the continental plates meet around the edges of the Pacific Ocean – it wouldn’t take more than a fraction of the 10,000 warheads we have – and set them off simultaneously in order to lift the edge of the continental plate. Ocean water pouring into hot magma would burst into steam and blow off the crust of the Earth “like peeling the cover off a baseball.”