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7887. vonKreedon - 4/12/2012 7:02:57 PM Check out this terrifying infographic. It's a complicated infographic, so it takes a bit of time to grok, but then...
P.S.: I really like the Smithsonian Magazine, so many fascinating articles about all sorts of things.
7888. vonKreedon - 4/12/2012 9:15:53 PM I sort of hate the idea of adding further complexity to the above infographic, but I would like to see a couple more lines:
- Global renewable energy production
- Global metal recycling 7889. arkymalarky - 4/14/2012 11:09:09 PM This new satellite internet is fantastic. First good internet we've ever had here. It's as fast as broadband at work. Hope it stays that way. 7890. concerned - 4/16/2012 9:18:04 PM Re. 7887 -
Interesting graphic, but I suspect its premise is outdated. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the economic collapse it predicts is predicated on mankind's using up all of one or more critical available resources by 2030 or something like that, resulting in mass starvation and war.
Well, now we're 40% of the way to 2030 past the farthest extrapolation shown on the graph, and there now is no imminent fear that an economic collapse will be caused in the forseeable future due to an insuperable lack of natural resources.
What looks like more probable causes of economic collapse now, IMO although more localized in scope today (such as with the EC PIIGS) are widespread demographic shifts coupled with increasingly irresponsible governmental spending and social policies. So eventual war is still a possibility; not so much starvation. 7891. vonKreedon - 4/16/2012 9:37:14 PM Yeah, the non-renewable resources curve was supposed to be the driver for the collapse and that curve is the furthest off the predicted track, and if the graphic showed the years from 2001-2010 it would probably be further off track, thus pushing the collapse back by some decades. OTOH, my wife looked at the graphic and what leaped out at her was the Global Pollution track. Her take is that if observed levels are close to predicted levels then we won't have a chance to run out of non-renewables before choking ourselves to a Malthusian collapse. 7892. concerned - 4/17/2012 12:04:36 AM How about a nice exhilirating bike ride in China to clear out your lungs?
According to the article that included this picture, there are 750,000 deaths a year from pollution related illnesses in China. And it's interesting that a primary source for air pollution along much of the US Pacific Coast is the effluvia from Chinese coal fired power plants. I once saw a satellite photo showing that.
Did you know that China has the world's most colorful rivers? Proof:
And they call this the Yellow River....
It's not easy being green....
Here's the Yellow River actually being yellow with cute bubbles on it. 7893. Wombat - 4/18/2012 3:29:46 PM Hey, it's a nonregulatory paradise! If your guy gets elected, our rivers can be just like that! Consarned environmental regulations are holoding the recovery... 7894. Wombat - 4/18/2012 3:30:24 PM "hindering" the recovery... 7895. thoughtful - 4/18/2012 3:34:12 PM Ah yes, reminds me of the good old days along the banks of the Cayahoga River.
7896. Wombat - 4/18/2012 3:53:21 PM At least it's not on fire in the above picture... 7897. concerned - 4/18/2012 5:52:22 PM Your response in 7893 makes me think of the Family Guy episode where Stewie and Brian travel back in time to prevent 9/11 and, as a result of that and no resulting Afghan War, George Bush lets his 'natural' 'conservative' propensities create a situation where a world war occurs that results in the virtual destruction of the earth.
Who started the EPA? The greatly hated Conservative, Richard Milhous Nixon. It defies reason to seriously believe that conservatives are less concerned with environmental quality than anybody else except for fringe types.
Facile, trite, marginally entertaining...and almost entirely untrue - that's about as far as all those 'conservatives are bad guys only held in check by world events and/or heroic progressives' scenarios can be taken in reality. 7898. vonKreedon - 4/18/2012 6:58:58 PM Ummm...Con, have you been paying attention to what Repub candidates and legislators have been saying about environmental regulations? Did you notice that Nixon, if he were active today and pushing the same policies, would not be considered a conservative, I'm not sure he'd even be considered a RINO.
Some of today's Repub positions on environmental regulations:
Not to mention the whole global warming denial vitriol that passes for policy on the right.7899. iiibbb - 4/18/2012 7:44:01 PM This is why I got into environmental research...
... it has not be a lucrative career path... but I'm still mostly glad I did it. I just get more depressed than if I'd been an engineer I think. 7900. concerned - 4/18/2012 8:13:27 PM Sorry. If CO2 is a pollutant because it retains atmospheric heat, so is water vapor, a much greater contributor to global warming.
The EPA should either classify both or neither as pollutants based on that criterion.
7901. concerned - 4/18/2012 8:35:11 PM The EPA classifying CO2 as a pollutant is an unjustifiable, unconscionable overreach. 7902. vonKreedon - 4/18/2012 8:44:18 PM Because global climate change due to the megatons of CO2 we've been dumping into the atmosphere is a hoax? 7903. concerned - 4/18/2012 9:28:40 PM I'd say that while anthropogenic global warming measurably exists, all the hoopla and doomsaying surrounding it qualifies as the greatest scientific hoax in human history.
I'm not one to encourage a hoax, even if it is purported to be for the welfare of the human race. Are you?
One aspect of this hoax that has been recently exposed is that new research has definitively established that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were not limited to Europe as the IPCC and global warming alarmists have stoutly maintained but were of far greater extent, most probably global. Link to Syracuse University press release follows:
Scientists use rare mineral to correlate past climate events in Europe, Antarctica
This research alone demolishes a good deal of the global warming edifice. Every year now the screaming from the global warming chicken littles dies down some more - the hysteria diminishes. And for good reason. It's been over 30 years since the global warming hoax first hit, and the projections of weather change, sea level change, etc. have reduced by nearly an order of magnitude in just a generation and a half. This is what global warming alarmists have laughably called a 'consensus'.
In fact, an increasing body of the best scientific research indicates that we are over a decade into a cooling trend that may last for decades longer. What's worse, vK? Cooling or warming? If the alarmists don't know WTF they are talking about, is it smart to let them call the shots? I say: 'no'. 7904. concerned - 4/18/2012 9:45:26 PM An additional reason to oppose the EPA's recent actions regarding CO2 is that there is not scientific basis in reality to consider it a pollutant.
The EPA is doing nothing more creditworthy than injecting itself into politics and partisan conservation ideology, and has admitted that it has not taken the welfare of the US or its citizens into any account when it made these changes, nor weighed the relative contribution of anthropogenic CO2 production from the US in any way as far as quantity nor global warming effect against that of the rest of the world, which is clearly misfeasance, IMO. 7905. vonKreedon - 4/18/2012 9:54:43 PM Con said, "In fact, an increasing body of the best scientific research indicates that we are over a decade into a cooling trend that may last for decades longer."
Do you have a cite for this? I've got a cite from NOAA showing that 2005 and 2010 tied for the warmest years on record, globally, since such records started being kept in 1880. And NASA says that 2011 was the ninth warmest year since 1880. Doesn't seem like a cooling trend.
Regarding concensus:
• Climate Change and the Integrity of Science [PDF] letter from 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences.
• National Academies' Joint Statement [PDF] (includes G8 and 5 other countries)
• American Association for the Advancement of Science
• American Meteorological Society
• American Geophysical Union
• American Statistical Association
• Wide variety of other scientific societies [PDF]
7906. concerned - 4/18/2012 10:35:53 PM Btw, did you know that the Polar Bear is most closely related to the Irish Brown Bear that lived between 38,000 and 10,000 years ago, and that polar bears and North American Brown bears typically have fertile offspring?
This strongly suggests that, besides their coat color, which is no more an expressed genetic variation than what may be expected between a northern European and an Eskimo, polar bears' adaptations to an arctic rather than a temperate climate lifestyle is primarily 'cultural' rather than genetic or instinctual.
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