great white: are WE the before timers? (grim but.)

[Dark One]

do you draw it from the well yourselves, or is it piped into the house?

[fearless-falcon]

well.....................
cows yes yes indeed produce more gas than all our cars PUT TOGETHER
think twice before eating a big mac

[MajiKat]

i'm a vegetarian.

[Fuil Dearg]

jgduffin said:

do you draw it from the well yourselves, or is it piped into the house?

it's piped to our house by an electric pump. it's always very difficult when we lose our electricity (as the pump needs electricity to work) or when the pump very occasionally breaks down. it just shows how much we depend on pumped water! and electricty too i suppose. i mean this is such a wet country and there's always plenty of water in rivers and streams and plenty of rain but we still depend on pumped water from the well and have a difficult time when it is not available.

falconfaseeker said:

well.....................
cows yes yes indeed produce more gas than all our cars PUT TOGETHER
think twice before eating a big mac

i'm a vegetarian too.
i think that the type of gas cows produce is important tho. i don't know how much difference it makes to the Enhanced Greenhouse Effect but gases produced by the burning of petrol or diesel in combustion engines produce many and much harmful gases, for example, sulphur gases produced in this way cause acid rain.

[had]

Cows produce mainly methane, IIRC. Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas then CO2.

I'm not sure what cars produce, but I'm fairly sure they produce a helluva lot more greenhouse gases then cows.

[Fuil Dearg]

Cars produce quite a significant amount of greenhouse gases. Even if cows produce more than cars, the fact that cars produce so much is still as important as it would be if cows did not.

Cows have lives of their own and should not be slain simply because their numbers are too vast. (I know they'll be killed anyway) I guess/speculate that it would be better if the population of cows decreased a lot. For one thing, the land many of them graze on does not belong as grazingland.

A Greenhouse Effect is necessary. Otherwise, the Earth's surface would be icy. The problem is that it has been enhanced too much by extra greenhouse gases. Many things contribute to the Greenhouse Effect. It does not make sense to say that something is a bad influence solely because it contributes to the Greenhouse Effect, even if it contributes to it in a big way and to a large extent. People don't need cars and they cause several bad things besides. Cows are alive and have a right to that life.

Humans have so changed their world that they are blind to any natural order of things. Natural order is lost: humans permit themselves alone to hunt and kill. Some people talk about how they would find dogs hunting livestock distasteful yet this same livestock is treated worse when they are being killed. Why should people determine the environment of the whole land?! They don't live on all of it, they are not it's only inhabitants and they don't need to. The idea that people determine what is done with and to every square inch of land has become so accepted and is usually not even questions nor considered.

If livestock were allowed to roam wild and if dogs were also allowed to do so then dogs would hunt livestock and the numbers of livestock would be reduced. The fact that this idea sounds ridiculous to people and the fact that they do not want animals to be free shows how much people changed their world that they do not see that it should be so or shows how they lack respect for the needs and rights (if there can be rights) of these animals. They aren't necessarily malicious, they just don't see or don't care. There are people too who see it as ridiculous because of it's unrealistic nature, people who care but cannot easily do anything about the way things are. There are a few who actually try to make conditions better for animals in bad conditions.

The numbers of dogs (in this country anyway) is high because of puppy farming and greed and irresponsible despicable people who want to make a quick buck, at the expense of the dogs they breed. Many of these dogs, and especially after Christmas, are put to death 'painlessly'. Many of these are puppies. I'm cynical and pessimistic.

[had]

Natural order? Sure, humanity has done nasty stuff in the form of reducing biodiversity, and, in general, degrading the environment, but 'losing the natural order'? That's what's technology's all about! Using fire to cook food is hardly something that happens all that often 'naturally', but I couldn't see you advocating the entirety of humanity going without cooked food.

Not to mention that 'the natural order' changes all the time, naturally. There have been extinctions before humans turned up. And not even the violent ones, like the dinosaurs, and the Permian extinction (in which roughly 96% of all marine life and 70% of all terrestrial life was killed. Nothing humans could ever do could ever come so close to completely destroying all life on Earth) aren't the only ones - things die all the time. Things change. 'Natural' processes have brought humans into existence - and whatever we do is inherently part of any 'natural order', if such a thing exists, because of it.

I often think the natural/artificial distinction is a little blurry. Humans are animals, too. If a dolphin does something, it's natural. We're not that much smarter then dolphins.

I have no problem with us 'controlling' the environment. I have a problem with lost biodiversity. Controlling stuff just means that we have a handle on what's going on - it doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad. For example, zoos. Zoos that do conservation work, that is. They 'control' the local environment, and even bring in animals from other places, in order to try to preserve biodiversity - a good thing. And if you consider the number of mass extinctions in the fossil record - and there are a few of them, every few hundred million years or so - being able to avoid that sort of event requires significant control over the environment.

Or, at the least, the ability to deflect large incoming asteroids (You could nuke it, I suppose, but it probably wouldn't work very well. You'd just end up with a cloud of small rocks with the same kinetic energy flying along the same route, rather then one big rock. Whoop-di-doo).

Of course, we're sort of heading towards a mass extinction event right now. Not quite as massive as others in history, but a all-out nuclear war would definitely show up, as would some sort of runaway greenhouse effect.

Humans might not 'need' cars, but we don't need a lot of things. I don't need a personal computer, but my quality of life is enhanced significantly by the possessing of such. It's not a crime to have something you don't need, as long as you can have it in a sustainable sense.

Basically, what I'm getting at in my rambling and long winded way, is that the way first world nations live is not inherently bad - it's the fact that with current technology, it's unsustainable that is bad. That, and allowing massive poverty gaps to form. That doesn't help anybody.

[Fuil Dearg]

i agree with almost all of what you have said. as usual, you make obvious to me how ignorant i actually am. i think you are quite sensible.

FD

[DragonRider/Robin]

I agree, we do need the Greenhouse Effect, yet it's killing us. By the looks of Australia, we'll need an evacuation of the south if the weather goes on like this. I mean, not anytime this or next year, but sometime in the future. We're more likely to die of skin cancer or drought before the Greenhouse Effect sends Australia underwater. But I don't think I'd live near the Medeterainean Sea because that's slowly shrinking. The land masses are moving together. The Atlantic is supposed to get bigger, though.

[had]

It's not the greenhouse effect that's doing it - it's the enhanced greenhouse effect. We're putting stuff into the atmosphere faster then it's coming out, and the result is that the concentration of various greenhouse gases is increasing. It's the Greenhouse Effect getting bigger, basically. If it wasn't for the sort of 'baseline' greenhouse effect that we have now, we'd be Mars - -100 celsius on a good day.

Of course, going the other way and becoming Venus probably won't help much.

[MajiKat]

plant more trees. trees soak up the Co2, am i right? i don;'t know too much of this scientific stuff in theory and technical terms, all i know is what i see and experience. i cannot breathe in the city. not all cities would be like that i suppose, but i feel like i am slowly suffocating in a place like Sydney. it may be more psychosomatic than anytying else, being from the country. i dunno. but in the country, i can breathe. trees are doing their job. we cut down too many of them. yeah we re-plant, and we have timber plantations, but deforestation is a serious issue. as is overgrazing etc - such a huge list. we need to start using more renewable resources. people have such strange attitudes to that idea - i told a mate once that if i were to build a house, i would use recycled timber, go to a house recycling place, and they looked at me funny. but really, why the heck not? why use brand new timber to build a house when there is other methods available?

i don't understand people alot of the time.

[had]

I believe current research suggests that old-growth forests soak up a little carbon, but that new forests and growing trees actually produce it. This may be incorrect, though.

The absolute best way to semi-permanently get rid of CO2 in the air is to write lots of books. Or put down lots of asphalt. Lots of carbon in that that's out of the atmosphere!

(Seriously,that would work, but the amounts involved to cancel out current emissions are prohibitive. Plus, asphalt is ugly.)

As far as I understand the science (I'm more an astrophysics person myself), we can't really increase the rate at which greenhouse gases are turned into other things - at least, not sustainably and not realistically. So the only thing that's left is to cut down on emissions - which can be done by finding better energy sources then fossil fuels. That's really where all the emissions come from - fossil fuel use.

(As for deforestation, that's a biggy too. Mostly due to loss of biodiversity - sure, the responsible companies plant trees where they've logged, but new forests are distinctly different to old ones. The only way to sustainably log is to do it in an artificial forest grown expressly for that purpose.)

[Dark One]

The worlds ocean soak up more carbon than all of the worlds forests combined

[MajiKat]

had said:

asphalt is ugly

i couldn't agree more! i hate it! esp in schools - how stimulating is a playground full of concrete?

[had]

The amount of CO2 in oceans is pretty much in equilibrium, I thought. With billions of years of existence, you'd think it would reach equilibrium fairly quickly.

But yes, there's more carbon locked away in seawater then in trees. This, unfortunately, brings up a positive feedback cycle - if the oceans start heating up, CO2 becomes less soluble in them. As they're currently pretty much saturated (I think), that means they have to spit out some CO2. That causes more global warming, which causes more CO2 to be released, and so forth. Not good, basically.

[Fuil Dearg]

asphalt is ugly, i agree.

maybe the melting of the ice-caps (fresh water) would compensate for the CO₂ released by the heated seawater. ( bad joke)

whatever about modern conveniences, i wouldn't like to be without my toothbrush.