The Great Global Warming Swindle Options

[impala454]

From ESPN2:
Twenty ways to be a greener sports fan this Earth Day:

1. Demand that opposing batters do not replace broken bats.

2. Conserve water by drinking more beer at sporting events.

3. Thank general managers who hired Dusty Baker, Rick Adelman, Norv Turner, Mike Keenan and all other recycled coaches.

4. Save energy by only turning on your television to watch the final minutes of NBA and NHL playoff games. You know, like you do now.

5. If a member of the sports media, use compact fluorescent lights to illuminate your Brett Favre shrine.

6. Encourage your favorite athletes to use only organic steroids.

7. Petition NASCAR to replace its gas guzzlers with more fuel-conscious vehicles such as Hummers or Ford Excursions.

8. Eat one vegetarian meal per week, assuming Prince Fielder leaves some veggies for the rest of us.

9. Encourage your favorite team to play earth-friendly jock rock, such as "Blitzkrieg Bop (Hey Ho! Let's Grow Sustainable Crops!)" and "I Like To Move It ... From The Trash Into A Recycling Container."

10. Petition USA Swimming to reduce the water depth in competition pools to two feet.

11. Petition USA Diving to reduce the water depth in competition pools to three feet. OK, four.

12. Use natural creams and moisturizers. Or just urinate on your hands to toughen them.

13. Push your favorite baseball team to sign a lot of good bunters and then declare the infield a protected natural grassland.

14. Demand professional teams travel by electric light rail, even if that means lengthening the NBA season to 17 months.

15. If a sports blogger, continue to wear only your underwear to cut back on laundry, but come out of your mother's basement in order to use sunlight instead of the electric lights in your basement lair.

16. Cut back on the time you spend showering. Or skip bathing altogether like Jason Giambi.

17. When golfing, replace your divots. Then, reward yourself for your green act by shaving two strokes off your score.

18. If a groupie, reduce or eliminate your use of hairspray, animal-tested beauty products and extra hotel towels.

19. Cut back on paper consumption by getting all of your news, information and entertainment from ESPN.com. Woot! Woot!

20. Boo any cheerleading squad* or dance team that performs with clothing** covering more than 10-percent of their bodies.

[impala454]

So I play wow in a guild of old people. Some might have heard of it, it spans tons of games, called "The Older Gamers". We were chatting about our jobs while playing this evening and one of the older guys has an interesting job. He mentioned he'd be out of game for a few days, something about hosting a workshop with researchers or something, so I ask what about. He says they're people he went to antarctica with last fall, coming down to florida to see some ice core sample they took up there. So I picked his brain for a while, turns out he's the "head curator for the antarctic marine geology research facility." If you want to just say "omg BS the guy is lying he's playing wow blah blah blah etc" that's fine, just don't even read any more of this and move on. I see no reason the guy would lie about it, but whatever. I've heard the guy's voice and he sounds like an older indian guy.

So I asked him what the real deal is as far as this global warming stuff goes. He had some interesting ways of putting it. I'll post the gist of the conversation:

Him (when asked about his job): Mine is crappy money and sometimes insane hours, and the responsibility for the fruits of million-dollar research projects. It is gruntwork that requires PhDs and the ability to do mindless tasks concentrated for long periods of time. But I do get to go to the polar regions occasionally

Me: So I bet you'd have a lot to say about this global warming business eh?

Him: hehe. Well I am a paleoclimatologist, so yes

Me: Awesome, so are we all gonna be under water next year or what?

Him: I was reading a book about that today, from 1979. It's by one of my great idols, James Hays, who came up with a model to explain ice ages with orbital variations. And it's funny, it has the exact same ideas we are trying to sell the public today.

Me: So what's the main idea?

Him: That the problem is too complex for us still to fathom whether our activities are helping the globe warm up. But we are definitely dumping the right ingredients into the system. So we should probably try to control our outlet of climate gasses and pollutions, although there is no guarantee that natural changes won't do us in anyway hehe.

Me: Well it's nice to hear what a real scientist thinks rather than the cnn scientists think

Him: A somewhat bleaker view I guess. I like to think it as we have our fingers on the buttons that control climate. We just don't know which one does what, or how fast the response will be when we press it. But either way we will survive. Just don't buy real estate near the coast

Me: I'll go ahead and go get my ocean front property in arizona

Him: If West Antarctica goes to sea, South Florida is gone. If East Antarctica goes, almost all of the East Coast is gone.

Me: Doh

Him: But East Antarctica has been around for 12-25 million years (we hope), so why would it?

Me: So how about Houston, am I screwed? The street sign on our main drag in my suburb here says 25 ft

Him: If West Antarctica melts, you will get 18 feet of sea level rise. East Antarctica will give about 150.

Me: So I read in some places we're starting to see a cooling trend?

Him: Yes but not more than the warming trend. The cooling trend was mostly an idea from the 70s, based on increased particle output (soot and such). But frankly, we don't really know if CO2 and soot cancels each other out or not. We do know that adding soot or CO2 to the system will change it, somehow. We just don't know exactly what the effects would be.

<and blah blah back to WoW gamin>

He said he has a small team of grad students and PhDs that do research and such. Pretty neat guy. Too bad he's terrible at playing his warrior though

[Testm0nkey]

so now that you had your WoW friend explain global warming to you you believe it? i like how every scientist other than this WoW guy is a cnn cohort

[impala454]

Cat I didn't say "every scientist other than this guy is a cnn cohort". I was making a joke about the media. And "now do I believe it?" Believe what? This guy didn't say that we as humans are the problem. He said yes we are putting the right ingredients into the system. Read that very carefully, he did not implicate that we are the cause, only that it is possible. What he said was that they are basically still nowhere near fully understanding it.

And let me spell out what I think so you stop misconstruing it.

1. Yes, the climate changes. It warms up, it cools down, warms back up, cools back down, etc.
2. Yes, changes in the climate have effects on us, like melting ice, rising sea levels, weather, etc.
3. Is CO2 output from human industry the cause? I don't believe so. I think the natural changes in climate far exceed anything that's currently possible for us to do, short of setting off hundreds of nukes and throwing us into a nuclear winter.

So the extremely general question "Do you believe in global warming" (hah, sounds like some kinda f'n religion). Yes I believe it happens, obviously. But that answer of "yes" does not mean yes I believe it's our fault and I'm on my way to the prius dealership to trade in my truck.

[Dogmeat]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/24/close.call.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests.


Researchers confer on data from the Genographic Project, which uses genetics to study anthropology.

The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis released Thursday.

How quaint, we were almost extinct before we even had the ability to nuke ourselves let alone cause global catastrophe's by increasing our quality of life

[impala454]

I've seen on some discovery channel shows, where during the ice ages thousands of years ago, that at one point they estimate there were only 60 reproducing human females left on the planet.

[Dogmeat]

I've seen on some discovery channel shows, where during the ice ages thousands of years ago, that at one point they estimate there were only 60 reproducing human females left on the planet.

wow, no wonder females have such a tendency to be sluts. it's genetically inbred into them

[FORSAKENR320]

Cat I didn't say "every scientist other than this guy is a cnn cohort". I was making a joke about the media. And "now do I believe it?" Believe what? This guy didn't say that we as humans are the problem. He said yes we are putting the right ingredients into the system. Read that very carefully, he did not implicate that we are the cause, only that it is possible. What he said was that they are basically still nowhere near fully understanding it.

And let me spell out what I think so you stop misconstruing it.

1. Yes, the climate changes. It warms up, it cools down, warms back up, cools back down, etc.
2. Yes, changes in the climate have effects on us, like melting ice, rising sea levels, weather, etc.
3. Is CO2 output from human industry the cause? I don't believe so. I think the natural changes in climate far exceed anything that's currently possible for us to do, short of setting off hundreds of nukes and throwing us into a nuclear winter.

So the extremely general question "Do you believe in global warming" (hah, sounds like some kinda f'n religion). Yes I believe it happens, obviously. But that answer of "yes" does not mean yes I believe it's our fault and I'm on my way to the prius dealership to trade in my truck.

i understood all that.... i think cat was too distracted reading it and trying to look for things to say " i'm right i'm right!" even when it's fully apparent that she's trying to be the "random button pusher" that this guy talks about.

[Testm0nkey]

no i totally understood what he was saying 6 pages back. what i just dont get is how still doesnt believe we are a big factor in global warming. you believe we are pumping the "bad stuff" out and you believe that affects the environment but you stop short believing we are a cause?

yearly 1 person pumps over a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere with their cars alone. you dont think that has an effect when you take into account how many cars are drivign around? thats what i dont get

brandon whats your expertise on this subject? you have any background at all? oh wait you dont!

[impala454]

no i totally understood what he was saying 6 pages back. what i just dont get is how still doesnt believe we are a big factor in global warming. you believe we are pumping the "bad stuff" out and you believe that affects the environment but you stop short believing we are a cause?

yearly 1 person pumps over a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere with their cars alone. you dont think that has an effect when you take into account how many cars are drivign around? thats what i dont get

That's the kind of reasoning that allows the swindle to continue. Let me put it this way and see if it makes sense. You got an olympic sized swimming pool full of plain old water. Now toss in a teaspoon of salt. Then after you do that, some dude comes in with a wheel barrow of salt and dumps the whole thing in. Technically, you both made the water more salty, but which one of you really effected the system? Now to see what my buddy was saying, swap the pool a system we don't yet fully understand.

And another thing, "1 person pumps over a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere with their car". How much is that? This is by far the biggest factor in how the swindle is perpetuated. Use of very large quantities scare people. You are scared into belief by quantity. Al Gore can come on the screen, and tell you that the US puts out 500,000,000 tons of CO2 (I dunno what the real number is), and you're absolutely wowed by that number, along with every other treehugger out there. Do you have any idea how to quantify that? How does that "1 ton of CO2 per car" add up compared to how much CO2 per our breathing? Instead of being wowed by numbers, why don't you quantify them in relative terms and actually think about them. Go find all your terrible CO2 output numbers, and compare them to this, and then come back and tell me that we as humans are making some huge changes to the earth's atmosphere:

(from wiki)
Total mass of the Earth's atmosphere: 5,148,000,000,000,000 metric tons

[Testm0nkey]

ok i have this from my carbon capture notes - a typical 30 mpg (!) car driving 10k miles/year emits a ton of carbon into the air annually. today there are ~ 600 million cars in the world and its predicted that there will be 2 billion passenger cars on the road in 50 years.

side note 30 mpg and 10k a year is like amazing efficiency. virtually NO ONE especially americans get that.

but cars arent the only polluters industrial and commercial buildings are some of the worst, add into that factories, mining, everything else you get astronomical numbers.

BUT THEN you have to think about the chemistry behind global warming.

every molecule of destructive gas and particles we emit into the atmosphere has exponential negative expansion. thats because a lot of the gas, virtually all of them, that make up our atmosphere serve as a catalyst to produce more negative compounds...

im on the phone so i didnt make that clear. i can write out the formulas if you want



and it was PROVEN that even our use of CFC's affected the atmophere so much it created a massive hole the size of australia. thats huge support for the theory that we can affect the atmosphere. its proof


and i am willing to bet you wont read this like you didnt read my other long post where i explained what global warming was and some of its evidence because its CLEAR not many people actually know much about it

[Dogmeat]

[FORSAKENR320]

brandon whats your expertise on this subject? you have any background at all? oh wait you dont!

and show me where i have tried to throw around proof or arguement in any of the globel warming threads.

i know to keep quiet when it's a subject i am not educated on. but from reading your posts, you're too concerned with trying to prove you ARE educated on the subject, and not enough on the actual context of anyone elses posts.

[Testm0nkey]

thats all ive been doing, addressing other peoples posts.

you people honestly dont know anything. impala actually seems to know something what hes talking about

[Mommy]

You all fascinate me on this subject