@suzyQ3 wrote:
@patbz wrote:
@Ketra : It is the Nation's record (always has been, too).
@patbz, if there is anything I can count on, it's that you are 99% unlikely to change a denier's mind with facts. It just can't be done.
It's an interesting phenomenon. I would love to know what's truly behind it. I'm sure that it differs from person to person, but it seems that are some common denominators involved, probably a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors at work.
It is also nearly impossible to change the mind of a believer in climate change being based solely on CO2 emissions. People choose to believe what they wish to believe in. I tend to be flexible in my beliefs and not blindly accept only one view. I've changed my mind on many issues through the years and I likely will on many more over time.
My view, as stated in my earlier post, is that if the temperatures weren't increasing, we'd be in much bigger trouble. We're generating three times the heat we were in 1950. Triple the heat output and temperatures had better rise. If they haven't risen, we're in a whole lot of trouble. The world's population has grown dramatically since the 1950's and each and every human being on the planet is a 98.6-degree radiator radiating heat from their body 24/7.
Let's assume that the CO2 believers are right and we need to make changes. What's an easy change to make? Ban small gasoline engines. According to the EPA a new gas-powered lawnmower running for one hour creates as much pollution as eleven new cars being driven for one hour. There are about 54 million lawns being mowed each week during the growing season. 54 million yards each taking an average of an hour to mow and each hour of mowing equalling the driving of eleven cars would be about the same as taking 594 million cars off the road for an hour. That wouldn't help matters? Add in leaf blowers, snow throwers, weed whackers and the like and you could drastically reduce the pollution by simply banning them and having people replace them with electric or battery-powered versions, all of which are readily available and proven. It's a cheap and effective way to vastly lower pollution. Electric versions of those devices are typically comparably priced and in many cases lower priced.
So, why aren't small gas engines banned? There are cheap and readily available replacements. I've used electric and rechargeable mowers and weed whackers for decades. Why keep those horribly polluting machines on the market when there's no need to? Why keep letting manufacturers inject CO2 into products? Commercial use of CO2 in items like sodas releases millions of tons of CO2 each and every year. Why not ban dry ice which is solid CO2? Heck, ban bread and alcoholic drinks since CO2 is created and released in the making of those products. If the problem is as severe as people who truly believe like to think it is, wouldn't those moves be sensible? Good God, the world is ending in ten to twelve years if you believe the Greta's of the world. Surely having a flat drink instead of a bubbly one isn't too great a price to pay to save the world.
The reason why no one talks about doing any of that is because there isn't an industry (solar photovoltaic, wind, electric cars) funding them that looks to profit from it. More CO2 is used commercially than most people believe and yet no one talks about limiting that.
I've seen the doom and gloom predictions all my life. In the seventies, we were facing an ice age. Some were saying it was already too late to stop the glaciers. Some wanted us to build massive man-made steel ribbed mountains north of our northernmost cities to break up the ice and then use nuclear power plants to melt that ice into drinking water for city residents. For a while, the Gulf Stream was moving up the East Coast and would give NJ Miami-like weather. Yeah, the dire predictions tend to be wrong in every single case. Oh, but this time, this time they're right. Yeah, we'll see. But if they truly believed it, why not take simple steps to solve the problem? What, the soda industry is too powerful to save the world?
If those pushing CO2 as the cause of climate change truly believed what they were saying, there are lots of things that could be done now, with minimal impact on the lives of humans to drastically lower the output of CO2 at little to no cost. They ignore those areas though and instead seem more intent on terrifying children into believing that the world will end.
The planet is a lot more resilient than many choose to believe. When rising sea levels hit dry land, the water doesn't just sit atop the land. It gets pulled down by gravity, deeper and deeper until there's no place left for it to go. It then pools there and forms aquifers. The land above that water gets displaced and rises, helping to offset the rise in sea levels. More CO2 means more lush plant growth. Some commercial plant growers inject CO2 into their greenhouses to encourage more lush growth. (Yet another commercial use of CO2 that's not banned.) As growing seasons get longer plants consume more and more CO2. Heck, the paintball industry alone uses tons of CO2 just so people can shoot one another with paintballs. Surely banning that isn't too drastic a step?
The climate on this planet has never been stable. It undergoes wild swings and has done so long before man existed and will do so long after we're gone. Those who believe the climate was ever stable are deluding themselves. Oh, and those ice core samples that show far lower levels of CO2 800,000 years ago? Did the scientists telling you about those ever mention the existence of sea ice algae? Sea ice algae is a microscopic algae that lives in, oddly enough, sea ice. It moves through the seemingly solid ice seeking food which in the case of algae is CO2. When it finds CO2 it breathes it in and exhales oxygen. Unless those same scientists can absolutely guarantee that no sea ice algae ever came across those trapped air bubbles, they can't guarantee that those samples are nearly as pure as they want you to believe.
Some want to call me a "science denier." I believe in biology, geology, physics, and most of the established sciences. I don't believe in climate science that forecasts imminent doom largely because I do believe in those other sciences. Geology and physics explain what happens when sea levels rise. Biology explains how rising CO2 levels are used by plants. Ask yourself this, if those pushing CO2 as the cause of our future imminent death truly believed it, why wouldn't they be pushing for smaller simpler changes that could have a very dramatic impact on CO2 emissions, but minimal impact on our lives? All they want to push are solar photovoltaic, wind and electric cars. Why? Maybe it's because they're being paid by them.
Now I know this rant from a science-denier won't even get any of the true believers to even consider that I could be right. After all, you know you're right. Sure, we're creating three times the heat that we did in the recent past, but that doesn't matter. Sure, there are vastly more humans each radiating 98.6 degrees of heat 24/7. But, none of that matters. You know it doesn't matter since those you listen to tell you it doesn't matter. I'm just a science-denying idiot who won't accept the truth that you all know to be the truth. Yeah, I've seen too many lies in my life to fall for every new one that comes along. If the world implodes in a massive fireball in ten years, you can all tell me I was wrong. My money is that in ten years time the next in a seemingly endless number of points of no return will be once again just ten years away. It's the eternal cycle.
I'm sure psychologists have studied those who always believe the world is ending and only they are smart enough, informed enough, to know it'll happen. There's likely a term for them in psychology. I'm not one of those people. We weren't annihilated by nuclear weapons, the hole in the ozone layer hasn't burned us all to a crisp, the ice age never came, NJ is far from Miami-like, bed bugs haven't taken over the world, AIDS/Ebola/insert name of whichever flu here, hasn't killed us all, and climate change won't end the world in ten to twelve years. If I'm wrong, you can all gloat, but I strongly suspect I won't be wrong.
Fly!!! Eagles!!! Fly!!!
goes out to you, Patbz. :-)
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