Here ya go for some fun reading:
http://www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/author_archive/church_white/GRL_Church_White_2006_024826.pdf
and another:
http://kaares.ulapland.fi/home/hkunta/jmoore/pdfs/JevMooreGrin2005JC003229.pdf
Last edited:
An Inconvenient Truth
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http://www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/author_archive/church_white/GRL_Church_White_2006_024826.pdf
and another:
http://kaares.ulapland.fi/home/hkunta/jmoore/pdfs/JevMooreGrin2005JC003229.pdf
the inconvenient truth?
?An Inconvenient Truth? to be shown by Seaside Repertory
By Deborah Wheeler
Regardless of where you stand on the position of global warming, Seaside Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Craige Hoover said he feels it would be irresponsible to have an indie film series and not show ?what may be considered the most important film in the history of mankind.?
Hoover is speaking of Al Gore?s controversial and passionate independent film, ?An Inconvenient Truth,? which will be shown Feb. 21 and his decision to include it in spite of its two recent local outings.
Hoover said he had seen the film and feels it presents a balanced view on the subject of global warming and does so in an entertaining format.
?Whether he (Gore) is right or not is for history to decide, but I think it is too important not to consider and act upon. Renewable energy is out there and yet we continue to perpetuate our current dependence on pollutants,? said Hoover.
Disturbing to Hoover is that some label the movie ?political.?
?Yes, it was made by and stars a former Democratic presidential candidate, but the film aligns itself with neither party and endorses no particular campaign. It simply relays some startling scientific data and offers some potential preventative actions,? he said. ?The film and its message would have been great no matter who spearheaded the project. Gore is simply a well-respected man, which lends credibility to the project.?
A clue to the ?startling data? to which Hoover alludes is offered in the film?s synopsis at www.climatecrisis.net, which says, ?Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world?s scientists are right, we have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.?
The film presents Gore?s personal introduction as a college student to warnings of a looming massive environmental crisis to his present desire to make a difference in what he considers the biggest moral challenge facing global civilization. It presents statistics about the current increased number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes that have been experienced, advancing cases of malaria and melting glaciers ? all attributed to global warming and the increased need for fuel consumption. Alternatives are also offered to help the dilemma.
?I absolutely loved it the first time I saw it and I look forward to showing the film and engaging in spirited conversation when it is over,? said Hoover.
Although he feels ?An Inconvenient Truth? is the most important film to be presented during the festival, Hoover is also enthusiastic about ?Bachelorman,? which he calls ?highly entertaining and riveting.?
?It is completely hilarious and a great example of how great films can be made without the backing of major studio,? he said. It will be shown Feb. 28.
Earl Newton, a local filmmaker and independent fi lm afi cionado, assisted Hoover in this season?s fi lm selections.
The Seaside Indie Film Series is presented each Wednesday in February at 7 p.m. at Seaside Meeting Hall Theater. It is funded in part by Trattoria Borago of Grayton Beach, ticket and beverage sales, and individual and corporate donations.
By Deborah Wheeler
Regardless of where you stand on the position of global warming, Seaside Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Craige Hoover said he feels it would be irresponsible to have an indie film series and not show ?what may be considered the most important film in the history of mankind.?
Hoover is speaking of Al Gore?s controversial and passionate independent film, ?An Inconvenient Truth,? which will be shown Feb. 21 and his decision to include it in spite of its two recent local outings.
Hoover said he had seen the film and feels it presents a balanced view on the subject of global warming and does so in an entertaining format.
?Whether he (Gore) is right or not is for history to decide, but I think it is too important not to consider and act upon. Renewable energy is out there and yet we continue to perpetuate our current dependence on pollutants,? said Hoover.
Disturbing to Hoover is that some label the movie ?political.?
?Yes, it was made by and stars a former Democratic presidential candidate, but the film aligns itself with neither party and endorses no particular campaign. It simply relays some startling scientific data and offers some potential preventative actions,? he said. ?The film and its message would have been great no matter who spearheaded the project. Gore is simply a well-respected man, which lends credibility to the project.?
A clue to the ?startling data? to which Hoover alludes is offered in the film?s synopsis at www.climatecrisis.net, which says, ?Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world?s scientists are right, we have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.?
The film presents Gore?s personal introduction as a college student to warnings of a looming massive environmental crisis to his present desire to make a difference in what he considers the biggest moral challenge facing global civilization. It presents statistics about the current increased number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes that have been experienced, advancing cases of malaria and melting glaciers ? all attributed to global warming and the increased need for fuel consumption. Alternatives are also offered to help the dilemma.
?I absolutely loved it the first time I saw it and I look forward to showing the film and engaging in spirited conversation when it is over,? said Hoover.
Although he feels ?An Inconvenient Truth? is the most important film to be presented during the festival, Hoover is also enthusiastic about ?Bachelorman,? which he calls ?highly entertaining and riveting.?
?It is completely hilarious and a great example of how great films can be made without the backing of major studio,? he said. It will be shown Feb. 28.
Earl Newton, a local filmmaker and independent fi lm afi cionado, assisted Hoover in this season?s fi lm selections.
The Seaside Indie Film Series is presented each Wednesday in February at 7 p.m. at Seaside Meeting Hall Theater. It is funded in part by Trattoria Borago of Grayton Beach, ticket and beverage sales, and individual and corporate donations.
bdc63
I also am very concerned about rising sea levels and the ramifications of such an event. Surely cataclysmic. May be someone on the board can discuss rising sea levels and the development of desalinization. It seems with drought conditions in some parts of the world and certainly the southwestern United States, now is the time for science to perfect desalinization. Is it possible ?? Can it be done ? Is it economically feasable ?
I also am very concerned about rising sea levels and the ramifications of such an event. Surely cataclysmic. May be someone on the board can discuss rising sea levels and the development of desalinization. It seems with drought conditions in some parts of the world and certainly the southwestern United States, now is the time for science to perfect desalinization. Is it possible ?? Can it be done ? Is it economically feasable ?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...21/AR2007022102095.html?referrer=email&sub=AR
In Far North, Peril and Promise
Great Forests Hold Fateful Role in Climate Change
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 22, 2007; Page A01
PINE FALLS, Manitoba -- Here on the edge of the silent and frozen northern tier of the Earth, the fate of the world's climate is buried beneath the snow and locked in the still limbs of aspen trees.
Nearly half of the carbon that exists on land is contained in the sweeping boreal forests, which gird the Earth in the northern reaches of Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia and Russia. Scientists now fear that the steady rise in the temperature of the atmosphere and the increasing human activity in those lands are releasing that carbon, a process that could trigger a vicious cycle of even more warming.
The prospect of the land itself accelerating climate change staggers scientists, as well as woodsmen such as Bob Austman, who stopped recently in a quiet stand of birch on the edge of the boreal forest to examine a jack rabbit's tracks.
"There are big forces out there," he said succinctly.
Those forces, which scientists are only starting to understand, could free vast stores of carbon and methane that have been collecting since the last ice age in the frozen tundra and northern forests. Their release would push the world's climate toward a heat spiral that would raise ocean levels, spawn fierce storms and scorch farmlands, scientists believe.
But the land is impartial. It could also be enlisted to help abate global warming, as both a storehouse for man-made carbon dioxide and a natural sponge for greenhouse gases. Policymakers are considering changes to protect and expand the forested areas that store carbon; outside the boreal forest, they are experimenting with techniques to bury man-made carbon dioxide in underground vaults and porous seams.
"The world is both victim of climate change and a possible solution to it," said Stewart Elgie, associate director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Ottawa.
Carbon is freed from the land in numerous ways. Permafrost melting because of warmer weather exposes peat, deadwood and buried pine needles to decay, freeing the carbon they contain. Fires, raging through forests more often because of hotter and drier weather, send wood -- and its carbon -- up in smoke. Insects thriving in milder winters girdle trees and send them to rot on the forest floor. Miners and oilmen build roads that expose the earth and warm the land, and loggers cut down old forests and replace them with young ones that will take decades of growth to absorb and store the same amount of carbon.
As the released carbon rises, it adds to the belt of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, trapping even more heat, which causes more warming. Scientists call it a "feedback loop." Others have a more ominous term: the carbon time bomb.
Risk Poorly Understood
"We are taking risks with a system we don't understand that is absolutely loaded with carbon," said Steven Kallick, a Seattle-based expert on the boreal forests for the Pew Charitable Trusts. "The impact could be enormous."
Scientists acknowledge they are not certain how the carbon time bomb will explode, or when. Many of the consequences of global warming that experts once predicted would take centuries are occurring in decades, such as the melting of the world's glaciers and ice caps. But other changes might be more gradual.
"With permafrost, it may take longer for change to get moving. But it may keep moving, even if we get our emissions under control," said Antoni Lewkowicz, a professor of geography at the University of Ottawa. "It's like a big boulder. Once you get it moving, it won't stop."
In Far North, Peril and Promise
Brian Amiro, head of the department of soil science at the University of Manitoba, is part of a research team involved in a project called Fluxnet. The researchers have erected more than 400 towers throughout the world, outfitted with instruments to measure the exchange of carbon between earth and air. The boreal forest, sometimes called "the lungs of the world," breathes in more carbon in years when the forests grow, and loses more carbon in years of bad forest fires, drought or insect infestation.
Lately, there has been a string of bad years. The number of forest fires in Canada doubled in the 1980s and '90s from the previous two decades, and some scientific models indicate they will double again this century, Amiro said. Logging, mining and oil exploration have carved roads deeper into the forests. Temperatures have risen faster toward the north -- by as much as five degrees since the 1950s -- than in more temperate zones.
"The environmental triggers are going to become much more significant," said Faisal Moola, director of science at the David Suzuki Foundation, a Vancouver-based environmental organization.
There are mixed views about whether the process can be stopped. The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- the highest in at least 420,000 years -- mean average temperatures will continue to rise, accelerating the thawing.
But humanity's footprint could be changed. Development, mining and logging account for 25 percent of the carbon loss in forests, Elgie said. Logging releases almost twice as much carbon dioxide each year as all the passenger vehicles in Canada, he said.
Credits for Preservation
Here in Pine Falls, a town of 1,400 about 80 miles northeast of Winnipeg, the giant Tembec pulp mill billows steam and smoke into the crystalline sky. The 1920s-era mill makes newsprint from spruce and pine trees, and Vince Keenan, a forester for the company, said Tembec has responded to calls for change. It has set aside 12 percent of its 2 million-acre logging forest here, and up to one-fourth of its product is now made from recycled paper. Changes in mill practices have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 50 percent since 1990, he said.
But a broader step would be to set aside vast areas of the forest now designated for mining or logging and preserve them. This could be done by setting up a system of "carbon credits," in which, for example, an industrial plant would offset its pollution by paying money to preserve land in the forest that could store an equal amount of carbon.
"Right now, the only way to make money in the boreal forest is to cut trees down," Elgie said. "If you had carbon credits, you would be able to make money by keeping the trees up and storing carbon."
That system appeals to some native Indian groups, now torn between the desire to keep their traditional lands and the need for income from logging or mining.
"Preserving the land is important to us," said Carl Smith, an elder of the Brokenhead Ojibway First Nation on the Winnipeg River near Pine Falls. "Once the land is gone, you're gone."
Smith also is president of the Manitoba Model Forest, a group set up 15 years ago to balance the competing views of how the forest here should be used. One of its goals is teaching schoolchildren about the forest, a job that falls to Bob Austman, the woodsman, whose family has lived in and on the boreal forests of Manitoba for three generations.
He sees nothing but beauty here. As he and Brian Kotak, an environmental scientist, tramped in minus-10-degree cold through a stand of birch near the Winnipeg River recently, it seemed hard to see the Earth as a potential danger.
"The dilemma," Austman said, "is that we live on a planet with 6 billion people. This land is under increasing pressure."
Turning a Minus Into a Plus
South of the great swath of forest in central Canada, the wrinkles of the land smooth out, stretching toward a straight horizon. The Great Plains are frozen and still in winter. But in Weyburn, 70 miles southeast of Saskatchewan's capital, Regina, pumps bob relentlessly amid the snowy wheat fields, sucking crude oil from a mile underground like a host of mechanical mosquitoes.
What goes back into the ground here heartens some environmentalists. The giant EnCana oil and gas company, which operates more than 700 oil pumps in this field, pumps carbon dioxide deep down to drive more oil out of the porous rocks.
Almost inadvertently, the company has become the world's largest working example of carbon storage, or sequestration, a technique being hailed by international experts as one tool to reduce greenhouse gases. Darcy Cretin, operations superintendent at the EnCana plant, is slightly amused by the environmental scientists who have flocked here to see the maze of pipes, pumps, valves and sensors planted in the prairie.
"We have to keep explaining we are doing this to make more oil," he said. "The carbon sequestration is an extra."
When the oil brought up at Weyburn dwindled after 40 years of pumping, EnCana struck a deal with the Dakota Gasification Co. It owns a plant in Beulah, N.D., that converts coal to natural gas. Combustion at the gasification plant makes carbon dioxide, which was being vented into the air. EnCana offered to buy the gas, and in 1999 the U.S. company built a 200-mile pipeline into Canada. The foot-wide pipe emerges from its underground route at a chain-link fence on the edge of EnCana's property.
The company pumps the carbon dioxide under high pressure into the oil field. The gas acts as a kind of solvent, driving the oil out of porous rock. The greenhouse gas remains underground, leaving buried nearly 5,000 tons a day that would otherwise have gone into the atmosphere.
Experts believe this scheme of carbon storage could be used more widely in cases where the gas could be easily collected at a single point and moved by pipeline to a storage field. The approach would not work where the carbon dioxide could not be collected easily, such as from the tailpipes of moving cars. But nearly 40 percent of the carbon dioxide released to the air comes from big power plants or industrial areas, where the gas could be captured.
A committee of more than 100 experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2005 that carbon sequestration has "considerable potential" to help reduce greenhouse gases, and a lengthy study at Weyburn by the International Energy Agency found virtually no leakage. The British Columbia government this month announced that all its coal-fired electric plants will be required to utilize carbon sequestration to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.
For oilmen such as Cretin, the prospect of helping reduce a greenhouse gas by pumping it underground seems a natural fit.
"This is pretty easy," he said. "It's basic stuff for us."
In Far North, Peril and Promise
Great Forests Hold Fateful Role in Climate Change
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 22, 2007; Page A01
PINE FALLS, Manitoba -- Here on the edge of the silent and frozen northern tier of the Earth, the fate of the world's climate is buried beneath the snow and locked in the still limbs of aspen trees.
Nearly half of the carbon that exists on land is contained in the sweeping boreal forests, which gird the Earth in the northern reaches of Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia and Russia. Scientists now fear that the steady rise in the temperature of the atmosphere and the increasing human activity in those lands are releasing that carbon, a process that could trigger a vicious cycle of even more warming.
The prospect of the land itself accelerating climate change staggers scientists, as well as woodsmen such as Bob Austman, who stopped recently in a quiet stand of birch on the edge of the boreal forest to examine a jack rabbit's tracks.
"There are big forces out there," he said succinctly.
Those forces, which scientists are only starting to understand, could free vast stores of carbon and methane that have been collecting since the last ice age in the frozen tundra and northern forests. Their release would push the world's climate toward a heat spiral that would raise ocean levels, spawn fierce storms and scorch farmlands, scientists believe.
But the land is impartial. It could also be enlisted to help abate global warming, as both a storehouse for man-made carbon dioxide and a natural sponge for greenhouse gases. Policymakers are considering changes to protect and expand the forested areas that store carbon; outside the boreal forest, they are experimenting with techniques to bury man-made carbon dioxide in underground vaults and porous seams.
"The world is both victim of climate change and a possible solution to it," said Stewart Elgie, associate director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Ottawa.
Carbon is freed from the land in numerous ways. Permafrost melting because of warmer weather exposes peat, deadwood and buried pine needles to decay, freeing the carbon they contain. Fires, raging through forests more often because of hotter and drier weather, send wood -- and its carbon -- up in smoke. Insects thriving in milder winters girdle trees and send them to rot on the forest floor. Miners and oilmen build roads that expose the earth and warm the land, and loggers cut down old forests and replace them with young ones that will take decades of growth to absorb and store the same amount of carbon.
As the released carbon rises, it adds to the belt of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, trapping even more heat, which causes more warming. Scientists call it a "feedback loop." Others have a more ominous term: the carbon time bomb.
Risk Poorly Understood
"We are taking risks with a system we don't understand that is absolutely loaded with carbon," said Steven Kallick, a Seattle-based expert on the boreal forests for the Pew Charitable Trusts. "The impact could be enormous."
Scientists acknowledge they are not certain how the carbon time bomb will explode, or when. Many of the consequences of global warming that experts once predicted would take centuries are occurring in decades, such as the melting of the world's glaciers and ice caps. But other changes might be more gradual.
"With permafrost, it may take longer for change to get moving. But it may keep moving, even if we get our emissions under control," said Antoni Lewkowicz, a professor of geography at the University of Ottawa. "It's like a big boulder. Once you get it moving, it won't stop."
In Far North, Peril and Promise
Brian Amiro, head of the department of soil science at the University of Manitoba, is part of a research team involved in a project called Fluxnet. The researchers have erected more than 400 towers throughout the world, outfitted with instruments to measure the exchange of carbon between earth and air. The boreal forest, sometimes called "the lungs of the world," breathes in more carbon in years when the forests grow, and loses more carbon in years of bad forest fires, drought or insect infestation.
Lately, there has been a string of bad years. The number of forest fires in Canada doubled in the 1980s and '90s from the previous two decades, and some scientific models indicate they will double again this century, Amiro said. Logging, mining and oil exploration have carved roads deeper into the forests. Temperatures have risen faster toward the north -- by as much as five degrees since the 1950s -- than in more temperate zones.
"The environmental triggers are going to become much more significant," said Faisal Moola, director of science at the David Suzuki Foundation, a Vancouver-based environmental organization.
There are mixed views about whether the process can be stopped. The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- the highest in at least 420,000 years -- mean average temperatures will continue to rise, accelerating the thawing.
But humanity's footprint could be changed. Development, mining and logging account for 25 percent of the carbon loss in forests, Elgie said. Logging releases almost twice as much carbon dioxide each year as all the passenger vehicles in Canada, he said.
Credits for Preservation
Here in Pine Falls, a town of 1,400 about 80 miles northeast of Winnipeg, the giant Tembec pulp mill billows steam and smoke into the crystalline sky. The 1920s-era mill makes newsprint from spruce and pine trees, and Vince Keenan, a forester for the company, said Tembec has responded to calls for change. It has set aside 12 percent of its 2 million-acre logging forest here, and up to one-fourth of its product is now made from recycled paper. Changes in mill practices have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 50 percent since 1990, he said.
But a broader step would be to set aside vast areas of the forest now designated for mining or logging and preserve them. This could be done by setting up a system of "carbon credits," in which, for example, an industrial plant would offset its pollution by paying money to preserve land in the forest that could store an equal amount of carbon.
"Right now, the only way to make money in the boreal forest is to cut trees down," Elgie said. "If you had carbon credits, you would be able to make money by keeping the trees up and storing carbon."
That system appeals to some native Indian groups, now torn between the desire to keep their traditional lands and the need for income from logging or mining.
"Preserving the land is important to us," said Carl Smith, an elder of the Brokenhead Ojibway First Nation on the Winnipeg River near Pine Falls. "Once the land is gone, you're gone."
Smith also is president of the Manitoba Model Forest, a group set up 15 years ago to balance the competing views of how the forest here should be used. One of its goals is teaching schoolchildren about the forest, a job that falls to Bob Austman, the woodsman, whose family has lived in and on the boreal forests of Manitoba for three generations.
He sees nothing but beauty here. As he and Brian Kotak, an environmental scientist, tramped in minus-10-degree cold through a stand of birch near the Winnipeg River recently, it seemed hard to see the Earth as a potential danger.
"The dilemma," Austman said, "is that we live on a planet with 6 billion people. This land is under increasing pressure."
Turning a Minus Into a Plus
South of the great swath of forest in central Canada, the wrinkles of the land smooth out, stretching toward a straight horizon. The Great Plains are frozen and still in winter. But in Weyburn, 70 miles southeast of Saskatchewan's capital, Regina, pumps bob relentlessly amid the snowy wheat fields, sucking crude oil from a mile underground like a host of mechanical mosquitoes.
What goes back into the ground here heartens some environmentalists. The giant EnCana oil and gas company, which operates more than 700 oil pumps in this field, pumps carbon dioxide deep down to drive more oil out of the porous rocks.
Almost inadvertently, the company has become the world's largest working example of carbon storage, or sequestration, a technique being hailed by international experts as one tool to reduce greenhouse gases. Darcy Cretin, operations superintendent at the EnCana plant, is slightly amused by the environmental scientists who have flocked here to see the maze of pipes, pumps, valves and sensors planted in the prairie.
"We have to keep explaining we are doing this to make more oil," he said. "The carbon sequestration is an extra."
When the oil brought up at Weyburn dwindled after 40 years of pumping, EnCana struck a deal with the Dakota Gasification Co. It owns a plant in Beulah, N.D., that converts coal to natural gas. Combustion at the gasification plant makes carbon dioxide, which was being vented into the air. EnCana offered to buy the gas, and in 1999 the U.S. company built a 200-mile pipeline into Canada. The foot-wide pipe emerges from its underground route at a chain-link fence on the edge of EnCana's property.
The company pumps the carbon dioxide under high pressure into the oil field. The gas acts as a kind of solvent, driving the oil out of porous rock. The greenhouse gas remains underground, leaving buried nearly 5,000 tons a day that would otherwise have gone into the atmosphere.
Experts believe this scheme of carbon storage could be used more widely in cases where the gas could be easily collected at a single point and moved by pipeline to a storage field. The approach would not work where the carbon dioxide could not be collected easily, such as from the tailpipes of moving cars. But nearly 40 percent of the carbon dioxide released to the air comes from big power plants or industrial areas, where the gas could be captured.
A committee of more than 100 experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2005 that carbon sequestration has "considerable potential" to help reduce greenhouse gases, and a lengthy study at Weyburn by the International Energy Agency found virtually no leakage. The British Columbia government this month announced that all its coal-fired electric plants will be required to utilize carbon sequestration to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.
For oilmen such as Cretin, the prospect of helping reduce a greenhouse gas by pumping it underground seems a natural fit.
"This is pretty easy," he said. "It's basic stuff for us."
Everything is possible. It all comes down to a will and money. We are living in a society where everything is cheap and quick, and that is what is killing us. Desalinization is possible and currently used around the world, but it is expensive. As we continue to destroy our resources, everything will continue to rise in price. We use coal and oil for energy because it is the cheapest route. What we have to look at is what effects using coal and oil has on our other resources. Sure coal is cheap, but how cheap is it if we have to spend more money to clean other resources that it affects.
It can be difficult to weed through all the info out there, especially if you are looking on the web. You have to check your sources carefully. See where there money is coming from. How can a scientist who is paid by the oil industry be taken seriously when they state that the human use of oil is having no effect on the planet. I will give you a perfect example of what I am talking about. I have not responded to any of Iceage's posts on this thread. For the most part they are not well grounded. If we first look at what he/she is posting they contradict themselves. "Plus, there are just too many humans to put an end to the damage. Our footprint is too big. But, every little bit helps so we should all try to do something every day to help our environment." What????????? There is no hope, but every little bit helps???????? Next you have to look at the sources Iceage sites. Iceage sites Wikipedia to show how there are "just as many" scientists around the world who disagree with man made global warming as there are those who support the belief. The very first sentence of Iceage's chosen article contradicts this point:
A small minority of scientists have expressed doubt that modern global warming is mostly the result of human activity.
Their views contrast with the mainstream scientific opinion on climate change, as reported in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001).
A small minority does not sound like just as many to me. It is not easy to change the way we live. For many people it is much easier to just deny the need to change. By doing so they can continue to carry on as usual, while removing any guilty feelings by doing so. It is easy for someone like Iceage to question everyone else (how many of you are driving hybrids etc. etc.), but it is much more difficult for them to question themselves. Change isn't going to happen all at once, but we all must start now. Change your bulbs to compact fluorescents. Take responsibility for your own actions and waste. How difficult is it to separate your recyclable materials? I mean really. If you don't have curbside pick up, how difficult is it to find a recycling bin? It isn't difficult at all, but we have made it seem difficult because Americans like being catered too. I am definitely guilty of this. I encourage everyone to go to www.architecture2030.org. or just click this link: 2010 Imperative Global Emergency Teach-in! In the right hand corner of this site select the Archived Web Cast. This was a teach in that just took place at a university in New York that was broadcast around the world. It is incredibly informative on the subject of Global Warming and will answer a lot of the questions asked on this thread. The entire program is about 4 hours long so you will need to set aside a chunk of time. There are three segments and then a Q&A, and each is about an hour. You can watch each of these separately.
"The sky is falling!".....Professor C. Little
triple b, if you disagree, do you mind if continue on our way being treehuggers? how cool would it be if while i was trying to green up my environment, and pay premiums for green energy, carbon offsets and the like, some of it benefitted you and yours?
whether or not you believe we humans are contributing to the global cooling or heating, shouldn't eveyone do their own part to cut down on consumption and waste? i believe it's an ethical imperative. our landfills aren't lying.
whether or not you believe we humans are contributing to the global cooling or heating, shouldn't eveyone do their own part to cut down on consumption and waste? i believe it's an ethical imperative. our landfills aren't lying.
And, wouldn't be nice to leave a cleaner, better, place for our children?
i.e. Hug a Tree and you hug your child!
Yes, absolutely John R. No one should get so bogged down on the debate that they cut off our collective noses. Believe what you will, but please be a good steward.
I am in total shock after beginning our blue can recycling here in January. I had no garbage to be picked up today, but the blue can is almost full after a week and a half. I can't believe the satisfying feeling of rinsing out plastic and glass containers for recycling. :clap_1: