jpdell33 | -- 10-10-2019 @ 2:47 PM |
Global Warming is real - glaciers and ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising. How long this will last is anybody's guess. NASA has even predicted an imminent major cooling trend. To the extent this is human caused is highly speculative. It's only based on 150 years of climate data of which only the last 50 years or so is accurate. Sorry folks, but correlation does not mean causation. For the 5 or so billion years of earth's history we have had a varying climate to include regular ice ages. The chicken littles of global warming neglect that some 15,000 years ago vast ice sheets covered North America and Northern Europe - what happened to it? Well they melted and sea levels rose several hundred feet. Obviously some sort of global warming took place - but was certainly pre-industrial. We know that Roman era Britain had vineyards that died off in the mini-ice ages since. Only now has the climate warmed enough there to to sustain some vinticulture. We also know that atmospheric CO2 levels in the Pleistocene epoch were higher than they are now. The Greenhouse effect is a theory. It implies that it forms a covering layer in the stratosphere so as to trap heat in the troposphere. If you remember the 7th grade science demonstration where the teacher squirts some CO2 into a glass and pours it out to extinguish a candle, the point was that CO2 is heavier than air and eventually finds its way into the ocean where it is absorbed. The tree line on mountains is from a lack of CO2 unable to sustain photosynthesis. A more serious greenhouse gas is methane which is lighter than air and breaks down into CO2 and water vapor from sunlight. There are many sources of methane- termite digestion, cow farts, decaying vegetation and subterranean releases from the oceans a defrosting tundra. Very little in comparison comes from leaking wells and pipes. That said, the earth has finite resources. Fresh water, oceans, air, useable minerals, arable land, and fossil fuels chief amongst them. The problem is that earth's ever-growing population cannot sustain the wasteful consumption of these resources. In the last 100 years it has become increasingly evident that the wasteful use of these resources has an associated economic burden. So far technology has kept us ahead of global disasters such as famine and plague. Meanwhile our war making capabilities are only restrained by the increasing effectiveness of communication and surveillance. The bottom line is that we are seriously overdue for a comeuppance. Our current growth trends are not sustainable. One black swan event will collapse the house of cards we are building with funny money. Better have some gold when it does, because that's where we'll start picking up the pieces when the bullets run out.
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bmurphy | -- 10-10-2019 @ 2:51 PM |
Hi again and the bullets might run out sooner than most people think. all the best Bill
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