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Re: News Advisory: Still Crazy After Oil These Years!
David Beorn is making me do something I hate to do. David is pushing
me into defending the statements of a crank in the interest of truth.
David should be ashamed of himself.
David Beorn <dbeorn@freenet.vcu.edu> wrote:
>On 19 Jul 1996, Scott Nudds wrote:
>> Very false. The actions of man have substantially increased the
>> amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and rates of emission continue to
>> increase.
>And where is your evidence of this????
There is no serious question that human activities, specifically the
deforestation of large areas and burning of large amounts of fossil
carbon, have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere steadily
and substantially. If you do not know of the evidence, you have not
been reading the right things.
>> You might as well try to argue that you can not die from 1 litre of
>> water because your body is contains 81 times as much without any harm at
>> all.
>
>And that would probably be true - I doubt if I would die - unless you
>injected it in my veins of something. But I don't see the analogy.
Suppose you inhaled it in one dose. I do not recommend it.
Nudd's statement could have been picked on very easily. 81 liters of
water is almost 180 pounds. That is more than many people weigh.
Instead, you missed his point that the dose and route can make a
substance toxic or harmless. That is true, and you should not
dismiss it. It weakens everything you say.
>Don't "environmentalists" contend we are THE MAJOR contributor to CO2
>productions, ozone depletion, etc??
They do, and they are correct. Volcanic CO2 emissions are part of a cycle
of deposition of carbonate rock in the oceans, subduction of the rock, and
emission of carbon dioxide by volcanoes. Plant emissions are part of
a cycle of photosynthesis and respiration. Human emissions from
fossil sources come from deposits which have been out of the cycle for
over one hundred million years. Human emissions of chlorofluorocarbons
are the only source of free chlorine which can easily diffuse up into the
stratosphere and catalytically decompose ozone.
There is no serious scientific dispute about these facts. There
is only discussion about the effects.
>Despite what many scientists would have you believe, there are still many
>unknowns in our world, and the more we find out, the more we realize
>that we don't know. Yes - out knowledge is greatly increased over years
>past but we also have a complex world and we've got a LOT to learn.
Are you arguing that we can never learn enough about something to know
what a given action will do? If so, you are quite mistaken.
You are not doing anything for your credibility. If you will please take
your argument out of the sci.* hierarchy, you will do everyone a favor.
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