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Re: News Advisory: Still Crazy After Oil These Years!



On 21 Jul 1996, All locked up and nowhere to go wrote:

> Date: 21 JUL 1996 23:46:25 GMT 
> From: All locked up and nowhere to go <cage@critech.com>
> Newgroups: alt.energy.renewable, alt.save.the.earth,
>     alt.sustainable.agriculture, talk.environment, sci.environment,
>     sci.energy, bionet.agroforestry
> Subject: 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.

Not in the least - you should be ashamed for propagating unsubstantiated 
information.  

> 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.

I have not contended that they aren't increasing CO2 - I only questioned
whether they were the major contributor.  I also dispute the contention
that this is the cause of so-called "global warming" - what happened to
the ice age many scientists were predicting a few decades ago???  I'm just
trying to get the discussion into the realm of REALITY and not emotion or
hysteria.  I've not seen any facts yet that convince me that we KNOW these
things are happening and you also have not added any concrete evidence to
the mix.  I could be wrong and would gladly admit it if there were some
evidence.  What are the "right" things to read??  Sources that agree with
YOUR contentions???  Give me some examples.  How about some source that
has some integrity and will not compromise truth/true science for political
or philosophical purposes. 

> >>   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.

No - I didn't miss the point - as I said in my response, it depends on
what you do with it (I hadn't thought of inhaling it but you can't think
of everything <GRIN>).  I don't dismiss it in the least, either.  But if
indeed humans are NOT the major contributor to CO2, then there may be some
other source you want to attack.  Now, obviously, if the major contributor
was volcanos, there's not much you can do.  THEN you go to the sources
you CAN control and try to fix them.  No problem with that.  But let's not
fix problems with expensive solutions that don't need fixing (or maybe
more appropriately, can't be fixed because of the vastness of the causes). 
The only real solution, I expect, to our contribution to the CO2 is for us
to STOP making electricity, etc. by burning fossil fuels altogether.  And
would that solve the "problem" we are seeing???  Or is the fluctuation of 
ozone and maybe CO2 a natural phenomenon that we just haven't had enough 
data to document yet??  The Ozone fluctuation has DEFINITELY been 
documented as far back as 1956 - why is this ignored in these discussions??

> >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.

That is what YOUR source says - but my source says that volcanic gases 
contribute FAR more to this than man.  

> There is no serious scientific dispute about these facts.  There
> is only discussion about the effects.

Only if you keep your head in the sand.  

> >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.

No - just that we either don't know enough to make these conclusions or
that we may in the future find info that contradicts it.  Just like we 
recently "found out" that radon gas is not the harmful thing we said it 
was 5 years ago.  So the original conclusion was reached without 
sufficient data to prove it (or the new conclusion may lack something 
too - I haven't seen the data so I don't know but obviously this calls 
either conclusion into question).  

> 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.

I'm not the one who put it here - I just responded to the original info 
and it happened to be in a couple sci.* newsgroups, which still seems 
appropriate.  You do have a delete key don't you???

	Dave

         *-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^
        *        David Beorn, david.beorn@pobox.com (internet)        *
        *        Virginia FREENET                                     *
         *-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^

~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'~*-,._.,-*~'`^`'




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