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Re: fHuman vs. natural influences on the environment
In article <4vmuq7$ru7@igc.apc.org>, tomgray
<tomgray@igc.apc.org> wrote:
>charliew@hal-pc.org (charliew) wrote:
>
>>I am fully aware of what adaptation means. It is even
worse
>>in the "natural world". Only the strong survive. That
>>doesn't mean that I like this particular way of things.
>>However, nature certainly has a way of maintaining a
certain
>>"efficiency", especially between predator and prey.
>
>True. Nature also usually works on somewhat longer time
scales.
>Your thesis that we can't do anything to harm the
environment,
>because it's always changing anyway, keeps overlooking the
rate
>of the change that we are inducing.
My point was that we don't need to keep all "earthly"
variables absolutely fixed, and we probably couldn't if we
tried. There is a "reasonable" rate of change that man and
nature can adapt to. This reasonable rate is debatable, but
it surely exists.
>
>Incidentally, I made an error on my earlier post about
methane
>--the scale was off. It should have been 300-650 ppb, not
ppm,
>over the past 150,000 years, and around 1700 ppb today. The
>point about statistical significance still holds.
>
Thanks for admitting the error. Incidentally, until the last
10 years or so, we couldn't measure 300 ppb. Even 1700 ppb
only corresponds to 1.7 ppm. No matter what greenhouse
effect you attribute to methane, unless you assume a
ridiculously high value for this effect, 1.7 ppm is not going
to make any kind of measureable change to anything of
importance.
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