[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

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. 



Follow-Ups: References: