i want to be clear in all of these veiled (not so veiled?) insults of me that i am VERY for environmentalism. in both my personal life and in how i feel about public policy i agree with protecting our resources. what i don't agree with is using fear and overblown doomsday scenarios to promote it. i also put people above the environment. that means that i believe developing nations should be granted the same leniency (or help) to develop like we did. it is not fair to restrain them by what "may" happen in our worst-case scenarios...... and, for the umpteenth time, i am not a fundamentalist. i know that most of you who try and utilize theologically charged terms have no idea what you are talking about, so i try to have grace. but it is nonetheless offensive to be considered part of a group that, while i respect on many levels, i am not a part of......
You have a point as well. There is a middle ground between allowing unchecked misinformation and legitimizing the attacks. I am not sure exactly where that's at. I think that we also have to recognize that some level of adversarial dialog is good. Occasionally the dialog raises some legitimate critical observations, but its often drowned out by the noise.
that's a great point Coelacanth and i constantly wonder about that. to a pure naturalist, everything that happens is by definition natural. therefore, the climate change we are experiencing, even if it is purely manmade, is completely natural. so is it consistent to fight against it? i would argue that as a Christian and a theist, I have a much higher calling to take care of the environment. I have an argument as to why it makes moral sense to take care of our environment. On the other hand a naturalist doesn't have any argument beyond utilitarian concerns as far as i can see.
Yes, climate change is natural. An analogy might be, rain and flooding are natural. To a certain extent, we would like to prevent a certain type of very damaging (to human interests) floods. Floods that our activities cause are a good, though not the only, target. Its not complicated.
I think the argument Coel raises is at least an interesting one to ponder. I believe we have a duty to care for the environment, but not everyone shares my catholic faith. By what first principle would an atheist argue we need to lower CO2 emissions? Rejecting the inherently superior and sacred nature of H. sapiens and viewing all life as an accident of previous environments, it is harder to argue that change can be objectively bad. Bigger mass-extinctions than the ones postulated to be risked by our continued unchecked emissions have already occurred. The overwhelming majority of species that ever lived were extinct before man existed. The vast majority of existing species would go extinct regardless of our actions, given enough time. Some new species will not get the chance to evolve based on what we don't let change to accommodate them. It is human nature, however, both to fear change and to overestimate our individual importance in the cosmos. Like I said, though, I believe we have a duty to be good stewards.
Anastasis, i think we should carefully guard our waters and avoid pollution of all water sources. i believe we should also guard the air against dumping poisons into them. i am thoroughly unconvinced that CO2 qualifies for either of those precautions. in fact, i think it is a massive red herring that puts us off the scent of productive environmental dialogue. it amazes me that we are trying to limit natural plant food when it is not at all clear that it is doing much damage.
sure thing johnny..... hey, you may want to seriously get that anger thing in check... EDIT: i have removed a rather sarcastic and disrespectful portion of this post directed at Johnny. I apologize publicly for not responding appropriately to what i consider offense. please forgive me johnny. as for the photos Anastasis....how much of that is CO2? how much is SO2? how much is straight up carbon and a host of other things? i don't think photographs of filthy skylines really makes much of a point unless you are suggesting that that is largely CO2. last i checked CO2 was a colorless and odorless gas. has that changed? pictures with almost opaque air don't seem to suggest anything about CO2 at all.
by the way, this is an interesting article on the effects that cattle are having...... cattle causing great damage why don't we spend more energy trying to limit methane if it has 20 times the warming potential that CO2 has? is there just not that much of it compared to CO2? i do know that according to scientists there have been periods of history where we have had FAR more CO2 in the atmosphere. clearly that was not due to modern industrialism......so where did it all come from and where did it all go? (serious question, not appealing to mystery here). i assume it is still all around in some form or another, but what form is that? or is there some way in which it is released into space?
mop - you've hit upon one of the very best things people could do to help the environment - eat less (or no) meat. not only due to the methane, but many other things. it takes a lot of water to raise meat. it takes a lot of fossil fuels to move that meat to processing centers, stores, and then your house. it also has the nasty tendency to poison us in other ways (see the e.coli spinach outbreak).
good points johnny...if i wasn't such a carnivore i might take steps. regardless, i will consider it.
Anastasis, you are begging the question. you used photographs of absolutely filthy air and then tried to blame CO2 which is colorless and odorless. that is a non-sequitor and a poor argument. i have not disagreed about SO2 so bringing it into the discussion was a bit disingenuous. if you removed all of the CO2 from those photographs it would not affect the look of those pictures one iota. that my friend, is a very uncomfortable fact for you little display here. that doesn't at all mean i am right about CO2 not being a pollutant, but it does make your argument rather vacuous doesn't it?
mop - i'll leave the health isssues about eating meat aside and just tell you to focus your meat-eating on small local farms. get your meat from a farmers' market. you can get good meat that has not been injected with a lot of the same chemicals and has not traveled as far. that alone would make a tremendous difference. it's not just meat either. the distance that our food travels is asinine. we should focus our attention on local cuisines and foods, and yet we value a system where someone in montana can have as many bananas as they can imagine in february.
yeah...but man is that expensive eh? buying local sounds great until you see what it does to a budget....not all of us make 6 figures a year.... although my wife and i love going to the farmers market on 4th street.
well, it's not that expensive when you really think about how much meat people really NEED and how much we currently eat...but again, I don't want to get off onto a health tangent. if you want a large serving of meat at every meal then yes, eating the good local meat is going to be more expensive. (which, by the way, should make us all raise an eyebrow....why should food that travels so far be so much less expensive than food provided by someone down the street? and when you really look into the "costs" of that "cheap" food, you'll find out that it isn't so cheap after all...but again, i digress.) another great idea is to find out if there are any CSA's (Community Sponsored Agriculture) programs that you may be interested in. these support local farms and also bring a better awareness to people about what is in season at different times during the year. The Link That's one I just found through google...I have no connection with it or experience with it.
a good friend of mine from San Diego has recently gotten excited about drinking "raw" milk that has never been pasteurized. supposedly some believe that lactose intolerance can be largely attributed to the fact that we pasteurize important bacteria out of our milk. at any rate, it sounds cool, but it costs like 12 bucks for a gallon of milk! i suppose if i was worth a couple of million (estimate, could be way off there) like him, i could afford 12 dollar milk too.
or you could stop drinking milk altogether since there's no need for it, and actually some very good reasons not to do it. we're the only species that drinks milk from another animal. see, now you're not even spending the money on your pasteurized milk!
Anastasis, that is a bizarre retelling of what actually happened. After my answer on what policies i would support (which were reasonably specific for something as large as the environment, i was covering the things that i think we should be most concerned with), you tried to lump CO2 with SO2 and a host of other filthy pollutants by posting a picture which does nothing at all to illustrate CO2. you can scream louder all you want but my point still stands. you could reduce the CO2 to 0 in those pictures you posted and the pictures would look EXACTLY the same. come to think of it, they may look worse, with that much more room for visible pollutants, the sky could get worse if we got rid of the colorless and odorless gas that is known to us as CO2. act indignant all you want, but your post was embarrassing if it was meant to be a coherent argument. if it was meant to pull at our heart strings...you succeeded with me. i HATE that we have skies that filthy. i get upset when i see Austin having even the slightest hint of that look..... Anastasis, you are trying to paint me with your broad brush but it isn't working. I hope we continue to have very stringent emissions standards for factories, for anything that has any potential of touching our water sources (underground aquifers as well as oceans, rivers, lakes and streams). i truly am for regulation...i just think regulating CO2 is a huge smokescreen for FAR more important endeavors.
