Carl, < I realized that the growth rings were 3/8 of an inch apart. Rather than being 100 year-old wood, these were somewhere around 20 years old or less. Beautiful wood.>
With increasing CO2 in the air, plants will be feasting and growing fat quickly. They have been starving for eons but now, dinner is served. Crops will do better. Horticulturalists have to burn methane to make their glasshouses warmers and fill them with CO2. With SUV distribution of CO2, the energy is used in transport and the CO2 helps all plants.
It's good that George W ditched the Kyoto deal. I'm all for being a greenie and I would call myself a rabid environmentalist, but not an irrational one. I don't see a major risk if human-produced CO2 really causes warming and I see large costs if it doesn't.
People who think the world is increasingly polluted have little memory. In my 53 years, I have seen rapid improvement in environmental conditions. All sorts of barbarities used to be inflicted on harbours [the one I grew up in - I spent days and days in it] became dead from sewage, abattoir offal, blood and muck, open air dumping of all rubbish, steel works runoff [oil and other muck], road runoff [tyre wear, oil, other muck], other dumpings down drains.
The harbour was literally dead. It was seething with life when I was 4 and we'd go swimming at Shelly Beach. By the time I was 25 it was as lifeless as a moa [it's a huge harbour and parts of it were fine, flushed each tide into the ocean but the region where I lived was dead].
Now, it's coming back to life. Those polluters have been closed or restricted.
That's one small example. Cars and garages used to be filthy, oily polluters. Now they are almost as clean as a living room. Lead paint used to be everywhere. So did lead in petrol. Lead sprays were used on fruit. Mercury was used all over the place [I still have it in my teeth!]. Factories were all noise, dirt, oil and mess with groundwater and soil a common disposal means.
Everywhere I look, things are cleaner, more efficient, cheaper, better.
Underlying the environmental concerns are Ted Kaczynski ideas and that's the real source of the complaints. Technology and science and big government and globalisation and multinational companies and all that stuff are big and threatening and taking on a life of their own. That's true. I quite like it, but environmentalists don't [generally]. People don't understand science and technology and what we don't understand is scary, when it is obviously more powerful than us.
Greenies [generally - the best of them are highly knowledgable] don't understand science, technology and have short memories [being young]. The 'good old days' involved horrors and destruction on grand scales, pollution, short life spans, famines, disease, waste and poisoning. I like the 21st century much better.
Mqurice |
