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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (150343)	8/26/2002 5:18:11 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1584194

Tim, what scares me is the indifference of people like yourself. I'm not indifferent, I just think we should keep a balanced perspective and not run around thinking the sky is falling. Reduced sun may well have lead to the cooling of the earth but it would not have been the most important factor if dinosaurs were cold blooded as many believe. Reduced sunlight due to particles in the atmosphere from an asteroid or comet impact would have not only cooled the planet it would have also had a big impact on plant life and when the plants die the things that eat them start dying. vehiclechoice.org Try vehiclechoice.org A good example of the fact that the environment including temperature naturally goes through changes and that the warmer then normal temperatures are usually more beneficial for life in general and for humans then the colder periods. You talk about things going wrong environmentally and nothing happening. I don't think it works that way..........that a species disappears and suddenly the ecosystem falls apart. I think its like most living things or like our immune systems. Each time the ecosystem experiences a setback, it hurts the overall system only slightly and the ecosystem goes on but lessened or weakened. Over time, I think the effects become cumulative and then a threshold may be reached where the degradation suddenly picks up speed and disaster results. The changes over time have been greater then anything we have done to the planet as a whole. The sun's brightness changes, enormous volcanos release more of many pollutants then we probably have in our entire existence, yet life adjusts and thrives, if it didn't work like that it would have ended thousands of different times throughout the history of the earth. Mankind can and does mess up specific areas but it would be difficult for us to cause the type of world wide disaster we fear even if we where trying to do it. Again, no one knows for certain but my philosophy is why fukk around and tempt the fates. No one knows that we aren't going to be invaded by aliens that look like glowing pink rabbits but its better to deal with realistic scenarios and logical trade offs. For example to stop the growth of CO2 emissions would costs trillions and probably condemn billions of people to be stuck in poverty. And yes it may prevent a potentially harmful global warming, but it may be unnecessary (if the climate doesn't warm to fast the warming could be beneficial, other factors may be cooling the planet, some of the evidence for human caused global warming is unclear or contradictory, other alternatives to reducing CO2 could deal with global warming for less money if it does become an issue, and in general we don't have enough understanding of the potential problem to justify putting the wealth of whole nations in to the attempt to deal with it). Most equipment works better when it has ongoing maintenance and is not abused.......why should the earth's ecosystem be any different. The world really isn't once ecosystem, its thousands or millions of systems. We designed and built the technological equipment and know how to maintain it. Also it can't maintain itself. Living things maintain and adjust themselves, and we don't understand ecosystems the way we understand a car or a factory. Our adjustments and maintenance may not be needed, it may even be counter productive. But there are places and times where we can provide environmental help, and sometimes we should take advantage of those opportunities, but that doesn't mean there is going to be a world wide disaster if we don't. You don't know that.......the ice age of the Pleistocene Epoch would have severely diminished human populations and the ave. temp. drop was only 9 degrees. 1 - Nine degrees is a lot more then most global warming scenarios. 2 - The cooling would probably be worse then a bit of warming. 3 - A severe ice age would not wipe out mankind. We've lived through the ice ages of that epoch (it was a whole bunch of ice ages separated by warmer periods not one ice age see geobop.com and now there are more of us, spread out over a larger part of the earth's surface and with technology to help us deal with such problems. Man is so sure he has all the answers and can do anything but the truth is that the ecosystem on this planet far outstrips Man's capabilities in terms of complexity, ingenuity and functioning ability. If we are so uncertain about the ecosystem and how to deal with it that's even more reason not to take drastic measures. Tim