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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (25734)	11/11/2009 8:28:48 PM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

Yes, they are definitely way out in left field deep in the environmentalist puritan movement, but my point was the lack of scientific talent they wield without even getting into economic issues. <It sounds like what you're saying is that in your "experience" environmental scientists are "biased" toward the green side of the fence. > High-powered scientists are strong on causal relationships. Stamp collector scientists are keen on collecting, categorizing and naming. Many [or most] stamp collector scientists seem to be more like capable technicians rather than deep thinkers. They very often seem to be unaware of the fact that correlation is not causation. By the time journalists and the public get hold of the scientific results, any association with causal relationships and mechanisms [physics, chemistry] is lost. The likes of Al Gore get hold of some superficial "scientific" concepts and run amok with them, excited that they think they understand the processes involved. For example they enthusiastically adopt the idea of "the balance of nature" when there is in fact no balance. Yes, there are stabilizing feedback loops such as the water cycle from equatorial ocean to atmosphere to cloud, to snow, to Arctic/Antarctic, with ocean currents and the sun driving the cycle. But that feedback system interacts with plants and animals to result in oscillating snow cover, cloud cover and plant cover as well as water depth. One of the major unbalanced trends of nature for a billion years has been the stripping of CO2 and burial of it as coal, oil, shale, bitumens, gas, limestone in vastly huge amounts. Since our life depends on CO2 and it had reached homeopathic amounts with plants battling for the last vestiges of it, it seems no bad thing that people have resurrected a little of it over a century of enormous effort. Only to see the bulk of it already stripped from the atmosphere. It's like filling a leaky tank - the more we fill it, the faster it leaks out. I claim to be far more an environmentalist than nearly all of those who claim the mantle. But that doesn't mean any whacked out idea that's called "environmental" gets my support. I've been one ever since my environment [harbour, air, economics] were despoliated by those in authority [government]. Mqurice