Some Questions for Opponants of "Going Green"

mrvedderson

if only our side wasnt just represented by someone who cant spell

EddieLedBetter

America limiting the use of things wouldnt even scratch the surface of the destruction China is causing the rest of the world. What do we want to go to war with them next? Face it, the world works in ages and cycles. We're getting close to the end of an age.

yoke

As someone who is conservative and actually sees recycling on a daily basis I can tell you that nobody does it correctly. Seriously, people suck at it.


Now as far as everything else goes. I am not a believer in Man Made Climate Change at all. However, I do think we should be cleaner, nothing wrong with a with that. We should also drill for our own oil. Why not have multiple sources of energy? Why do we have to have one source? We should not depend on any country for our own Energy needs. What may work in one part of the country may not in others.

I am sick of the elite telling me what I have to do and what is "good" for me and the planet when they themselves don't practice it. Anyway one of the biggest issues I have is this type of crap below.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6963482.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=3392178

Jeanwah

yoke wrote:

Now as far as everything else goes. I am not a believer in Man Made Climate Change at all. However, I do think we should be cleaner, nothing wrong with a with that. We should also drill for our own oil. Why not have multiple sources of energy? Why do we have to have one source? We should not depend on any country for our own Energy needs. What may work in one part of the country may not in others.

Increase of carbon dioxide in air is real, and so are its effects

http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2009/d ... 0_Spivack/

I am a retired chemist who worked at the GE Global Research Center in (NY Capital Region) for 16 years after teaching chemistry at SUNY Cobleskill for 15 years.

I will confine my comments in this letter to known facts: Not projections or predictions. None of what I am about to say is controversial, it is the simple truth.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a naturally occurring gas that is produced by all air-breathing living things, volcanoes and the weathering of some rocks. It is absorbed by the sea and by green plants. For long periods of time, a balance between production and absorption leads to a steady low concentration of CO2 in the air. This balance can and has been disturbed in the distant past, with the CO2 levels increasing or decreasing in the air as a consequence. In general, times of high CO2 have been warm or hot (think forests at the poles) and times of low CO2 have been cold (think most of Earth covered in ice).

Before the Industrial Revolution, the CO2 content of the air was about 0.028 percent. Since about 1750 it has been rising and the rate at which it is rising is increasing. It is now at about 0.038 percent; that is nearly a 36 percent increase in 150 years after about 10,000 years of remaining nearly constant. Most of that increase has occurred in the last 50 years. The rate of increase coincides with the increasing rate at which humans have been burning fossil fuels. There is no doubt whatever that this increase is being caused by human activity.

Yes, it is true that plants need CO2 to survive. But the growth of all the plants on Earth and the tremendous capacity of the ocean to absorb CO2 have not been able to keep up with the rate we are producing it. About half of what we produce gets absorbed and about half remains in the air.

Consider any object. Pour heat into it and allow heat out. If the heat coming in is equal to the heat going out, then the temperature of the object will not change. If the heat going out is less than the heat coming in, the object will warm up.

The sun is our source of heat. For 10,000 years, the heat coming in from the sun has been balanced by the heat that Earth radiated to space and the temperature of Earth remained fairly constant. When we add a greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, it traps some of the heat that would otherwise have left Earth and gone into space. Now we have a situation where the heat leaving is less than the heat coming in and Earth must warm up. This is so simple a idea that it cannot be wrong.
Effective heat source

Yes, it is true that CO2 is not the most important greenhouse gas. That role is played by water vapor. Humans do not directly affect the amount of water vapor in the air. But a cubic yard of CO2 is much more effective at heating up the atmosphere than a cubic yard of water vapor, so the relatively small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has a profound effect. As the planet warms due to CO2 additions to the air, the atmosphere holds more water vapor, so we get a double whammy: Warming caused by both gases increases.

Those are the facts. If we do nothing about curbing our fossil fuel burning, the planet will warm up.

We are presently engaged in an uncontrolled experiment with Earth’s climate and the risks are high. Do we take the risk, continuing business as usual because our only concern is our economic recovery? That reasoning would have us ignore the effects we have on the planet and all other living things so that we might increase our GDP (Gross Domestic Product) next quarter.
Moment of opportunity

It also ignores the tremendous economic opportunities that an international agreement on controlling CO2 emissions presents to us. All the world is now clamoring for more efficient machines that use less fuel, and energy sources that are independent of fossil fuels. Who in the world is better than the United States at inventing new devices and methods? This is the economic opportunity of a lifetime; the greatest since the exploitation of petroleum.