Page 53 of 65 FirstFirst ...
3
43
51
52
53
54
55
63
... LastLast
  1. #1041
    Quote Originally Posted by Kasierith View Post
    All I really see in this argument are straw mans pushed by oil companies.
    And the massive appeal to fear of "they're raising your taxes!!!???"

  2. #1042
    This is the problem with the global warming cult... What better world are you creating? How is enviro-terrorism going to create a better world?
    Its true, anyone who thinks global warming is real supports terrorism.

  3. #1043
    Quote Originally Posted by oblivionx View Post
    The enslavement of the rural to benefit the urban is what they really are on about, which is fine if your urban I suppose.
    The part where cities subsidize rural areas to a massive tune doesn't disrupt this idea at all, does it?

  4. #1044
    Quote Originally Posted by Grokan View Post
    So I guess the Koch brothers are in on this cult, too?
    Only by accident!

    ---------- Post added 2013-01-14 at 04:12 AM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Spectral View Post
    The part where cities subsidize rural areas to a massive tune doesn't disrupt this idea at all, does it?
    Clearly we are enslaving them with our money. Clearly.

  5. #1045
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Feb 2010
    Location
    Ottawa, ON
    Posts
    78,759
    Quote Originally Posted by oblivionx View Post
    They seem to leave that RAISE ALL YOUR TAXES point out of it amongst the stifle economic growth, ban "bad" power for "good" power (that doesn't exist) and a litany of other things.
    Nope.

    Doesn't have to raise taxes, and if it does, it's for things like the seawall going around New York to prevent an even worse storm than Sandy causing havoc; said wall is projected to cost about 2/3 of what the damage from Sandy alone wreaked in the area, making it well worth the investment. More direct to your point, though, it just requires shifting tax revenue from project A which isn't helping, to project B. It doesn't "stifle" economic growth, it stifles certain sectors that are doing harm to us all, but it does so deliberately, to encourage better long-term sustainability.

    The only thing actually proposed is more taxes and more government. If that's your creed, you're giddy about it... but if you aren't exactly enamored with the demagogues of the world rabble rousing their way to power and more taxes, giddy isn't exactly the word to use. The enslavement of the rural to benefit the urban is what they really are on about, which is fine if your urban I suppose.
    Yeah, okay, you're just in total tin-foil hat territory now, and will probably start talking about chemtrails and the Reptoid threat next.

    The way the democratically-elected officials choose to distribute government funds is not "enslavement", and it's ludicrous to think so.


  6. #1046
    Scarab Lord bergmann620's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Dec 2010
    Location
    Stow, Ohio
    Posts
    4,402
    Quote Originally Posted by Raybourne View Post
    are you still waiting out relativity, gravity, germ theory?
    Kind of ironic, seeing as relativity proved that Newton's gravity was merely a nice approximation.

    As to the title of the post, isn't 'belief' something you should have in the Bible, rather than a theory?

    As to the general thrust of the thread, I think the bigger issue is how do we turn the train around without running it off the tracks?
    indignantgoat.com/
    XBL: Indignant Goat | BattleTag: IndiGoat#1288 | SteamID: Indignant Goat[/B]

  7. #1047
    Old God Grizzly Willy's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    Kenosha, Wisconsin
    Posts
    10,198
    Quote Originally Posted by bergmann620 View Post
    Kind of ironic, seeing as relativity proved that Newton's gravity was merely a nice approximation.

    As to the title of the post, isn't 'belief' something you should have in the Bible, rather than a theory?

    As to the general thrust of the thread, I think the bigger issue is how do we turn the train around without running it off the tracks?
    The first step in doing that is recognizing that the train needs to be turned around.

  8. #1048
    Quote Originally Posted by bergmann620 View Post
    Kind of ironic, seeing as relativity proved that Newton's gravity was merely a nice approximation.
    Not really. Classical mechanics is still correct, just incomplete.

  9. #1049
    Quote Originally Posted by bergmann620 View Post
    Kind of ironic, seeing as relativity proved that Newton's gravity was merely a nice approximation.

    As to the title of the post, isn't 'belief' something you should have in the Bible, rather than a theory?

    As to the general thrust of the thread, I think the bigger issue is how do we turn the train around without running it off the tracks?
    No, you can believe the sky is blue, or that Canada is north of the United States. Belief is basically you thinking something is true. Faith is belief, but it's mainly in a religious context, so there's not really any scientific proof.

    As for turning the train around, metaphorically speaking, it's rather simple on paper... stop, or minimize, the industrial processes that are harmful to the environment and as a global society invest in things that aren't. Of course, that also means billions, if not trillions, need to go into altering the infrastructure of nearly every country on the planet as well as into developing these green technologies and weaning ourselves off of more harmful practices.

  10. #1050
    Quote Originally Posted by bergmann620 View Post
    Kind of ironic, seeing as relativity proved that Newton's gravity was merely a nice approximation.
    I think carrying this example even farther is in order - if all we have is a decent approximation of what to expect when it comes to climate change, isn't that still enough to say, "hey, we should probably do something about this"?

  11. #1051
    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    Nope.

    Doesn't have to raise taxes, and if it does, it's for things like the seawall going around New York to prevent an even worse storm than Sandy causing havoc; said wall is projected to cost about 2/3 of what the damage from Sandy alone wreaked in the area, making it well worth the investment. More direct to your point, though, it just requires shifting tax revenue from project A which isn't helping, to project B. It doesn't "stifle" economic growth, it stifles certain sectors that are doing harm to us all, but it does so deliberately, to encourage better long-term sustainability.
    Don't forget that with those projects it actually nurtures different economic growth as well. Get rid of the coal / oil industry? Solar, hydroelectric, and wind will all get a boost.

  12. #1052
    High Overlord Grax's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Ohio
    Posts
    104
    Quote Originally Posted by oblivionx View Post
    The enslavement of the rural to benefit the urban is what they really are on about, which is fine if your urban I suppose.
    In the United States, the majority of farm subsidies (I guess this is the urban enslavement of the rural?) go to large corporate farms. The 'rural' way of life died quite some time ago, and here in Appalachia, it had little to do with urban attempts at enslavement. Although, if you want to see what remains, I could show you a few pockets of the 'rural' life that would make you gasp.

  13. #1053
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Feb 2010
    Location
    Ottawa, ON
    Posts
    78,759
    Quote Originally Posted by bergmann620 View Post
    As to the general thrust of the thread, I think the bigger issue is how do we turn the train around without running it off the tracks?
    The same way they actually reverse a train.

    You put the brakes on, bleed off speed, and when it comes to a halt, you shift into reverse. The idea that we CAN'T fix the environment because it's too big and complex is just an error. If we can influence it enough to push it off the rails, we can push it back on. It's not necessarily going to be as easy, and quite likely will cost more, especially when you factor in the mitigating infrastructure that will be necessary in the meantime particularly in coastal cities, but it's not a case of "can't". Just a case of "not worth it to us to bother, yet". Mostly because it hasn't hit people in the wallets, yet, but with bigger and worse storms and rising sea levels, that'll change in the next few decades. Katrina and Sandy were the first in a worsening trend, not exceptions to the rule. Which is WHY New Orleans and New York are investing billions in infrastructure to prevent future disastrous levels of damage from similar events; if they were hundred-year-storm one-offs, it wouldn't be worthwhile.

    Quote Originally Posted by The Madgod View Post
    Don't forget that with those projects it actually nurtures different economic growth as well. Get rid of the coal / oil industry? Solar, hydroelectric, and wind will all get a boost.
    Right. Many of those measures of efficiency aren't really great comparisons, either, since they don't include cleanup measures to repair the environmental damage from coal/oil power generation, which you should, if you want to compare to "clean" energy sources like solar and wind, since otherwise, they're doing damage that the clean sources aren't, and aren't being penalized for it cost-wise, which makes no sense. It's like debating whether to buy the $30 leaky oil tank, or the $400 secure one, without factoring in the inevitable cleanup costs the leak will generate.

    In the end, though, on a national scale, it's about not running the country the way you run a homeless shelter. Sure, at a homeless shelter, you need to factor in how much food you can buy for the least expense, to feed the homeless the most nutrition for the dollar. That's because they're not getting much funding, and have to make it stretch. The US is in desperate need of overhauling their account books, but they have the revenue to push this stuff through, if they want to bother. Instead, they're focusing on a stupidly large military budget. I don't want to turn this into a military thread, I'm just referring to how it's larger than the 10 next-highest military expenditures by nations, combined, and how Nasa's entire operating budget for its entire lifespan was less than one year of the most recent Iraq war. If that doesn't seem like an egregious waste of money, I don't see how we can move past that block. It's not about the US become a country with a crap military; you could shave off 3/4 of the US' military budget and they'd STILL be the top spender in the world in absolute dollar value.

    The money's there. It just takes a shift in priorities.


  14. #1054
    The climate is always more more chaotic and hot before an ice age, small or big.

    http://www.scotese.com/images/globaltemp.jpg
    Last edited by Fojos; 2013-01-14 at 05:27 AM.

  15. #1055
    Quote Originally Posted by Fojos View Post
    The climate is always more more chaotic and hot before an ice age, small or big.
    Only in the sense that during an ice age the average temperature goes down, so before it does, it's "more hot". It's not like temperature rising due to human emissions will trigger an ice age.

  16. #1056
    Quote Originally Posted by semaphore View Post
    Only in the sense that during an ice age the average temperature goes down, so before it does, it's "more hot". It's not like temperature rising due to human emissions will trigger an ice age.
    And looking at history we're going right on schedule, but most tools only look at graphs for the last hundreds or thousand years.

  17. #1057
    Quote Originally Posted by Fojos View Post
    And looking at history we're going right on schedule, but most tools only look at graphs for the last hundreds or thousand years.
    No we aren't. There's no "schedule". The climate don't randomly change for no reason. Trying to predict a "schedule" from fluctuations that lasts for extremely variable lengths like your previous links, is just asinine.

  18. #1058
    Quote Originally Posted by semaphore View Post
    No we aren't. There's no "schedule". The climate don't randomly change for no reason. Trying to predict a "schedule" from fluctuations that lasts for extremely variable lengths like your previous links, is just asinine.
    In any case, the planet is both stable and cold compared to what it has been in the past (especially right before large cold periods). It's only warm if you compare it to recent ages (again, the last few hundred years or so).

  19. #1059
    Quote Originally Posted by Fojos View Post
    In any case, the planet is both stable and cold compared to what it has been in the past (especially right before large cold periods). It's only warm if you compare it to recent ages (again, the last few hundred years or so).
    No, that's frankly retarded. Why do you people always bring up this utterly meaningless and irrelevant point?

    Our civilisations exists today. Who cares what the Earth was like when 7 billion of us didn't live on it? Global warming isn't a problem because of how it compares to the distance past. It's a problem because when the climate of a planet changes it tends to affects those of us living on the planet.

  20. #1060
    Quote Originally Posted by semaphore View Post
    No, that's frankly retarded. Why do you people always bring up this utterly meaningless and irrelevant point?

    Our civilisations exists today. Who cares what the Earth was like when 7 billion of us didn't live on it? Global warming isn't a problem because of how it compares to the distance past. It's a problem because when the climate of a planet changes it tends to affects those of us living on the planet.
    How is it irrelevant if the mean temperature is going to rise no matter what we do? Of course it matters what happened in the past, but then again, looking at the whole picture isn't for everyone.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •