How real is our threat to the Environment?

Great Debates
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Humans have been using this planet as our personal stomping ground for some time now. Clearing wilderness for habitation, hunting animals into extinction, burning natural fuels. However, it seems that the last 250 years, during the industrial revolution, have seen more damage done to the natural world then all the years previous combined. Landfills, oil spills, toxic exhaust, and per capita consumption and waste at incredible evels. Is this accurate? And if so, how bad are things?

“Take this ugly bag of snakes, and lay em out straight for me”

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levels

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In the words of George Carlin, “this planet has survived earthquakes, floods, volcanos, asteriods, tidal waves and ice ages. Do you really think a few aluminum cans is going to make any f****** difference?!”

If we set off every single nuclear bomb we have we would destroy our civilization. But the planet Earth would recover in less than 1000 years. Probably a lot less.

So do I think we’re destroying the enviroment? We couldn’t if we tried.

Do I think we’re a wasteful, inefficient civilization? To some degree, yes. But what’s in danger is the economy, not the freakin’ planet.

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Good point. All right let me rephrase: “How real is the threat to ourselves by damaging the environment?”

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It depends on who you talk too. If you listen to Paul Erlich and his crowd we all died in the 80’s. :slight_smile: Erlich and others have been screaming for years that we are corrupting the environment and are on the verge of some catastrophy.

On the other hand if you listen to Juilian Simon and his crowd things are just getting better, cleaner and cheaper.

Looking at the predictions made and the results it appears that Simon and his crowd are correct.

Human impact on Global Warming is far from proved and the mathmatical models used to make predictions are really bad.

Most likely the threat is very small. I’d bet that the AIDS epidimic in the Third World is a bigger threat than environmental concerns.

Also note that as time goes on processes get more efficient which helps the environment. More stuff with less energy and waste. And these days companies have a vested interest in taking care of the environment.

Slee

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The problem as I see it is that we aren’t giving the Earth time to recuperate. We just pound on it time after time.

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That’s a pretty general statement to make without any facts to back it up. In the countless threads that we’ve had on the subject, assertions like that haven’t stood up to the evidence very well.

Global warming is not a threat to the survival of the species, but it is a threat to the stability of socities and to our ability to provide comfortably for the future. Everyone agrees that there have been above-average numbers of severe storms in recent years, and that droughts have caused considerable damage to crops across much of the United States and elsewhere. What’s under dispute is how much of that is due to global warming brought on by greenhouse gas emissions. Today, there are very few scientists willing to say none of it is related to chemicals in the atmosphere trapping heat.

As for the assertion that “processes” get more efficient, not true. Technology always advances, but that doesn’t mean that society always produces less waste as time goes on. The average vehicle sold in America is less fuel-efficient than the average ten years ago.

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Well, the evidence used to “prove” that Global Warming is caused by human actions is pretty trivial. There is just not enough information to build a valid model.

I’ll be kind and say that the last 50 years of weather information is spot on perfect. 50 years of weather data is not enough to make accurate forecasts. If it was I’d watch the news and know what the weather would be like two weeks from now.

You also bring up that assertions like mine haven’t stood up.

Have you read Paul Erlichs books and his predictions? Ya know the whole “The world is going to starve to death in the 80’s” bit?
Did you read Juilan Simons response? The whole “Things are going to get better, cheaper and cleaner” bit?

Guess whos predictions were correct. And I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t Erlich. I will stand by those who have a track record of being right. The other groups just promise Doom and Gloom and have never been right.

And you think I made a general statement. You just claimed that ‘EVERYONE’ is in agreement with your view. Geez…

Nice try to evade the issue. I never claimed that none of the warming was due to human emissions. I said that human emissions were trival given the big picture.

I want a cite on this statement “The average vehicle sold in America is less fuel-efficient than the average ten years ago”. I doubt it. At the same time even if the fuel mileage went down I know that vehicles produce less pollution now than they did 10 years ago.

Slee

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In general, things are so bad that they are getting better. And, unfortunately for those who have a political stake in the matter, things were never all that bad to begin with. Sorry that you’ve been misled. We’ve managed to crap up a few isolated areas of the planet well enough to create some pretty spectacular highlight footage for the doom and gloom crowd to exploit, but the planet has trumped them by being much more resilient than they expected. To name a couple – if I recall the rhetoric of the time the Exxon Valdez ‘disaster’ was going to destroy the ecosystem of the Alaskan coast for all time, but the natural cleansing action of the sea pretty much made our efforts at cleaning up look pathetic, and there is now little evidence that it ever happened. In the Gulf War, the fleeing Iraqi army set fire to just about every oil well in Kuwait, and the predictions of the shrill panic-mongers pointed to a global cloud of toxic smoke that would create an effect akin to an unproven but subjectively modeled theory of a ‘nuclear winter,’ throwing the entire planet into turmoil-- then a few dozen guys from Texas went over and put the fires out, and the crops in Iowa somehow didn’t fail from lack of sunlight. We can hurt, we can help, but the material difference we can make on a planetary scale is minute. The truth is, even our best efforts at self-extermination can’t stand up to things like the Huang He River flood in August of 1931, which wiped out an estimated 3,700,000 people all at once. We are very small, and the planet is very large.

 I'm sure we could do more than we are doing, in terms of not crapping things up, but I'm just as sure that what we are doing is by no means hurting the planet, or humanity in general.  Even the 'cloroflourocarbon' crowd has been forced to back off from junk science to a small degree, and now claim that it is carbon dioxide (people exhaling, for example) that is destroying the atmosphere and threatening life as we know it.  Why life-spans continue to rise, even in 'developing' countries, is a mystery in the face of such dire warnings that we exhale at our peril.  Faced with this conundrum, no less an authority than Jeffrey Sachs, formerly of Harvard and currently the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, now says that it isn't the carbon dioxide, per se, but the carbon itself, once freed by some yet unspecified chemical process, that is the threat.  Proposing carbon as a threat to carbon-based life forms is going to take some time -- but hell, time we clearly have in abundance, since every time the doomsayers predict that we are all going to die tomorrow if we don't do as they say, we screw them up by sticking around.  For an example, let's propose Manhattan, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or Boston, as a compromised 'ecosystem,' thoroughly and completely bent to the will of man, then count up the casualties caused by this utter degradation of the natural environment . . . I figure we'll struggle by, somehow.

 Makes for pretty good entertainment, watching the passions of the political, but I doubt at this point if even they believe their own 'scientific' rhetoric.  The planet is doing fine -- the adaptable critters are still scurrying around and proliferating, same as ever; every work of man is either continuously maintained or quickly reclaimed by natural forces, same as ever; the last real 'mass extinction' and 'rapid climate change' had nothing to do with human influences, nor will the next; human life spans globally continue to rise; and the only real threat I can see to our continued survival as a species, or to the interstellar harmony of the universe as a whole, is rap music.

Gairloch
“Actually, one of the surprises of the last couple of centuries is that we are not running out of stuff.” – Jeffery Sachs, 12/15/02

Such a surprise.

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You had me until rap music. Also OT, but those boys from Texas were arguably as responsible for starting those fires as they were for putting them out.

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http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=83160

As I don’t like endlessly repeating myself, just go to the above thread for cites.

sleestak, I didn’t claim that Paul Ehrlich was correct. Your argument that Paul Ehrlich was wrong, so it follows naturally every environmentalist must be wrong about everything is so pathetic that I won’t waste my time refuting it. I’m not Paul Ehrlich, the statements that I made have nothing to do with him, and you’re just trying to change the subject.

Life spans rise because healthcare systems get better, new drugs and antibiotics are introduced, etc… Your argument that we can ignore the health effects of air pollution completly just because life spans are rising is ridiculous. And if you’d like to provide proof that the arguments in your second paragraph aren’t just straw men built up to smear environmentalists, I’d love to see it.

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The decrease in ozone and increase in UVB is so well-documented that this rule of thumb is generally agreed upon: a 1 percent reduction in ozone leads to a 2 percent increase in UV intensity.

A 2% increase in UV intensity leads to a 2% to 4% increase in skin cancers. More than 1.3 million Americans are diagnosed each year with the disease. I was one of them. I was lucky. Mine wasn’t the worst kind.

50,000 people in the U.S. die every year from skin cancer. And the rate of increase is out the ceiling.

The same is true of asthma and allergy sufferers.

And the damage that has been done to the ozone layer is from emissions prior to the mid-1950’s. We haven’t seen yet what the damage will be from car emissions over the last forty-five years.

Just in my lifetime there is a noticeable difference in the air quality. Reputable scientists generally agree that this is scarey stuff. When I was a child, I knew only one person who had an allergy – and that was to milk. I didn’t know anyone who had asthma.

And I haven’t even scratched the surface of the long list of problems that are already part of our lives – not something just in the future (although that would be bad enough.)

What he hasn’t said is that there is no threat. The carbon is freed from the carbon dioxide by an as yet “unspecified process.” Why is carbon dioxide increasing? Could it have anything to do the steep decline in the number of oxyogen producting trees in South Armerica, for example?

Don’t be one of those people who says, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Don’t be convinced by your own death warrant. Have some common sense. Spend a little time researching other university studies if you really want to know. They tend to be more independent.

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I never said that you were Paul Erlich. I said that you agree with his point of view and that Erlichs point of view has been proven to be wrong. The Doom and Gloom crowd has never made a prediction that has turned out to be true. You fall into this catagory.

At the same time you ignore Julian Simon. Simon predicted the correct outcome. I guess that doesn’t mean shit to you. You just don’t care because you are more focused on your beliefs than reality.

If you come up with a theory that actually predicts something and it actually happens then I will listen to you.

You fall into the Doom and Gloom crowd. You have no evidence and cannot reliably predict your own bowel movements much less the weather. If you could predict anything we wouldn’t be having this arguement.

Slee

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The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased 30% in the last 400 years. They have not been this high for several thousand years.
That this coincides with the industrial revolution proves nothing beyond reasonable doubt.
That several of the last few years have been the hottest on record proves nothing beyond reasonable doubt.
That insurance companies have been steadily paying out more for damage from natural disasters proves nothing beyond reasonable doubt.

It * might * be the case that these extra greenhouse gases do not warm the planet as much as predicted.
It * might * be the case that these extra greenhouse gases are not caused by human activity, and that the increase coincided with the industrial revolution is insignificant.

However, given the worst case scenario of melting ice caps turning off the Jet Stream, does it not seem prudent to * try * to limit further increases due to human activity?

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How long have we been recording this? Perhaps 300 years? I’ve also seen evidence that the earth is on a natural warming cycle.

In any event, cite?

No offense, I’d just like to see.

As an aside, we could pretty much kill off about half the planets wildlife and most of its species and still live quite nicely.

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http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/spm22-01.pdf

Page 3 gives data for the last 1000 years based on indirect measurements such as tree rings etc.

As I said, it * is * possible that global warming is “natural”, and that only a portion of the 30% increase is solely due to mankind. However, this surely does not give us license to go hog-wild and continue to mess up our room without a second thought: * any * decrease in human CO2 production * might * be just enough to prevent some unpredictable macroscopic event such as a diversion of the Gulf stream. We may never know how close we are to an unequivocally “bad” thing - if we find out in the far future that there was never anything to worry about, well, better safe than sorry.

This was only one part of the OP, however. I fail to see how * any * pollution, rainforest depletion or ozone depletion can be argued as being a good thing.

I do not wish to live in such a world. The guilt I would hopefully feel at such reckless, unnecessary devastation could not be described as “nice” by any means.

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Global warming is not taking place. As evidence I offer:

http://www.co2science.org/ - well argued case against the “CO2 will ill us all” hysteria
http://www.john-daly.com/ - “Still Waiting for Greenhouse” good source for the lack of evidence for the greenhouse effect
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/ - the marvellous Number Watch site, ruthless in its exposure of sloppy science including global warming. Especially worth a read is http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/sir_robert_may_annotated.htm

A couple of salient points from Number Watch:

The Earth is about one degree Celsius cooler than it was a thousand years ago. It’s not surprising if it’s getting warmer.

The commonest greenhouse gas is water vapour. There is about 100 times as much of it as there is CO2 in the atmosphere. Work out for yourselves the effect of reducing man made CO2 emissions on the greenhouse gas concentrations.

Most temperature readings suffer from the urban heat island effect. (Briefly, temperatures are measured in the same places they were measured 100+ years ago. Most of these locations have become surrounded by urban sprawl or were in cities to start with. Urban development has the effect of raising the average temperature. This is especially true in the UK. Temperatures measured in cities all read higher than they did a hundred years ago, almost entirely due to the urban heat island effect.)

The year 2000 was declared the warmest on record, despite there being a fall in the temperature of the northern hemisphere, and a fall in the temperature of the southern hemisphere. So which bit of the world was so hot that the global average went up?

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None of these cites appear to be established peer-reviewed journals or attached to any established academic institution. However, I don’t wish to engage in “citation handbags” since, like Sir Robert May, I’ve got no expertise in climatology whatsoever.

As I said, even the experts appear to disagree on to what extent the sentence “Human activity has made the Earth hotter” is true. What is * not * contested is that the greenhouse effect is real and that greenhouse gases have increased over the last couple of centuries.

And even if, as I sincerely hope, this is all a hurricane in a teacup, pollution, ozone depletion, smog and species extinction are all * undeniably * a threat to the environment caused by human activity.

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SentientMeat, what is disputed is that humans have caused global warming. The greenhouse effect has always been there, indeed since before humans evolved. The increase in greenhouse gases attributed to human activity is also not in dispute. Whether it has had any measurable effect is disputed.

As you say, there are many other things that are far more damaging to the environment than the greenhouse efect.

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Returning to the more OP’s more general question. 25 years ago, Cod was the most inexpensive fish imaginable. Millions of fish patties were served in America’s public schools every friday. Now the Grand Banks fishery has collapsed, the North sea is not far behind, and nothing worth eating is taking the place of this missing species. North Sea cod ‘face commercial end’