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Yes, there's plenty of evidence for global warming and it's a big deal, long term, but I think the fundamental environmental problem is economic growthism aka human expansion.
We have bought into a blind mandate of endlessly rising resource consumption, fueled by population growth and the need to pay off unsustainable debt by constantly creating jobs. The money system is destroying the physical world by pretending the latter has the capacity to support billions more people. The evidence shows we've already overused Earth's physical resources, based on the illusion of easy energy, which is mainly burned-up fossil fuel capital, not energy income.
Efforts to replace the vast scale of fossil fuels are already wrecking nature more than environmentalists want to admit. Man's physical footprint on nature keeps increasing. Wind turbines and solar thermal plants are among the worst culprits, slated to grow along with the mindless expansion of the economy. The problem is limited physical space to install giant structures without trashing wild and scenic areas, killing birds and generally wrecking the aesthetic quality of life.
This is a warning for "green" technophiles who think they're "saving the planet" with massive land-grabs. Just because a power source doesn't burn oil or coal (after construction) doesn't make it benign. There's also the problem of electricity never being able to replace portable, energy-dense liquid fuels. We won't be able to power trains or semi-trucks with batteries in the foreseeable future.
Here's an article that sums it up better than most.
...To do this will require the large-scale harvesting of the planet’s ambient energy: sunlight, wind, water power. This means that vast new conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where this energy is most abundant. Unfortunately, these places coincide with some of the world’s wildest, most beautiful, and most untouched landscapes. The sort of places that environmentalism came into being to protect.
And so the deserts, perhaps the landscape always most resistant to permanent human conquest, are to be colonized by vast “solar arrays,” glass and steel and aluminum, the size of small countries. The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires. The open oceans, already swimming in our plastic refuse and emptying of marine life, will be home to enormous offshore turbine ranges and hundreds of wave machines strung around the coastlines like Victorian necklaces. The rivers are to see their estuaries severed and silted by industrial barrages. The croplands and even the rainforests, the richest habitats on this terrestrial Earth, are already highly profitable sites for biofuel plantations designed to provide guilt-free car fuel to the motion-hungry masses of Europe and America.
What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.”...
Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it's good for you! Poison ivy is "natural", but it doesn't make a good skin lotion!
The Earth will do what it does...our global climate is ever-changing, and there is NOTHING we can or should do about it!
There have been MULTIPLE ice ages...which means there have also been multiple warming periods. 200 years of weather records out of 4+ BILLION years of the earth cannot convince me there is a man-made problem. We will adapt to whatever the earth throws at us.
So global warming alarmism is just thinly veiled anti-Capitalism.
We've heard this song before.
BS. Global warming concerns are based on hypotheses and observations that needs no justification among those who understand physics.
The broader question of questioning an addiction to system that requires exponential growth on a finite planet seems to strike at the heart of environmentalism and sustainability. It is just common sense. Preaching a gospel of unregulated growth is to preach the ideology of a cancer cell, or a bacteria in a petri dish. We should be smarter than that. We can achieve most of the positive benefits of capitalism with a sense of the importance of limits. Foremost, we need to move away from resource-consumptive sectors into other forms of innovation.
I think the challenge for environmentalists is to move from pointing out the obvious flaws in our system to coming up with alternative models and ideas.
Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it's good for you! Poison ivy is "natural", but it doesn't make a good skin lotion!
The Earth will do what it does...our global climate is ever-changing, and there is NOTHING we can or should do about it!
There have been MULTIPLE ice ages...which means there have also been multiple warming periods. 200 years of weather records out of 4+ BILLION years of the earth cannot convince me there is a man-made problem. We will adapt to whatever the earth throws at us.
That's your own problem, not the rest of ours.
The rest of the world won't let your denial take us down with you.
Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it's good for you! Poison ivy is "natural", but it doesn't make a good skin lotion!
The Earth will do what it does...our global climate is ever-changing, and there is NOTHING we can or should do about it!
There have been MULTIPLE ice ages...which means there have also been multiple warming periods. 200 years of weather records out of 4+ BILLION years of the earth cannot convince me there is a man-made problem. We will adapt to whatever the earth throws at us.
As a purist and a rulemeister, I have to say, you cannot count the first 2-2.5 billion years of earth's existence into any of these kinds of conversations. The year was not habitable until 2-2.5 billion years ago. And really, we are only concerned with the last 2-3 millions years of the current ice age we are in.
The AGW crowd time and time again demonstrates they dont understant glaciation-warming cycles and you are correct that they consider only a little over a hundred years worth of data, not all of it relianble, to make their grand conclusions.
BS. Global warming concerns are based on hypotheses and observations that needs no justification among those who understand physics.
The broader question of questioning an addiction to system that requires exponential growth on a finite planet seems to strike at the heart of environmentalism and sustainability. It is just common sense. Preaching a gospel of unregulated growth is to preach the ideology of a cancer cell, or a bacteria in a petri dish. We should be smarter than that. We can achieve most of the positive benefits of capitalism with a sense of the importance of limits. Foremost, we need to move away from resource-consumptive sectors into other forms of innovation.
I think the challenge for environmentalists is to move from pointing out the obvious flaws in our system to coming up with alternative models and ideas.
Preach it brother!
The news is full of global warming news stories from all over the world!
Just to drop a few of the major news stories
West Australian Heat Wave - "Severest In History"
Heat Waves, Floods, Droughts, Famines Plague China
Spain's Heat Wave: 130 Degrees In Shade
Hottest June In U.S. History - Heat Wave & Drought
Drought In South Africa - "Worst Outlook For 50 Years"
80% of U.S. Suffers From Drought Conditions
Antarctic Has Incredible Heat Wave – 25 Degrees Over Zero
People don't want to accept the truth. Endless growth is not possible with finite resources. Capitalism has a fatal flaw and it is this.
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