unclenedsfishfactory.com

I am a skeptical & pessimistic person.
Things really bother me that nobody seems to care about. (Mass Pike, reelecting politicians in Massachusetts, etc.)
So in my wise old age,
I'm inclined to join them because I can't beat them.

I just got back from the NEC.
(Wish you could have gone, had a great time.)
A German fellow, Ingo,
was doing a talk on Plecos
and was telling us L18 get to be nearly a foot long...
I had to watch 2 of his talks and also read his paragraph in the catfish atlas
until I felt satisfied he was right, because I have never seen or heard of a foot long L18 in person.

My point being:
if I saw data that said
"here are the pH numbers from reefs A, B, ad C every January and every June for the past 150 years"
I might actually think that the pH is dropping in the ocean.
I also have to think that reefs have bleached and recovered long before anyone was here to see it.

I have a hard time thinking that a billion cattle farts cause global warming in 2007
where a billion buffalo farts did not cause global warming in 1807.

I also think global warming causes global cooling.
Many northern european master painters have deep snow winter scenes from the 1600's
(if I remember the century right) and places like the Netherlands do not get that now.

I may be mistaken, but don't mini-ice ages (couple hundred years)
come right after short warming periods (couple - 3 decades) ?
Did these climate changes not occur when there was zero - 100,000 humans on the planet
rather then 6 billion humans on the planet?

So what about solar flares?
So what about tilt of the earth,
or rotation of the earth or distance from the sun.

What about global dimming?
Is it true that for the 3 days after 9/11/2001 when there were no planes flying
that more sunlight hit the Earth's surface?

I'm not saying it's a good idea to burn billions of tons of oil
or that the earth is not warming,
I'm just a little skeptical that the temperature is all man-made.

I think it would be a great idea to put solar collectors on every south facing roof in the northern hemisphere.
Can you imgine the billions of acres that would equal?
I think it's also a matter of national security.
Why worry about a grid when your power comes on every sunny day?

How about a windmill on every property?

Hi Ned.


It is very nice to know that L18 reach a foot. What an incredible display specimen one that size would be! Provided they don't just suddenly turn all black or something. By the way the offending anemone decided to move itself today.


I am writing such a long response this time because you are a friend and exactly the kind of person who ought to know this stuff, since your business depends somewhat upon it.


I don't think there is anything wrong with being skeptical, that is good, just so long as you are also weighing the best available evidence. Also there is a big difference between a climate skeptic, and a climate denier. You do not want to be the latter right now, it is likely to be highly maladaptive.


The global climate change story is like your catfish. The proof is in. If you look at the actual data, it is about as convincing, no matter who you are or what your biases may be, that if you are truly considering things in a critical and skeptical manner, we have a problem here, a real one, and it is a problem that people can do something about but may choose not to. Remember that scientists do not ever consider a case totally closed, they just strive for about 95% certainty. And then they keep asking the same question over and over again just to make sure things haven't changed and to keep raising the level of certainty as much as possible. So we've been at this now for several decades. Yes, in the early 1970's, before supercomputers and tons of earth-monitoring data from satellites and a good understanding of the sun and farts and clouds and all the rest, back then there was some controversy over whether the earth was getting warmer or cooler. Robert Frost, even earlier, wrote a good poem about that controversy. But right now, our level of certainty is comparable to things like a hurricane big enough to destroy the levees is headed straight at you and is only a few hours away and here is a picture of it headed straight for you (information that unfortunately did not save New Orleans), and is getting near stuff like the earth goes around the sun.


Now is different than the early seventies. Ned, 95% is a hell of a lot more certainty than you'll get in the weather report, or from your doctor, or anything else at all in normal life. And actually, at this point, many of the indicators are definitive at a level of 99% or beyond. So the bottom line is, if you consider all the best data now available from all possible sources, the scientific community almost unanimously agrees (the fact that there are a handful of doubters is healthy, but not something to base your life that we are at least 95% confident of global climate change being a real phenomenon, that the current rate of change is toward an earth that is warmer on average, but hot in some places and unnaturally cool in others (overall warming, but strong regional patterns), that these changes will help a few people in a few places but on the whole cause pandemic economic collapse, suffering and death, and that a very large proportion of this change is being caused directly by people burning stuff: fossil fuel, forests, grasslands, and so forth.


The other problem with complete skepticism right now, is that if you interview the Inuit who live at and are experiencing the melting of the north polar ice cap, you might get some pretty strong opinions about whether global warming is real or not. Talk to the polar bears, if you will, by looking at how easy they're finding it to hunt or den over ice that is no longer there but has been for tens of thousands of years, maybe since polar bears even evolved. And what about the massive destruction of roads and infrastructure due to heaves in permafrost that hasn't seen this kind of defrosting in recorded history? Or talk to the folks in the US bread basket, that is now headed north into Canada. Or African farmers whose rampant crop failure and water shortages spell certain death for them and their families. Or the Maldive islanders whose homes are now washing away due to the thermal expansion of the oceans, already raising sea level just noticeably enough to matter to people living at sea level. Or the people who were stranded all through the Amazon Basin by a shortage of rainfall of trans-historic proportions. I can go on if you wish.


Of course reefs have bleached and recovered before. Bleaching appears to be an adaptation to warm spells. The corals may replace cool water symbionts for symbionts used to warmer water, or the reverse. However, bleaching has never produced the wholesale death across reefs around the world, multiple times each year, that we are seeing now. We know this because if you drill down through reefs and analyze who they have changed over time, there is nothing like what we are seeing now for at least the past several million years, anywhere. So in other words, the ability of most corals to adapt to warmer water has been outstripped by the rate at which long spells of very warm water have increased.


The cow farts are the same as buffalo farts. Methane is an important greenhouse gas. Termite farts put them both to shame. Farts have been taken into account in the models and they are not what has changed so much.


Mini ice ages have happend, lots of times the earth has gotten warmer then cooler, warmer then cooler. WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW IS ABOVE AND BEYOND ALL CYCLICAL CHANGES. These past changes are very well understood. They were taken into account by the scientific community.


The sun is getting slightly hotter every year. This is already taken into account in the climate models. The warming we see now is ABOVE AND BEYOND anything that can be explained by the life history of the sun.


Solar flares are indicative of a more active sun. The sun's activity cycle (an 11-year cycle linked to sunspots) does slightly warm and cool the earth. This is taken into account in the models. What we are seeing is ABOVE AND BEYOND the normal cycle of solar activity.


It is true about the planes. Jet contrails reflect solar energy back into space, as do any kind of clouds. Clouds and cloud dynamics have been taken into account in the climate models. It has also been proposed that we increase cloud cover artificially in order to retard global warming. This would have catastrophic impacts on crop production and the growth and health of forests, reefs, you name it.


SO: The effect is not all man-made. Just most of it.


And here's what matters: Enough is caused by people that we have the option, if we elect it, to avert catastrophic suffering, widespread crop failure, starvation, and death from thirst and disease, a large amount of political turmoil and war secondary to the sudden reduction in resources, and generally a really stupid and unnecessary future. And by the way, the loss of most of our coral reef estate.


So here we are able to prevent all of that from happening. We know that this is what's in store for us with a higher level of certainty than we will have that an asteroid will hit us when that time comes. The only way we could avoid trying to move the asteroid aside would be to sit on our hands until the level of certainty creeps from 95% to 99.9999%, by which time it will be WAY too late to even try to do anything about it.


This is my field, Ned. I am only one scientist. But I do work on climate change effects on corals, and I have read a lot of what my colleagues have written, I know how the scientific consensus is formed, and I am persuaded that we have a real problem on our hands here that we'd better do something about.


If you look hard enough, you will succeed in finding a "second opinion" that might support doing nothing. And it is true that sometimes one scientist says something that is true against the grain of the entire rest of the scientific community. Generally, however, that happens in the event of a novel theory or discovery. I don't think it is too common in situations like this, where we are staring down a monster and anybody with open eyes can see, feel, and fear that monster. Remember, the press looks high and low for the one person who might disagree with everybody else, and then sets that person up as 50% of the opinion of the expert community. Makes good copy and television, but man, you would not want to bet your life on that one person, especially if he or she has a poor track record about being right in the past.


Windmills and solar panels are going to help quite a bit, but they alone will not supply enough energy to make all, or even most, of the difference. We have to live cleaner. Doing so is good for business...just not necessarily good for oil and coal companies, or, evidently, for Dick Cheney or George Bush. They don't like the idea of global warming. All the more reason to recognize and combat it, far as I'm concerned.


So, the problem is real, we can do something about it, it is the possibly the most serious challenge ever faced in human history...


And we should not do what?








Les Kaufman
Professor of Biology
Boston University Marine Program
and
Senior PI
Marine Management Area Science
Conservation International


“I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”
George W. Bush
Saginaw, Michigan; September 29, 2000

Excerpt:
>
> In the Chesapeake, the most dramatic sign of warm weather's impact
> came in
> summer 2005. A long hot spell killed 95 percent of the bay's
> eelgrass, a
> crucial plant species that shelters baby blue crabs from predators.
>
> "There was this really hot bath water sitting on top of eelgrass,"
> which
> exceeded its temperature limit of 82 to 86 degrees, said Bob Orth, a
> professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. "They go into
> heatstroke, and they just die."
>
> Bay scientists said temperatures began climbing again in the
> summer. Luckily,
> they said, the remnants of Hurricane Ernesto cooled the water
> before the
> eelgrass was decimated again.
>
> "We dodged a bullet, but the bullets are flying faster and faster,"
> said
> Dennison, of the University of Maryland.
>
> ....
> Hot weather could supercharge the algae blooms that create low-
> oxygen dead
> zones in the Chesapeake. It could aggravate a disease that's
> killing off the
> bay oyster. It could cause sea levels to rise and swamp key
> wildlife habitats
> on islands and marshes. And it could make Maryland too hot for its
> remaining
> orioles.
>
> The problem: It's difficult to foresee how small changes will
> ripple through
> nature's complex systems of predators and prey, flowers and
> pollinators.
>
>
>
> FULL ARTICLE:
> ========================================
> Warming Imperils Md. Species
> Scientists Fear Loss Of Baltimore Oriole, Native Brook Trout
>
> By David A. Fahrenthold
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Monday, March 19, 2007; B01
>
>
>
> The Baltimore oriole is the state bird of Maryland. The brown
> pelican is the
> state bird of Louisiana. But now, as climate change seems to be
> leaving its
> first footprints here, local scientists worry that the Washington
> area may be
> slowly trading one for the other.
>
> About 1,000 brown pelican chicks hatched in Maryland last year.
> That was
> about 1,000 more of the birds, ungainly fish-eaters comfortable in
> the steamy
> Southeast, than there were in the state in 1985.
>
> The oriole, by contrast, might be gone from here in a century.
> Researchers
> say that as Maryland's climate warms, the bird could shift its
> territory to
> the north, becoming, perhaps, the Philadelphia oriole.
>
> As the global scientific community has settled on a consensus that
> the world
> is warming, local researchers have begun trying to understand the
> impact
> here. Already they've found enough to create serious concerns for
> the future
> -- about shifting bird migrations, increased "dead zones" in the
> Chesapeake
> Bay and bringing some beloved species to the edge of their
> tolerance for
> heat. Brook trout, the area's only native trout, could be
> disappearing from
> its last refuges in the woods of Frederick County, for instance.
>
> This issue will take center stage in Washington tomorrow with a
> rally at the
> U.S. Capitol calling for reductions in greenhouse gases.
> Organizers, from the
> Episcopal Church to the National Wildlife Federation to the U.S.
> Public
> Interest Research Group, say Climate Crisis Action Day will be the
> largest
> rally about climate change ever in the capital.
>
> It will be a political sign of what scientists already know:
> Washington is
> being changed by warming temperatures.
>
> "We certainly know that we've been experiencing climate change
> impacts," said
> Bill Dennison, a vice president at the University of Maryland
> Center for
> Environmental Science. He added that even a seemingly slight
> warming trend
> can be significant in the interdependent world of nature.
>
> "What's a degree? Well, think about if you ran a couple degrees'
> temperature," Dennison said. "We're already a couple degrees
> elevated. That's
> affecting our health."
>
> The public's interest has been stoked recently by the Oscar-winning
> documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" and a U.N. report that says the
> temperature increase is "very likely" man-made, at least in part.
>
> The causes of the warming, authorities believe, are the so-called
> greenhouse
> gases, which include emissions from cars and power plants burning
> fossil
> fuels. The gases accumulate in the atmosphere, creating a layer of
> insulation
> that holds in more heat.
>
> Certainly, Washington has not missed out on the heat. Climate data
> show that
> the average annual temperature in the District has climbed about
> two degrees
> since the early 1960s. Weather data going back to the 1870s show
> that five of
> the 10 warmest years on record in the District have come since 1989.
>
> Researchers have begun trying to learn how that trend is changing the
> surrounding ecosystems, from the wooded ridge of Catoctin Mountain
> to the
> weedy bottom of the bay. So far, the evidence is spotty, anecdotal
> and often
> inconclusive -- but it can still be arresting, when it shows eons-old
> processes threatened by change.
>
> The work has taken them to such places as Little Fishing Creek, a
> glass-clear
> stream running through woods north of Frederick City. Brook trout,
> which once
> lived all over the Washington area, remain there. They were
> decimated by
> urban pollution, and officials fear that climate change will finish
> them off.
>
> "All it takes is a couple of degrees to lose those fish," said Don
> Cosden, a
> state fisheries official.
>
> The local trout prefer water colder than 68 degrees, he said. Already,
> streams such as this one can get that hot on summer days. State
> officials
> estimate that the fish might be gone from central Maryland in less
> than a
> century -- although they would probably survive in the cooler western
> mountains and in states farther north.
>
> "This habitat is right on the edge of their ability to survive,"
> Cosden said.
> "If you throw climate change in on top of that . . . then you hit a
> tolerance
> level that can take out a whole population."
>
> Other studies of local plants and animals have found ways in which
> warming
> already seems to be re-tuning the rhythms of nature.
>
> One of the first appeared in 2000, when Smithsonian scientists
> found that
> plant species, including Washington's famous cherry blossoms, were
> flowering
> days earlier than they had in 1970. One theory was that the plants
> were being
> tricked by weather that said spring, even if the calendar did not.
>
> People who watch birds -- for fun or for a living -- have noted
> other changes
> that seem linked to warmer weather. This winter in Maryland, the
> Chesapeake
> Bay's flotilla of migratory ducks was smaller than usual, with
> thousands
> fewer canvasbacks, scaups and mergansers. Researchers' theory: The
> Great
> Lakes, where ducks often stop before venturing to the Washington
> region,
> didn't freeze in January, so the ducks saw no reason to head south.
>
> In the Chesapeake, the most dramatic sign of warm weather's impact
> came in
> summer 2005. A long hot spell killed 95 percent of the bay's
> eelgrass, a
> crucial plant species that shelters baby blue crabs from predators.
>
> "There was this really hot bath water sitting on top of eelgrass,"
> which
> exceeded its temperature limit of 82 to 86 degrees, said Bob Orth, a
> professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. "They go into
> heatstroke, and they just die."
>
> Bay scientists said temperatures began climbing again in the
> summer. Luckily,
> they said, the remnants of Hurricane Ernesto cooled the water
> before the
> eelgrass was decimated again.
>
> "We dodged a bullet, but the bullets are flying faster and faster,"
> said
> Dennison, of the University of Maryland.
>
> Armed with studies such as these, scientists have begun trying to
> forecast
> the future. One answer seems fairly certain: more heat. A recent
> U.N. panel
> on climate change predicted that global temperatures could rise
> about 0.7
> degrees, on average, by 2027.
>
> There are actually some benefits that added warmth brings. It might
> mean, for
> instance, that fewer blue crabs will freeze to death in their
> winter burrows.
> Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen's Association, said
> his group
> has seen no reason for alarm so far.
>
> "We think it's a natural cycle, and we're used to living in natural
> cycles,"
> Simns said. "We'll deal with it."
>
> But many local experts are more concerned.
>
> Hot weather could supercharge the algae blooms that create low-
> oxygen dead
> zones in the Chesapeake. It could aggravate a disease that's
> killing off the
> bay oyster. It could cause sea levels to rise and swamp key
> wildlife habitats
> on islands and marshes. And it could make Maryland too hot for its
> remaining
> orioles.
>
> The problem: It's difficult to foresee how small changes will
> ripple through
> nature's complex systems of predators and prey, flowers and
> pollinators.
>
> "We know it will be different," said Jay Gulledge, staff scientist
> at the Pew
> Center on Global Climate Change. "Not knowing exactly what that
> means makes
> it more difficult to manage."

My colleague Richard Primack is studying the arrival time in the spring of birds and the first flowering of wildflowers. He has reams and reams of data from Massachusetts, where he is comparing today's data to the records of Thoreau and others. Sweet project. He also has a lot of data from Japan that goes back centuries, because those guys are so anal about writing everything down and they have been there a longer time than we have been here in North America. But the results clearly show that the climate has shifted toward being warmer with earlier arrival of birds and blooming times of flowers. The problem is that the timing of insects that birds eat and flowers get pollinated by has not shifted uniformly the same way. This could cause starving birds and flowers that do not set seed.


Besides the polar bear problems in the north, there is an annual production cycle that depends upon the sea ice of Antarctica. That cycle is now being altered by warming, as the sea ice retreats. Antarctic productivity may decline precipitously, and it is a major source of global fisheries landings. For chrissakes, huge ice shelves are breaking off and floating away. Penguins breed on those ice shelves. This is really kind of not good. A friend of mine led an expedition to an iceberg the size of Connecticut that broke away a few years ago. These sorts of things have no precedent in historic times. People have to deal with this stuff.


But let us say that we decide that the climate is changing, that the changes are bad, but that they are TOTALLY NATURAL, and the only issue is whether people can do anything about it.


Then now is the time to celebrate and party because we actually can do something, and it is likely to greatly reduce the grief that we and our children and grandchildren have to deal with. Plus, if we do do something, it will launch a huge industry, send the stock market to new highs, restore American technology's preeminence in the world, and create gadzillions of new jobs.


This is a bad thing?


Only for those folks who are chained to Stone Age technologies.


Anyway I've got to do some work I've been procrastinating on all day long. No, for weeks.


Les

Les Kaufman
Professor of Biology
Boston University Marine Program
and
Senior PI
Marine Management Area Science
Conservation International

While sparring with Representative Joe L. Barton, a Texas Republican critical of his message, Mr. Gore resorted to a simple metaphor. “The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor.” He added, “If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say ‘I read a science fiction novel that says it’s not a problem.’ You take action.”


Les




Les Kaufman
Professor of Biology
Boston University Marine Program
and
Senior PI
Marine Management Area Science
Conservation International

March 22, 2007


Gore Warns Congress of ‘Planetary Emergency’

By <http>FELICITY BARRINGER and <http>ANDREW C. REVKIN

WASHINGTON, March 21 ­ It was part science class, part policy wonk paradise, part politics and all theater as former Vice President <http>Al Gore came to Congress on Wednesday to insist that <http>global warming constitutes a “planetary emergency” requiring an aggressive federal response.

Mr. Gore, accompanied by his wife, Tipper, delivered the same blunt message to a joint meeting of two House committees in the morning and a Senate panel in the afternoon: Humans are artificially warming the world, the risks of inaction are great, and meaningful cuts in emissions linked to warming will happen only if the United States takes the lead.

While sparring with Representative Joe L. Barton, a Texas Republican critical of his message, Mr. Gore resorted to a simple metaphor. “The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor.” He added, “If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say ‘I read a science fiction novel that says it’s not a problem.’ You take action.”

In the House, there was little debate about the underlying science; the atmosphere was more that of a college lecture hall than a legislative give-and-take. But in the Senate, James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, set a pugilistic tone, challenging Mr. Gore’s analysis of the dangers of climate change from <http>hurricanes and melting ice in Antarctica.

“It is my perspective that your global warming alarmist pronouncements are now and have always been filled with inaccuracies and misleading statements,” Mr. Inhofe said.

Beneath the carefully groomed surface of the House and Senate committees’ scripted production, a rift was evident. Republican committee leaders, including Mr. Barton in the House, and Mr. Inhofe in the Senate, seemed somewhat isolated from their rank-and-file colleagues, who appeared more receptive to Mr. Gore’s message and the scientific consensus on climate change. Even <http>J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the former House speaker, seemed to accept the scientific consensus.

Climate experts have concluded with growing accord that human-generated greenhouse gases are the dominant driver of recent global warming and that centuries of rising temperatures and seas lie ahead if emissions are not curbed.

Instead of challenging the science, many <http>Republicans focused on questions of how to attack the problem in the United States, tending to favor nuclear power ­ which Mr. Gore said should be a “small part” of any solution ­ and asking what to do about the emissions of large developing economies like China and India.

Senator <http>John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who briefly considered trying to replace Mr. Inhofe as the ranking member on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, expressed concern about how to coax China into reversing its build-out of coal-fired power plants, which are heavy emitters of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent heat-trapping gas associated with global warming.

“When we lead, they will be a part of it,” Mr. Gore replied, adding that two recent speeches by Chinese leaders indicate “there’s excellent evidence that they” are concerned about the effects of climate change.

From the time that he arrived in the morning at the Rayburn House Office Building in a black Mercury Mariner hybrid S.U.V. to the time he was whisked out of the senators’ entrance at the Dirksen Building committee room, Mr. Gore combined the erudition of a professor with a touch of the preacher’s fire.

Evoking the movie “300,” about the ancient Spartans’ stand at Thermopylae, Mr. Gore, speaking to a joint session of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Science Committee, called on Congress to put aside partisan differences, accept the scientific consensus on global warming and become “the 535,” a reference to the number of seats in the House and Senate.

Democrats and Republicans, he said, should emulate their British counterparts and compete to see how best to curb emissions of smokestack and tailpipe “greenhouse” gases.


Video

<http>More Video »

Mr. Gore also proposed a 10-point plan, calling for initiatives like a tax on carbon emissions, a ban on incandescent light bulbs and another on new coal-fired plants that cannot be designed to capture carbon. He also called for a national mortgage program to underwrite the use of home energy-saving technologies.

Waving his finger at some 40 House members, he said, “A day will come when our children and grandchildren will look back and they’ll ask one of two questions.”

Either, he said, “they will ask: what in God’s name were they doing?” or “they may look back and say: how did they find the uncommon moral courage to rise above politics and redeem the promise of American democracy?”

On the Senate side, Mr. Inhofe quickly hit an issue that some of Mr. Gore’s critics have sounded in recent weeks ­ the size and energy-consuming properties of his new home in Tennessee. Mr. Inhofe sought to exact a pledge from Mr. Gore to cut electricity use so that his home outside Nashville used no more than the average American home in a year.

This triggered a jousting match with both Mr. Gore and Senator <http>Barbara Boxer of California, the committee chairwoman, which ended when Ms. Boxer made a tart reference to the change in power in the Senate. “You’re not making the rules,” she told Mr. Inhofe.

Mr. Gore then said he pays extra to use wind-generated electricity at the home; Mr. Inhofe took that response as a rejection of the pledge.

When Senator <http>Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, asked if Mr. Gore would favor a tax on carbon emissions over a cap on emissions, accompanied by a system of trading pollution allowances, he said both were needed.

Representative Ralph M. Hall, Republican of Texas, said calls for cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases amounted to an “all-out assault on all forms of fossil fuels” that could eliminate jobs and hurt the economy.

In written testimony for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author critical of people who present environmental problems as a crisis, asserted that Mr. Gore’s portrayal of global warming as a problem, and his prescription for solving it, were deeply flawed.

Mr. Lomborg said that “global warming is real and man-made,” but that a focus on intensified energy research would be more effective and far cheaper than caps or taxes on greenhouse gas emissions or energy sources that produce them.

Felicity Barringer reported from Washington, and Andrew C. Revkin from New York.

<http>Copyright 2007 <http>The New York Times Company

Hmmmm, some very long winded posts.

My short winded opinion: Global warming and cooling trends have been going on since long before the industrial age leaving me to believe that man kind's contribution to global warming has been insignificant and any temperature shifts that may have happened in recent years were probably going to happen anyway.

The end of the world has been predicted by scientists in about 6 billion years due to the sun expanding and engulfing our solar system so the planet will last a long time but probably can't be ultimately saved.

I also believe that the planet would cool down alot if only Al Gore would close his mouth and stop releasing all of that hot air.

I look at it this way -
You've got a big fish tank.
In that tank you've got a big Oscar.
You change water every few weeks or so.
The tank parameters periodically shift as you do so - nitrate goes up then down, then back up, then down.

Your drunken roomate wants to Pee in the tank one night.

Granted, thats one really big oscar, and your roomate is a small guy, he probably isn't going to add THAT much more ammonia to the equation, and your next water change will eventually balance out the nitrate - but is it really a good idea to let him do it ?

Or - if you find out he's been peeing in the tank a little bit every week - doesn't it make sense to get him to stop ?


There have always been global temperature shifts. If we were on a downward trend - see the mini-iceage about 1000 years ago -- then I think all of our greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation would be fine. But it looks like we're on a natural upswing in global temps - wouldn't this be a good time to stop peeing in the fish tank ?

Just don't get me started on the Hollywood types who FLY in a private jet, then drive in a huge SUV, to go to a fundraiser to "save energy" or "save the planet" -- they use more gas during that trip than I use all year long.