SUV drivers doing a good job destroying earth.

Oh, good. I'm glad I'm helping get it warmer. I hate wearing jackets.

SUVs, R-12 and 22, combustion power plants, I doubt it!!!

In school (over 40 years ago) we were warned about clear cutting 100s of thousands of acres of the rainforest around the equator....

Find out the answers to these questions and more as you check out these interesting rainforest facts! And when you think that you know all there is to know about the rainforest, test your knowledge with our rainforest quiz.

Facts about the Global Coverage of Rainforests: Fact: Covering less than 2 percent of the Earth's total surface area, the world's rainforests are home to 50 percent of the Earth's plants and animals. Fact: Rainforests can be found all over the world from as far north as Alaska and Canada to Latin America, Asia and Africa. Fact: Rainforests are found on every continent across the Earth, except Antarctica. Fact: There are two major types of rainforest: temperate rainforests and tropical rainforests. Fact: The largest temperate rainforests are found on North America's Pacific Coast and stretch from Northern California up into Canada. Fact: Temperate rainforests used to exist on almost every continent in the world, but today only 50 percent ? 75 million acres ? of these forests remain worldwide. Facts about the Rainforest as Part of our Global Environment and Well-being: Fact: Rainforests act as the world's thermostat by regulating temperatures and weather patterns. Fact: One-fifth of the world?s fresh water is found in the Amazon Basin. Fact: Rainforests are critical in maintaining the Earth's limited supply of drinking and fresh water. Facts about the Abundant Life and Important Resources that Rainforests Share with Us: Fact: A typical four square mile patch of rainforest contains as many as 1,500 flowering plants, 750 species of trees, 400 species of birds and 150 species of butterflies. Fact: Rainforests provide many important products for people: timber, coffee, cocoa and many medicinal products, including those used in the treatment of cancer. Fact: Seventy percent of the plants identified by the U.S. National Cancer Institute as useful in the treatment of cancer are found only in rainforests. Fact: More than 2,000 tropical forest plants have been identified by scientists as having anti-cancer properties. Fact: Less than one percent of the tropical rainforest species have been analyzed for their medicinal value

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 07:59:58 -0700, goatman wrote:

If all of that is true, why do we need so many rail forest? Seems the ones we have are very productive and can produce more than we use or need.

What does that have to do with SUVs destroying the earth anyway. The rain forests that produce all the 'stuff' you referenced, not to mention a lot of the oxygen that we need to breath, would ALL disappear if not for the COs we exhale and the SUVs produce.

Seems to me it is all are part of natures natural recycling process.. The more CO2, the more vegetation, the more oxygen. After all it was the much high level of CO2, during the 165 million years that the dinosaurs roamed the earth that grew all of the vegetation, especially all the big trees, they needed to survive for all those millions of years.

Perhaps it they had SUVs back then, all the big vegetation and the dinosaurs would not have died out? ;)

mike

goatman wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@o61g2000hsh.googlegroups.com:

at 51 yrs old ive seen the 'world is gonna freeze' crowd in the seventies doom us all to death....now i have the loser of algore telling me we are all going to die because the globe is toasting!.....well......what is it you scientific genuises??? cold or heat??? makeup your mind.....or, is it just real happliss little kids that still have a silver spoon hangin' out their lips and have nuthin' better to do...........BYTE ME ALGORE!.........these mental midgets are right about one damn thing! WE ALL ARE GOING TO DIE!........ if i had any extra energy i would write his publiscist a nasty letter.................but, i will leave that to you youngsters, your future depends on getting the likes of him out of the news and back in the funny papers like when he was little bills whipping boy.

Ummm...that might be true in a "natural" system. Asphalt, concrete, clear cutting, drought, other pollutants, etc. influence how plants can respond to the increased CO2 levels.

IMHO, it is hard to reasonably deny that human activity has an effect on the natural balance. The question is how much of what is going on right now is natural variation and how much is due to us.

If it indeed human activity that is causing the CO2 level to increase, how does one account for the fact it was much higher for 165 million years, 60 million year ago, when man did not exist, yet life still exists today?

mike

on Sunday 15 July 2007 03:24 pm, someone posing as Mike Hunter took a rock and etched into the cave:

What are you quoting?

Here, read this so we can make sense of your post.

Oh, and you need to fix your sig delimiter. Two dashes and a space.

Well, Im 55, and I'm telling you, if you pull your head out of your ass, the world will smell a whole lot sweeter.

I never hear anyone propose that we start programs (even if it's just public awareness programs) to curb population growth. This insane exponential population growth is why there's all this pollution, forest depletion, wildlife habitat destruction, the paving of mother earth, polluting of fresh water, etc.. It seems that we're hell bent on exponential population growth, which is insane. "Growth for growth's sake is the idealogy of the cancer cell", said Edward Abbey. The only beneficiaries of out of control population growth are people with huge bank accounts that grow based on inflation. But the increased economic activity caused by ever bigger numbers of people gets eaten up by having to provide jobs for all of these people.

One simple explanation: Where do you think the carbon in the oil we burn came from? As you said, plants turn CO2, among other things, into more and bigger plants. These plants (and animals, which also contain lots of carbon) get buried and turn into coal and oil over eons.

This carbon took all of that time (millions of years, as you point out) to get "locked up" in fossil fuels. We have managed to put a pretty fair percentage of that carbon back into the environment in the last 100-150 years or so.

Is it not possible that the short time it's taken to do this has overwhelmed the natural feedback system you talked about? How about when we've also paved/covered in concrete/clear cut/cultivated much of the land that nourishes that feedback system (i.e. forests)? I encourage you and others to park your SUVs just for a little while and think about it logically instead of assuming that the "damn-pinko-tree-huggin'-NPR-listenin'-libruls" are just out to ruin your good time.

As a geologist friend of ours pointed out, the exact amount that mankind is contributing to climate change is controversial. But, it certainly isn't helping.

You are gonna love it when all those hordes of tanned immigrants wash ashore your northern beaches trying to escape rising seas and failing crops.

"What goes around, comes around" says the saying.