I always TIVO it, haven't had a chance to watch it yet. Looks interesting, although I sometimes get a little turned off by their sometimes incessant beating of a rather transparent agenda, and global warming is one of those.
I agree, but I think there's little chance of it ever sinking in. That would require him to actually care about something other than his friends' greed, and his own personal dogma and ambition. By the way, I prefer Bumbler-in-Chief (and that from a life-long conservative.)
I always TIVO it--one of my favorite programs. Haven't had a chance to watch it yet, though I had noticed it looked interesting.
Agreed, although I think there's little chance it will ever sink in. That would require him to actually care about something other than his friends' greed and his own personal dogma and ambition. By the way, I prefer Bumbler-in-Chief.
Remember the argument in the 70s over whether we were seeing global warming or global cooling? Our understanding of the earth's climate has come a long way since then, but I think this is a clear indication that there are major factors that we have absolutely no handle on.
In general, I agree with you, but given Britain's recent concession that Kyoto is unachievable, I'm not sure what we can do that will not require major personal sacrifice from most of the developed world--because that just ain't gonna happen. I think the science fiction stories of the Cold War era that posited that the human race would do itself in with its own aggression got it all wrong. The human race is going to do itself in with its greed and unwillingness to give up even minor concession in its ever-improving lifestyle in order to save the planet from climatic destruction.
Agreed. I'm constantly amazed at some things I've learned about changes that other countries have made. Brazil's switch to ethanol is one, Spain's decision to foster wind power is another, as is France's decision to foster nuclear power. In each case, these countries just made a decision that they were going to buckle down and change something, and they did it. That will never happen in the US. I don't know whether it's our size or what, we just don't seem to be able to make a major decision.
Agreed, I think we still know way too little about our climate to try something like that. In such a situation, the unintended consequence is almost certainly a major disaster.
says that it is, but I don't know how old the page is. There may be some local restrictions for various reasons. Perhaps I've seen one too many fancy car adverts :-)
There was one area in QLD where I did seen cane fields being burned off (it's a very impressive site). My neices in-laws run a cane harvesting business, and in the region they work nobody burns cane fields anymore.
I wonder if it is connected to the harvesting method? Sugar cane leaves are apparently wickedly sharp. Is it areas with some kind of automated cutting that don't bother and where manual labour is used they have to burn the leaves off for safety reasons? ( just guessing wildly at this point you understand ! )
The problem as I understand it is that there are huge amounts of CO2 sequestered compared to the amounts in the atmosphere. In such a scenario, it is extremely tricky to make a reliable prediction, because even small errors completely change your results. Not all mechanisms take CO2 out of these big reservoirs, some put it *in*.
And while scientific groups might make estimates about the error in their models by comparing the differences models, these other models probably are making the same mistakes about ununderstood effects.
But the danger is that if perversely, the observed trends turn around, and human intervention turns out to eventually cool the planet, (gosh, I hope not; it is already unbearable enough here in North Florida in winter,) something that has been raised as a possibility, there may be a great credibility problem.
I am a democrat, but I do not really blame Bush that much for holding of on acting on weak evidence, just for stacking scientific boards with his yes- sayers, instead of putting all the considerable scientific power of the US onto finding out the truth.
The burning is a trade-off with the harvesting method and cost. The leaves have to be removed from the stalk and the tops cut off. If your labor is cheap, you can do all that by hand. If your labor is more expensive, you burn the field and you only have to cut the stalks and trim the top of the cane and you can use combines or more expesive manual labor.
Problem is, you better harvest withing 2 days, because you just killed the plant and the sugar content of the plant is dropping just sitting inthe field.
I used to live in Lafayette, LA and I always found it ironic that the city busybodies had banned the burning of yard waste so I was forced to fill containers and clog up the land fill. At harvest, all the farmers around tow would lite the fields and smoke the whole town. I thing they waited until the wind was blowing in the right direction when they did this.
And remember, it's apparently global dimming and the resulting cooling of the Atlantic ocean that's causing the monsoon to fail, year after year, from the Sahel to south Asia. We *already* know it's a bad idea--intentionally causing even worse famine is unthinkable. Or at least one hopes so.
I agree in principle. But I can imagine a science fiction scenario where it (GH effect) gets so bad we are left no choice but to try something like this atmospheric engineering. With, I'd bet, some benefits here, some huge catastrophies there. Let's hope this is just SF.
As to the "apparent" cause, I'd leave it at that. I do some modeling in my engineering work, and even have worked with meteorological modelers a bit way back when. I found this broadcast to be far from compelling as to the causality of the dimming and monsoon. It's easy to model something that happened. That does not prove-in a model. It's far harder to predict what will happen next.
But again, I think we need to do something about our energy consumption and emissions.
Now where were we on the ethanol in the gas tank???
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