PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Little Joe on May 21, 2018, 05:37:28 AM
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Things have been too quiet on this board lately, so I thought I would stir up a little shit.
I have been rethinking my position on climate change. My position has always been that YES, the climate is changing, and YES, man's activities probably have something to do with that, although I have always thought that man's contribution has been minuscule and insignificant when compared with natural phenomena like forest fires, volcanoes, solar activity, spatial drift etc, etc.
But as time goes on and I see and learn more, I am starting to think that man's contribution is not as insignificant as I thought. And it is cumulative. Even before the industrial revolution, people were burning things for warmth, cooking and even as a weapon of war. And not only is it NOT as insignificant as I used to think, it is also additive to natural processes. We might not be the primary cause of the change, but we are helping to speed up the process. I live on the Intracoastal Waterway and over the years I have seen a continual, gradual rising of the water level. I suspect I will be ok for a few more decades, and by then, I will probably be dead. But if I live longer than I expect, and if the water continues to rise, I could be looking at some serious flooding.
But my question is what should we do about it? Even if the US spent half their GDP fighting climate change, we are a minority in the world. Developing nations are contributing to climate change more and more all the time and so far, all the international treaties and accords have given the poor underdeveloped nations a pass. Not only is that not right, it makes the accords useless. It's like pissing into the wind and will only result in turning us into a poorer country.
I would like to see the US take the lead in an international effort to begin cleaning up the environment. Make it fair so everyone, everywhere pays.
And once that is underway,we can begin to tackle the even more important tasks of mitigation. This could be done on a nation by nation basis. Retaining walls, tougher building codes, reducing development in flood prone areas, hardening subways against flooding could all be done by individual nations. It might even spike an economic boom due to all the construction jobs.
I don't think man is causing climate change, but I think it is time we start resisting it rather than assisting it.
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I haven't seen the affects at my family's shore home which I've been going to for 59 years. The water levels in the bay, and canals, etc all look the same to me. It is on a NJ barrier island, and is very low, but always has been.
The media wants you to think the Ice Caps are melting, but they are not. The fact that agencies like NASA, an NOAA had to go back, and change historical temperature data to be warmer, and then invent analysis using flawed data, and flawed assumptions which create the outcomes they want tells me it is a lie. Yes, the climate in changing, always has, but I see no conclusive evidence it is man, nor do I see evidence to any detriment to Man's existence on this planet.
The fact that ALL the solutions are more government programs, and government forcibly taking more money from people is another Red Flag. Energy is already taxed at very high levels. More taxes on energy will create not only higher energy costs, but higher costs for ALL products, and services. I run a commercial real estate portfolio for a living. We have properties in the UK. Our electricity cost is DOUBLE what it should be due to a separate "Man Made Climate Change" tax we pay. Guess what we have to do? Pass that right on to the companies that rent the space in buildings (tenants).
No, no thanks.
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I also wanted to puke when I saw the picture of the plastic shopping bag at the bottom of the Marianas Trench the other day. And I felt really bad when they pulled a dead sea turtle out of the water near hear that had his head and flipper tangled up in a plastic 6-pack ring. and I participated peripherally in the rescue of a Right Whale that was tangled up in a shrimp net about two years ago.
After the last hurricane, Leslie and I took a couple of big black trash bags and walked the edge of the Intracoastal waterway near our house. We filled those two big bags with plastic bottles, bottle caps, straws, shopping bags, beer cans, 5 hour energy containers and every other type of debris you can think of in about 20 minutes in about a 100 yard walk. We didn't even make a dent in the mess that washed up from the storm surge.
I would never be accused of being a tree hugger, but I just think we can all do a better job of protecting our environment, and YES, that often requires governmental regulations.
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I have a similar position on what I will call MMGW, as the words 'climate change' are far to nebulous for an engineer. I've also decided that there IS some human activities that affect global climate conditions. I also agree that there is an accumulation of factors by man that cause some warming, and some atmospheric problems with the ozone layer.
I like things that can be easily measured, and have repeatability, which is not subject to interpretation or 'correction' by the hand of man. When I grew up in SoCal in the 60s/70s, the air was horrible. Everyone, from every political spectrum knew we had to reign in smog. It was literally visible, and killing people with respiratory issues. Since the advent of the CA smog control, things have improved markedly. We've also had a problem there with metro heat bloom. This has been measured as far back as 1940s, and today it's even worse. The metro heat bloom in summer shows that the city itself is causing around 3-4F higher temps than surrounding non-metro areas. This isn't something that's made up, or corrected, or fiddled with in any way, because the temp readings come from aviation weather observations which haven't changed in 60 years. The only difference is the measurement has changed from analog to digital, which is generally more precise.
Having said that I am decidedly NOT on board with any of the proposed remediation plans that have popped up, most of which put a dollar price/value on the scale of heat and pollution. As if trading carbon credits will have any meaningful effect in the production of heat. The price will be passed on to the consumer in the higher energy bills. Maybe it will have an effect if the price gets far too high, but so far, I don't see much change in lifestyle in the LA metro area.
On the one hand, I did like the heavy-handed way CA went hard over on their tailpipe emission controls in the 70s and later. It was needed, and it succeeded. But - it's a slippery slope that now tries to get the last tiny molecule of HC and CO by fines, and even criminal sanctions. Hard to support that kind of stuff. The alternative maybe is Bejing in last olympics, where the smog was so thick I could hardly see the rowing event. It's a conundrum all right.
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I am ALL for cleaning up the environment, and we have done a lot since the 1970's, and the Nixon Admin's creation of the EPA. We have had an EPA that has over reached, and used the Clean Air and Water Act as a weapon to punish. They've become an agency of far left Zealots, until Pruitt was brought in, but most of those department heads are still there, so how much has it really improved.
All that being said, we are better off environmentally now than forty - fifty years ago. We can, and should do more, but it is a balancing act between things we can actually do, and measure versus the cost to the economy, and individuals. There are SO MANY lies from the Left on MMGW that it is hard to take their proponents seriously.
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I am ALL for cleaning up the environment, and we have done a lot since the 1970's, and the Nixon Admin's creation of the EPA. We have had an EPA that has over reached, and used the Clean Air and Water Act as a weapon to punish. They've become an agency of far left Zealots, until Pruitt was brought in, but most of those department heads are still there, so how much has it really improved.
All that being said, we are better off environmentally now than forty - fifty years ago. We can, and should do more, but it is a balancing act between things we can actually do, and measure versus the cost to the economy, and individuals. There are SO MANY lies from the Left on MMGW that it is hard to take their proponents seriously.
I agree with all of that.
I especially take offense at all of the hyperventilating liberals that automatically believe any and all of the lies being spewed without question. The reason that pisses me off is that it make it harder for intelligent people that question the lies to accept and agree to any change that might be beneficial. Everyone has to choose sides and live or die by that choice.
That said, even though we have made great strides in cleaning up pockets of pollution, there is still a huge way to go. We are filling and killing the ocean with plastic that will take thousands of years (if ever) to degrade.
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Clean up, try to live greener, yes. Control the climate, no.
I think it's numbers of people that are the problem. The earth and its components and systems are finite. You can easily posit, and probably get some hard numbers with a little research, that our planet can support, in first-world style, x number of people before irreparable change/damage occurs.
Subsistence, live-off-the-land style, x number of people. And so on.
Nature has an immense recovery capacity, but not an infinite one.
My 2 cents.
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The rise of the ocean over your lifetime has been so slow that it is nearly impossible for you to have noticed it - it has been measured in millimeters. Over the last 50 years, the reported sea level rise is less than 50 mm, about 2 inches. Unless you have been tracking this yourself and you have a stable measuring post, you just cannot reliably tell the difference I. Two inches of sea level.
Until more recently when certain scientists noticed that the data didn’t indicate what they KNeW about sea level rise. So they dig deeper and...surprise...discovered once again the data was wrong and needed to be corrected. So they corrected it until it met their preconception. Remember, that is 2 inches AFTER they “corrected” the data.
How much has the land in your area subsided? That has actually been the more usual cause of sea level rise.
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The carrying capacity of the planet is called it's global bio-mass. Not something talked about much anymore, but the science of it breaks down all living things into the components that make up bio-diversity. Of course, plants and animals(non-plants include everything non-photosynthetic) are symbiotic to a great extent. I used to teach this stuff back a few decades, and there was concern then that the carrying capacity of humans was close to exceeding the plant-life available for 'first world' existence. After a few years, the pointy-heads got together and debunked that myth, but they came up with something just as equally scary, and indeed - more likely.
Humans as a mass are displacing other variegated animal(non-plant) species. For example, there's a number of studies that show a decline in avian population, and avian diversity. Most of those studies are pretty good approximations of what's happening to birds around the world as rain forest, tundra, and grasslands have been cut or converted to cropland, or other human use. We know that humans are the only specie that is gaining in bio-mass at a rapid rate. If we were to postulate an equilibrium of plant and non-plant bio-matter, a significant increase in either of the two masses would cause a die-off either of plants, or animals so the balance is maintained. However, if one of the two sub-groups alters it's speciation, the balance can be more or less maintained between plants and non-plants.
Which we KNOW is happening because the bio-mass of humans is growing at a rapid pace. Unless we are slowly killing off other species, then we are unbalancing the plant-animal ratio to such an extent that there will eventually be a 'correction'. These are big, untested, and inconclusive theories, and I don't pretend to advance them as validated by any extent. Having said that - I would like to see a stabilization of human population at some point in my life. Avian and other specie deserve as much chance to survive as we do, and we've been pretty bad to other species over the last 100 years.
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I know what we should do, but I also know exactly what we will do, which is nothing.
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I know what we should do, but I also know exactly what we will do, which is nothing.
Tax anything, and everything, and give the money to Government to be mixed in with the General Fund?
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I do have a solution, but it kinda runs into the fascism, liebensraum deal. We can start by neutering people who are only on the planet to consume, and not to produce. Of course, this would have the purely unintended consequence of decimating the liberal meatsack population significantly.
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I do have a solution, but it kinda runs into the fascism, liebensraum deal. We can start by neutering people who are only on the planet to consume, and not to produce. Of course, this would have the purely unintended consequence of decimating the liberal meatsack population significantly.
I have a better solution. Soylent Green them.
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The WORST possible solution to the make believe MMGW problem is to let the government make decisions about what should be done.
Just think about the MMGW 'prophet' al gore and his billion dollar swindle of trading carbon 'credits.' Then remember this fucking pig flies all over the world in a pollution spewing private jet, telling people to use less fuel and leave more for hi and his corrupt fellows.
People need to stop pointing fingers (in the case of liberal democrats - grabbing the money in OTHER people's wallets) and start right where they are standing. Every one of those pathetic, lying, assholes, screaming and ranting about the Paris climate Accord could shut the fuck up and start picking up the garbage lying right under their corrupt noses.
But they won't...
Parasites NEVER actually do anything to help.
They're too busy acting like the little queer, David Hogg, and demanding bribes.