Is "Mother Earth" cleaning house?

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hey911
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Is "Mother Earth" cleaning house?

Post by hey911 »

The World's #2 leading reinsurer released their annual statement Monday, citing over 220,000 deaths due to natural disaster for the 2008 fiscal year.

The article can be found here:
http://www.terradaily.com/2007/08122912 ... p7fj0.html
Or here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081229/sc ... KNfjEPLBIF

So, is it one of the long term environmental shifts that our planet has gone through in the past?

Could it be the result of the industrial modern Homo sapien creating global disaster?

Or, could it be the space mutant hamster federation that has been slowly radiating the polar bear population into a submittable state?
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Re: Is "Mother Earth" cleaning house?

Post by Specially Cork »

I personally think human pollution is just working as a catalyst for something that would undoubtedly and naturally happen anyway. This isn't a cop-out "let's not bother stopping pollution" viewpoint, this is me accepting what we know about Earth's history and probable future.

It's very unsettling for us humans to have a problem that we can't solve. We always need a reason why, something/someone to blame, and a way to fix things. Even the environmentalists base their arguments on the hope that we are in control of our own planet. Whatever we do, something else will just come along in the future.

'How many many "children's children's children's..." do I have to go through before I can stop caring about them - considering the fact that everything we know about the universe makes Earth's eventual doom a certainty?

Our planet and everything beyond it makes one crazy place, and the idea that we can find a sustainable balance in it is comforting, but foolish.
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Re: Is "Mother Earth" cleaning house?

Post by Roofus »

There's too many variables involved to know how big a role we're playing in Global Warming (or "climate change" as they call it now) or indeed if we play a part at all. What we do know is that the climate has been far more extreme in the past than it is now and really, the only reason "climate change" matters is that we're here to worry about it.
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Re: Is "Mother Earth" cleaning house?

Post by Ex-Cyber »

We can be pretty darn sure that we've been increasing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 at a considerable rate because of the amount of fossil fuels burned compared to the changing isotopic profile of atmospheric carbon. It's pretty difficult to come up with a credible theory that says that this doesn't, in turn, contribute to the greenhouse effect (which is described by pretty fundamental laws of thermodynamics). The precise effects that this has on climate are not easy to predict, aside from an increasing average temperature and the disruption of previously typical patterns, due to the larger amount of thermal energy in the system (which is what an increase in average temperature implies). For this reason some people have suggested the term "climate chaos" rather than "global warming" or "global climate change".

It's been my opinion for a while that debate over global warming misses the point, though. If we don't find more sustainable ways to fuel human civilization, we'll probably kill ourselves via economic crises and warring over energy resources long before the climate gets around to killing us.
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Re: Is "Mother Earth" cleaning house?

Post by Code-Red »

Over-population is the main reason for reduction in employment and pollution. I wouldn't mind another couple billion people being knocked off this earth.
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Re: Is "Mother Earth" cleaning house?

Post by Roofus »

Code-Red wrote:Over-population is the main reason for reduction in employment and pollution. I wouldn't mind another couple billion people being knocked off this earth.
That's easy to say, but are you volunteering?
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Re: Is "Mother Earth" cleaning house?

Post by Code-Red »

Roofus wrote:
Code-Red wrote:Over-population is the main reason for reduction in employment and pollution. I wouldn't mind another couple billion people being knocked off this earth.
That's easy to say, but are you volunteering?
Yep, I'm not having any kids. You?
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Re: Is "Mother Earth" cleaning house?

Post by Specially Cork »

I think the main problem here is pretty simple:

To stop pollution, we have to stop doing things that we want to do. There isn't a better alternative to anything that pollutes - just a worse one, or none at all.
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