Happy Earth Day

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Things aren't looking so bad.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
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John Larkin
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What a bizarre web site. Three of the seven predictions are the same one, the prediction in the 70's that population which grows geometrically will outstrip food production which has a finite cap. Even though we had a green revolution which put off the inevitable, this is still in our future unless something is done to limit population. The largest countries in the world are again growing at large rates.

The one about air pollution is actually one of the greenie's success stories. It is only because government mandated reductions in air pollution emissions that we our air quality has improved! My home was losing all the lichen in the 70's because it was within 60 miles of Washington and Baltimore. Now lichens have returned and the air is much better. I remember the gray haze that used to hang over the nation's capitol.

Population control will be inevitable unless it happens as a natural consequence of overpopulation which is possible.

I like the fact that this article ridicules predictions that were made for a specific date while ignoring the underlying truth of the principle. Resources are finite. Resources like oil are much more limited than we would like. Yes, there will be oil for some time to come, but it will become more and more costly to find and extract, eventually becoming far too expensive to burn for energy not even considering the cost of doing so in terms of the environmental impact.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

Haha, it's such a Republican SOP isn't it?

1972: Scientists predict that without fast action, shit is going to jump up pretty soon.

2016: Republicans look back on the predictions and are like "Heh, they said in 1972 shit was going to jump up, but we seem to still be alive. LOL, dummy scientists."

Reply to
bitrex

Nothing has to be "done" to limit population. If you keep your central planning hands off of it the price will go up and that limits growth, as will, most likely, other factors we can't forsee. There are always biological limits to population growth.

Other countries also passed laws to limit polution, but most didn't pass laws that are so insane that a home owner who's oil tank leaks an insignificant few hundred gallons in an area where there is no local water source has to have his house turned into a hole in the ground.

If there's a little toxic spill in other countries they don't mandate shoveling a million tons of dirt into a giant incinerator.

Which is why you don't have to consider it.

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

Maybe not in your universe, but in this one a Republican created the EPA and the endangered species act passed with only 1 'no' vote. And I'm pretty sure Republicans had more than one seat at the time.

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

Bigger are voluntary limits. Lots of advanced countries, and some not so advanced, have low or negative population growth rates. When people get health care and education and access to birth control, they voluntarily cut their reproduction rate. So the best way to control population (and human suffering) is to provide more energy, education, democracy, and overall resources to the poorest people. Spend energy soon to save energy long-term.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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Reply to
John Larkin

Right, apparently the Republican Party had some sense, once.

40 years ago.
Reply to
bitrex

Basically before it was co-opted by a bunch of neoconservatives, deregulators, religious whackjobs and various goons and neer-do-wells of all types...

Reply to
bitrex

They were mostly right then and they are mostly right now.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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Reply to
John Larkin

...and where they're most wrong, they agree with Democrats.

Reply to
krw

No, environmental regulations had some sense, once, until 50 years ago when the environmental movement was co-opted by whack jobs. If the endangered species act had a list of 42 mammals and 45 clams and a hundred insects at the time it was written, even Democrats wouldn't have voted for it. That's just an inference but it really is a certainty that they wouldn't have voted for it.

Then it was co-opted again by a new generation of whack jobs, some of whom figured out that they could turn global warming into the biggest redistribution of wealth program of all time. Putin mused that global warming would be "a good thing because we wouldn't have to wear hats", but he came on board when he realized that his country could make money from it. A lot of other countries can make money from it too. Guess which ones loose. Democrats wouldn't have voted for that either in

1972, but they're insane now.

When they pulled off a world-wide ban on DDT they thought they were saving birds. Maybe they were, but do you think most Democrats of the time would have gone along if they knew malaria would return and kill 50 million people in Africa and Asia? But if you ask a Democrat today (I have) if the DDT ban was a mistake they say, "Well no..." Of what importance are 50 million people when you might have saved 100 million birds? And you think we're co-opted by whack jobs.

Three firemen die in a forest fire because the plane can't scoop up water from a neaby lake, because then three fish might die. A whole neighborhood burns down because, in the first place loggers can't remove dry growth, and then because the mole rat's tunnels might be damaged if we dig a fire break. We can rebuild a neighborhood and all the personal possessions in it but the mole rats would have to take a whole day out of their schedules to dig new tunnels. And you think we're co-opted by whack jobs.

As for those predictions from 1970 that you think would have come true if you hadn't prevented them, they would be material for a great satirical comedy if they weren't real predictions:

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Remember those the next time you say Republicans are "fear-mongering" when we point out that Social Security will break the budget by 2040. Because it will and, in another contrast, we don't have to keep pushing that prediction forward. You will bring it closer with socialized medicine.

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

The original definition of "species" meant a group of critters that could mate and product offspring. The current definition is much fuzzier, so there are many more species than there used to be. A bunch of prarie dogs with reddish tails is now a distinct species, so has to be protected.

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The environmental movement has very little respect for human life and suffering. Contempt, actually.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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Reply to
John Larkin

Same deal with salmon. They assign them to a species based on where they spawn, not the ability.

Fact.

Reply to
krw

Don't be silly. You've been reading too much Republican propaganda and taking it more seriously than it deserves.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

t-failed-spectacularly/

Not strictly true. There's probably not enough oil in the ground to inject really worrying a amount of CO2 into the atmosphere if we dig it all up and burn it as fuel, but there's more than enough coal that could be dug up to force us into a situation where we have to reinvent our agriculture, and l ose a lot of the population in the process.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Anthony Watts is paid shill for the denialist propaganda machine.

Trust John Larkin to post a lying propaganda URL without any warning that it's partisan rubbish.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Yeah, in the Amazon region Darwin found beetle "varieties", as they were called then, that didn't exist 100 yards away. They mutated so fast they became "extinct" every few years.

In 1980 David Attenborough made the fantastic BBC series Life on Earth, in which he said "we have never been able to eliminate a single species of them" (insects).

But then environmentalists realized they can claim that hundreds of species become extinct every day, if they claim that varieties are species.

Humans are "an infection in the body of the living planet", and that's real scientific thinking! "We have to trust science", "Republicans don't understand science", etc, ad nauseum.

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

Human numbers have increased spectacularly since we invented agriculture

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from about 5 million hunter-gatherers at 8000BC to about 500 million subsistence farmers in 1650, and it has gone up another order of magnitude since we mechanised agriculture.

That looks very like an infection.

Anthropogenic global warming is changing the planetary environment. That looks very like fever.

The last time anything like that happened was when photosynthesis evolved, and the oxygen content of the atmosphere went up from nothing to 35% before falling back to the current 21%.

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That took a couple of billion years, and was a lot more significant.

Republicans don't want to understand science, because if they did, they'd have to assent to measures that they really don't like.

You don't have to trust science, but the consequences of ignoring seem likely to be dire - which is an insight based on scientific evidence.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

I'm not sure how that's supposed to refute John's point, but it sure is scientific thinking, like the science of Dr Mengele.

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

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Robert Baer

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