loftus
Super Member
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2013
- Messages
- 1,348
- Location
- Ponce Inlet, Florida
- Aircraft
- Aircam; Previously owned Autogyro MTO
- Total Flight Time
- 800 hours
Jean Claude, Waspair, Kolibri - trying to convince those who deny the validity of the science of climate change is futile. Because they will always point to the fact that it happens to be a cold day in Florida. Of course they ignore or deny data that shows overall world temperatures breaking records multiple years running, massive reduction in summer ice in the arctic, rising ocean levels and increasing ocean acidity, trends towards stronger storms, and extremes of drought (with more fires) and rainfall (with floods) depending on the locale, and on and on. Generally people who have travelled beyond their local counties over the last few decades, can witness for themselves all the drastic changes occurring in the environment all over the world. For those with a closed mind on these things, a cold winter somewhere is proof enough this is not happening and discounts all the overwhelming data to the contrary. We are essentially trashing our world in many ways, whether its acidifying the oceans, filling them with trash, collapse of fish stocks, massive radioactive contamination as in Fukushima, massive extinction of numerous species etc, etc., melting of the arctic ice etc, etc Unfortunately, unlike you folks I am not confident that just building electric cars etc will solve our problems, building batteries has huge adverse effects on the environment as well. Also C02 is only one of the main contributors to the greenhouse effect (I think it's about 30%), other major contributors include methane from animal farming and nitrous oxide. There are also numerous other lesser know gases used and released all the time in many manufacturing processes that are less prevalent but also many times more potent in terms of trapping heat. The reality is that short of massive reductions in human numbers coupled with reversion to much more primitive lifestyles, and restriction of many freedoms and conveniences we take for granted we will not be able to stem the overall tide of planetary destruction and species extinction, ultimately leading to drastic changes in how the environment effects us and possibly destruction or at least diminution of our own species. A couple of really data filled, but depressing books on this are Carbon Ideologies (2 volumes) by William Volkmann, and the Sixth Extinction. We are simply too successful as a species, at the expense of all others. Pure evolution in progress. We will not be able to sustain growing populations, both in numbers and demands on all aspects of the environment, whether it's land use, adverse changes to the composition of our atmosphere, radioactivity, trash including plastic, diminishing species etc, etc as well as maintain our level of comforts, convenience, freedoms, and survival that we know today into the next century and beyond. And we have not even begun to bring a vast majority of the world's population anywhere close to our standard of living, which if we were to accomplish raising all the world's standard of living, would increase the demands on the planet by multiples...... the world will be a very different place for our grandchildren. The belief that somehow science will solve all the problems is misplaced. Science is reality, but science does not care. Our use of science as a tool unfortunately only serves to enhance the quantity and quality of human survival, to the detriment of other species and the planet in general.
