Ready for SS's 1st Great Debate?

[yotetrapper]

Ok here it is. I was reading a post where some people here were on another poster for drinking OJ in a plastic bottle. Granted, they were friendly about it, and nothing wrong was done in the post. But it got me to thinking.

I could care less if I use 50 plastic bottles a day. A lot of them I save for bottling my own beer (and one day soda), the rest hit the trash can. I drive a gas guzzling pickup (15mpg). I use Round Up and Sevin. But I'm off my topic already.

What is this "carbon footprint" stuff I keep hearing? If I leave a footprint, I hope I have on a big boot.

Here's my debate:

Global Warming and Carbon Footprints. IMHO, it's all BS. MY DH is a lot older than me, and when he was a youngun, scientists the world over were convinced that the next Ice Age was in progress. They were wrong.

These global warming scientists are wrong too. There may not have been "as much" C2o 100 years ago but there was sure some. The earth's climate goes in cycles. A high cycle (the "global warming" cycle we are in now) is followed by the low cycle (the "Ice Age" of my husband's past).

In fact, thousands of scientists met in NYC a few months past on the topic of Global Cooling. Yup folks, it's coming. Remember those winters of our childhoods with FEET of snow? Get your shovel ready.

Regardless how much gas we burn, plastic we melt, lights we leave on, or factories we support, the earth is preparing to leave the global warming stage and move into the global cooling stage. Get ready.

Ok....attack away, I'm ready lol.

 

[Beekissed]

Personally, I feel the Earth is way past saving and for every person who wants to be environmentally protective, there are millions who don't give a hoot!
I'm not fatalistic but I am practical. I don't really care about carbon footprints...we are way past that, folks!

I don't carelessly waste energy, nor do I drive a gas guzzler. I don't litter or waste too many things at all. I do organic gardening because I don't want to eat any more chemicals than I already eat in the foods we buy from the store. I use styrofoam plates and plastic cups without remorse when the occasion arises, plastic bags at the grocery store because they are handy at home, and burn wood without guilt of any kind.

When the people who are slaves to what is environmentally correct start living entirely off the grid, give up their espressos because its in a throw away cup, grow cotton and sheep for wool to make their own clothing, start riding horseback instead of in their car, write letters instead of relying on the cell phone and computer composed of plastic and harmful metals, start growing ALL their food, butchering their own animals instead of buying from the store....well, you get the picture. When these people are doing this then they can lecture me on my environmental responsibilities.

Until then I will do the best I can to keep my corner of the world clean, bright and healthy. Try to depend less on the things that have created this situation in the first place, and go to sleep each night knowing I'm not a bad person, just a person doing the best they can in a world past caring. Then I get on my knees and pray for God to come and get me....fast!

 

[patandchickens]

Oh, okay. Sigh. <rolling up sleeves for work> I really don't think that an extreme position, cavalierly and somewhat insultingly stated, is necessarily really the most effective starter for constructive debate (you can learn more about hornets when you *havent* just kicked the nest)... but sure, I'll play.

First, yotetrapper, I would have to respectfully ask how much you actually know about the issues you're dismissing so cavalierly. If your knowledge is pretty much limited to having read newspaper articles and watched the nightly news and heard people talkin' around town and discussing it over a few beers and so forth (as seems very very likely from the way you put things in your post), then I would have to SEVERELY question whether you've got the appropriate information on which to base any sort of an INFORMED opinion. Of course everyone is entitled to have opinions no matter what their basis but that does not make 'em all equally sensible. <shrug>

It is awfully awfully important to distinguish clearly between four different things, here: 1) empirical data, e.g. annual mean temperature records over the last umpty years, or #acres of land degraded each year to the point of near-permanent uselessness for agriculture, or the data on which are based the various estimates of future supplies of accessible oil, or figures regarding what our current oil supply is being used for.

Then there's 2) sensible, logical and reasonably-well-founded hypotheses or interpretations drawn from those data, e.g. "from X and Y and Z, it is a pretty reasonable possibility that human industrial activities might be a good part of the reason that global mean temperatures have been rising, on average, over the past century and have been especially high in the last decade or two", or "a hell of a lot of our finite oil supply seems to be going towards items like plastic water bottles and shipping refrigerated/frozen food all the way around the globe, and is this REALLY what we wanna be doing or are we maybe going to sit up in several decades and smack ourselves upside the head and say "Doh!, WHAT where we THINKING".

Further, there is 3) What we should do, based on #1 and #2. Meaning do on a personal level ("should I keep buying many hundreds of little plastic bottles of water per year, or should I learn to drink from a cup or carry a refillable container?") as well as do on a larger-scale level of organizational and governmental policy.

And then finally -- THIS is the one that you REALLY have to keep sorted apart in your mind -- there is 4) how the talking heads choose to boil numbers 1-3 down for you, in presenting a twenty-second dumbed-down oversimplification fraught with their personal or organizational biases. I.e., what anyone ELSE tells you that #2 and 3 "are".

Pretty much anyone holding a press conference has got some kind of axe to grind -- occasionally it is a fierce personal conviction, but of course more often (where organizations are concerned) it is a matter of personal interest. Which can be quite convoluted and difficult to trace or identify. Furthermore, the media's "personal interest" is simply in making noise and keeping your attention, so *their* axe being ground is to tell a very simple, complcation-free, thought-free story that can be kept rolling night after night after week after month to keep ya watching like a soap opera in which you are a bit-part character.

Consequently if you just believe what you're told, or if you go the extra mile and apply your own judgement to what you're told without going in and finding out quite a lot more about the whole issue, whatever opinion you form is not an INFORMED one, it is just imitative or reactive.

Regardless how much gas we burn, plastic we melt, lights we leave on, or factories we support, the earth is preparing to leave the global warming stage and move into the global cooling stage. Get ready.

Well heck, one one level that is absolutely guaranteed to be true anytime the global mean temperature is higher than very-long-term historical average. Climate ALWAYS fluctuates, on a variety of time scales. <shrug>

But on the level that it seems like you mean this -- as in, it is going to happen in our lifetime or our children's -- who knows? The scientific rationale behind that prediction is certainly no stronger than the scientific rationale behind the prediction that global temperatures will continue to rise for a good long while.

Contrarianism is fun and often an enjoyable way to stand out from the crowd and feel clever , but unfortunately it is not inherently a dependable shortcut to The Real Truth (which anyhow nobody is going to have access to. THe best we can do is to make the most sensible projections possible, and look at the RANGE of projections that we can sensibly make, and decide what to do based on that).

I would really STRONGLY urge anyone interested in the world to go back as much as possible to PRIMARY SOURCES for the data on which these things are based, and then read as much as possible the logical arguments for all possible sides of the story, and think critically about the whole ball o wax and decide for yourselves what you think is likely/unlikely and what you think we should do.

[/scientist-and-educator mode]

Finally, I would like to make a more or less unrelated observation.

Let's suppose that you're right, yotetrapper. MAN are you ever right, you are so right that it HURTS, who or what could ever have been more right, you know? (I hope you do not mind a little humor). Let's say that global temperatures are headed downwards for the next few generations at least, for absolute sure.

In what way on EARTH does this mean that we should just party onwards irrespective and not evaluate whether we're acting in a sensible manner???

What does it have to do with whether it is desirable to be putting increasing amounts of pesticides and other contaminants into critters (including our own bodies, and there is pretty reasonable evidence that many pesticides deemed safe in earlier years actually have noticeable long-term human health costs even in relatively small doses)??

What does it have to do with whether it is intelligent to be frittering away a finite supply of extractable petroleum reserves on shipping raw materials halfway around the globe to be processed into products that we then ship all the way back HERE to sell, just to save eleven cents on the dollar for a pink stuffed teddybear or whatever that nobody even NEEDS?

What does it have to do with whether it is ethically right to just do whatever the hell we happen to feel like at the moment and other people on the planet, and our own descendants, are just going to have to suck it up and deal with the fallout?

And anyhow, wouldn't the smart way of "getting ready" (as you suggest) for environmental change and the resulting societal upheaval involve learning to use what we've got more frugally, and choose how many extra problems we create for ourselves, and get used to doing only what we NEED rather than continuing to anesthetize ourselves with foolish momentary (and costly) pleasures?

There - I dunno if that's the response you hoped for but that's whatcha gettin' from me

Shaking head in amazement, although uncertain exactly what to be amazed *by* here,

Pat

 

[miss_thenorth]

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[me&thegals]

Well said, Patandchickens! This is such a hot topic (no pun intended, truly). I always try to explain to my husband--who virulently denies climate change caused by humans--that maybe the earth IS cooling down and we're getting more snow cuz' guess what? That's what happens when the glaciers start rapidly melting!

What I find incredibly difficult to believe is that so many humans using so incredibly wastefully would NOT have a tremendously bad impact on the earth.

The more time I spend in nature, the more incredibly beautiful and miraculous I find it. Kinda makes me want to stop abusing Mother Nature and do my best to heal my little tiny corner of the earth. After all, who am I to so wastefully use her resources and then dump the waste back into her? I have a LONG way to go...

Also, we in America are so incredibly wasteful--we have no idea. The rest of the world uses so very little. I think we have something like 7% of the world's population and use somewhere around 25% of its resources. Kind of makes me scared to think of what could happen as India and China develop

 

[hensdeliverthegoods]

Ok....attack away, I'm ready lol.

That is obvious. Because I didn't see any real invitation to constructive discussion, much less any openness to learning, I'm assuming this post is only about pot-stirring.

 

[Cassandra]

I don't think there is anything we can do about global warming (or cooling, as the case may be.) I will agree on that one point that the world is doing its own thing--temperature wise.

It is the nature of humans to try to find the reason behind EVERYthing. "Why have the past ten years been 0.82 degrees cooler than the previous ten years?" (made up numbers) And as it happens, "Because we're rockin' around the sun, just so, and sometimes other planets get in the way and you know the earth has been doing this thing for about four billion years and we evolved amid such conditions and are, as such, designed to withstand it," is not a good enough answer. (This gross over-simplification is supposed to be funny. I am not an astrophysanthropocologist or anything even remotely like that. I do not mean to imply that I have any idea why the temperatures don't stay the same all the time.)

On the other hand... You do have to share the planet with the rest of us. And if you want to toss over eighteen thousand plastic bottles into the trash every year insist on having an unlimited supply of gasoline at your disposal at any cost, it does make things harder for the rest of us.

On a personal note, I conserve to save money for myself--period. I don't buy bottled water because it is an absurd waste of money. I turn my lights off to keep my electric bill as low as possible (I am willing to spend a small fortune on a/c cooling, however... baby steps.) If you've got money to throw away then, there you go. Glad you got plenty.

Cassandra

 

[cjparker]

I'm not going to debate the global warming issue.

But what have you got to lose by being more environmentally sound? Nearly everything that one can do to be "green" costs a lot less than not being "green", such as driving less, driving a smaller vehicle, turning off electricity users when not in use, recycling, etc.

What do you have to lose by driving a gas guzzler, using a lot of plastic bottles, throwing away items that could be recycled, wasting resources? Possibly the entire earth.

 

[FarmerChick]

I am not debating the global warming or cooling issue....so much info is out there on this and I am not throwing out bits of info to try to prove a point in one direction or the other...LOL-LOL

BUT----I use chemicals on the farm, I buy small plastic items in bottles, etc. etc. I use "probably" more than my fair share on this earth, I drive big trucks for the farm and have big SUVs, tons of tractors, etc. BUT, I also do what I can to help the environment. I use as little of chemicals as I can, I do re-use, re-purpose, recycle anything I can, I stopped buying junk so consuming less in general, I save elec. when I can, etc. etc.

Alot of this is to help the pocket book, but alot is to help my mind knowing I am impacting some good where I can.

If everyone "does a little" and "cares a little" then it becomes a huge impact for the next generation and the generation after that. After all, we can not just think about our lifetime, seriously, we must be stewards for the generations to come and show good examples and learn and grow and become better consumers of this earth's resources.

It is so easy to say---let the next ones fix these problems, but at some point, the problems will not be controllable....why shouldn't we try to do the best we can while on this earth and do right? That is just the way I think about it.....I am not a fanatic at all.....I am too busy in this lifetime to be one..HA HA

But everyone has their level of being green....just do what makes one comfortable to help the environment and you are doing well!

 

[me&thegals]

Cassandra and cjparker--I absolutely agree. I tend to have personal environmental reasons, but it was first frugality that got me started thinking about waste.

Isn't it interesting how almost every single thing a person does to save money also saves electricity, fossil fuels, materials?

I believe people have the "right" to use up as much as they want, but I consider it awfully inconsiderate. Just as I would expect my kindergarten daughter to share the toys intended for the whole classroom, I think it's exceptionally arrogant for humans to use incredibly huge amounts of the earth's natural resources just because they can.

By the way, Farmerchick, I am not directing this at you at all. I think it's great when people are at least a little aware and do a little. Mostly I try not to notice what other people do/don't do because I would go a bit nutty. I just can't handle the attitude of apathy, entitlement or arrogance that too many people seem to have.