Read it and weep......

[DEADFISH1]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Leonard:
<STRONG>Not sure about you, Deadfish, but I'm not masochistic enough to wish a slow, painful extinction for my own species.

What's a few thousand extinct species between friends

BTW, can you please edit the number of "X's" in your post. I get the idea ... it's just messing up my browser.

[ September 07, 2001: Message edited by: Leonard ]</STRONG><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

well, I thought everyone was concerned about Earth, I'm just trying to say that earth can take care of it's self.

 

[MattM]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Rob Klein:
<STRONG>Food for thought, scientists predicted that the world was in danger in the 19th century when we hit the 1 billion mark. India alone has more than 1 billion people today.</STRONG><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Rob -

Most books on the "impending overpopulation disaster" have all made the same error: an assumtion that population grows geometrically or even exponentially, but food production only grows arithmetically.

The "19th Century" prognostications are based on "An Essay on the Principle of Population" by Thomas Malthus, and that work contains said error. The similar dire predictions made in the 1960's and 70's quoted the same work. The reason the predicted catastrophes never occured is because food is produced by people. So as population grows, food production keeps pace. The world has always produced more food than it can consume and will continue to do so until we hit the 12-15 billion mark, assuming no major advances in food production technology (no doubt an incorrect assumption). Famine still exists, but it is invariably caused by poor food distribution thanks to politics or other factors, not because the planet is running out of food.

What truly astounding is that people still quote this work today, despite its having been proved incorrect repeatedly.

DEADFISH -

Read my post on page 2 of this thread. You prove my point beautifully. If we were changing the climate slowly there would be no problem. The fact that there have been so many changes all in the space of that last little asterisk is the problem.

It's not the change, it's the rate of change.

That's way ecologies tend to survive the natural temperature variations that have occured in the last 40,000 years. Most did not survive the rapid variations that occured prior to that, and we are now experiencing a rate of change comparable to those events.

 

[Anonymous]

Sure Earth can "take care of itself", but it's better to keep Earth a pleasant place to live.

Look we humans are going to be stuck on the same miserable plots of ground for thousands of years to come, each generation generating more garbage & crap. (That is, unless you subscribe to the inevitability of the "colonization of space", which I don't see happening...)

Why is erring on the side of caution in regards to environmental maintainance such a bad-tasting proposition??

 

[DEADFISH1]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Cheese Sandwich:
<STRONG>Sure Earth can "take care of itself", but it's better to keep Earth a pleasant place to live.

Look we humans are going to be stuck on the same miserable plots of ground for thousands of years to come, each generation generating more garbage & crap. (That is, unless you subscribe to the inevitability of the "colonization of space", which I don't see happening...)

Why is erring on the side of caution in regards to environmental maintainance such a bad-tasting proposition??</STRONG><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Garbage?, garbage is earth, everything we possess is from earth and made from earth and will turn back into earth, so what.

 

[Len]

Top dwellers

 

[Anonymous]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by DEADFISH:
<STRONG>
Garbage?, garbage is earth, everything we possess is from earth and made from earth and will turn back into earth, so what.</STRONG><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Visit your nearest landfill, and roll around in the "earth" for a while.

(You'll smell worse then a dead fish, I assure you.)

 

[DEADFISH1]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Cheese Sandwich:
<STRONG>

Visit your nearest landfill, and roll around in the "earth" for a while.

(You'll smell worse then a dead fish, I assure you.)</STRONG><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

he he

, ok, doe!

 

[ArmyGoNow]

I just hope that we still have some kind of chance

 

[Len]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Rob Klein:
<STRONG>Lighten up Leonard. The point is don't
predict doom and gloom when even their best
guess is just that, a guess.
</STRONG><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think the evidence is pretty powerful - just that too many people have black oil clouding their sensibility.

 

[Len]

And then we have the camp who says "So what if we die and kill a few (thousand) species along the way?"

 

[Chucker]

Sumped.

 

[dbman]

I have taken it upon myself to research this more fully and I must say the results are quite alarming! Based on temperature data carefully collected over the past 4 hours, I have observed a climate change of nearly +20 degrees F, rising from 55 degF at 7:00 am to just shy of 75 degF at 11:00 am. If the temperature continues climbing at this frightening rate, in just 50 years, the surface temperature of the earth will rise to 2,191,575 degrees F, which will almost certainly cause the complete end of life on this planet.

I don't know about the rest of you guys but I'm packing my bags and getting the hell out of here!

 

[Len]