For all of you that wrote me regarding my post HERE, thanks... Looks like our arduous multi-day long crusade has yielded progress:NEW YORK (Reuters) - PepsiCo Inc. will spell out that its Aquafina bottled water is made with tap water, a concession to the growing environmental and political opposition to the bottled water industry. FULL ARTICLENow that's impact - thanks to all my readers... More to follow.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown linked the floods to climate change and pledged 200 million pounds (298 million euros, 411 million dollars) extra funding, plus a review to address future issues. "Like every advanced industrialised country, we are coming to terms with the issues surrounding climate change," he said after a visit to an affected area.
I'm assuming most people reading this (if anyone actually does) drink bottled water... I'm also assuming from time to time you hear stories about how it's not that much cleaner than tap - as a former New Yorker I was constantly reminded that The City had some of the cleanest water in the country.Nationally, we'll drop $16 billion on bottled water this year. That's 27.6 gallons for each of us. Since most of the bottles it comes in never get recycled, we're helping to clog landfills with 4 billion pounds of plastic annually. And when you consider the energy it takes to make and move those bottles into and around the United States, you might as well fill a quarter of every single one of them with oil.
...Ayer, Massachusetts. Best known for mills, railroads, and a former military base. And the water comes not from some gently burbling spring in a picturesque valley, either, but from the municipal water supply. Which pumps a slightly less-filtered but equally safe version of that same water into residents' homes for a quarter of one cent per gallon.
In 2100 Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will be much higher than anytime during the past 650,000 years. (IPCC)So here's my point - earth is 4.5 billion years old or so. Life hasn't been around for that full length of time, but let's put a couple things in perspective here - dinosaurs DIED OFF 65 million years ago and they were around for upwards of 200 million years. Before that we have several hundred million years of complex life. 650,000 years since we broke the record? If we compare that to the 200 million years since the dinos died off we're looking at about 0.3% - comparing that to my hottest day on record since 1913 example that basically means we would have had the hottest day in the last 4 months.
From catastrophic sea level rise to jarring changes in local weather, humanity faces a potentially dangerous threat from the changes our own pollution has wrought on Earth’s climate. But since nothing in science can ever be proven with 100 percent certainty, how is it that scientists can be so sure that we are the cause of global warming?OK, so where do I go with this. I guess first, how do you argue the debate is settled on warming by arguing that science can be wrong? Aren't you basically saying your "definitive" consensus on warming might be wrong? Good argument Andrea.
For years, there has been clear scientific consensus [note: not true, see a great collection here] that Earth’s climate is heating up and that humans are the culprits behind the trend, says Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at the University of California, San Diego.
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[the best part] Contrary to popular parlance, science can never truly “prove” a theory. Science simply arrives at the best explanation of how the world works. Global warming can no more be “proven” than the theory of continental drift, the theory of evolution or the concept that germs carry diseases.
Oh, and um, continental drift can be proven by measuring movement in land mass over time (South America and Africa moving apart at 5.7cm a year) and through fossil records (by the way it used to be called the theory of continental drift but was replaced with plate tectonics, so much for LiveScience); germs carrying disease can be proven by exposing an organism to those germs (horrible choice of example by the way Andrea); natural selection (if not evolution) can be measured through generations of fruit flies (as another aside I find it great that the lefties arguing environmental causes find sanctuary with the righties arguing evolution - awesome).
So there's a lot of discussion about the polar bears losing their habitat as a result of global warming. Comes up regularly in the "debate". Anyway I put it in the category of points people will accept simply because they view their validity as a secondary consideration - let me explain. Let's say I told you children were being murdered in the U.S. at a rate of 1,000 a day and we needed to invest heavily in school security to reduce that number. Many of you would look at that and say "maybe its true, maybe not... heck, I'm not even sure I believe it, but does it matter? If it gets people investing in school security that's ok by me."
"It also turns out that most of the alarm over the polar bear's future stems from a single, peer-reviewed study, which found that the bear population had declined by some 250, or 25%, in Western Hudson Bay in the last decade. But the polar bear's range is far more extensive than Hudson Bay. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain concluded that the ice bear populations "may now be near historic highs." One of the leading experts on the polar bear, Mitchell Taylor, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory in Canada, has found that the Canadian polar bear population has actually increased by 25% -- to 15,000 from 12,000 over the past decade." - WSJ
Anyone who knows me understands they shouldn't raise this topic. Anyway decide for yourself - I'll always respect an informed opinion, but each and every time I come across someone who definitively believes global warming is fact I point them to the following list.
