Henry Payne for March 06, 2014

Wait a couple of months…

The East Coast of the US isn’t the center of the world. Droughts and heatwaves are happening all over the world.

Check the West Coast of the the US and Australia.

The only issue on global warming is the issue of how much money needs to be spent and what can be done to alleviate it. Unfortunately the long term computer models provide a range of effects and time lines and they keep changing because conflicting evidence is discovered. The big problem is how much to spend. Too little may make it much worse, too much will devastate other programs and either may not have much of an effect. You have to remember the rest of the world has to also react.

Thank you, Mr. Payne. It all comes clear to me now. And more than just the idea that, since winter is cold, the planet cannot be increasing its average temperature.

Clear-cutting forests has no environmental effects, because new trees can grow where the forest used to be. Blowing the tops off mountains to mine more cheaply doesn’t matter, because the rivers clogged with the debris will find another route to the sea (eventually). Dumping large amounts of pollution into rivers makes no difference, because some marine life survives.

Thanks, Mr. Payne. I was wrong for so very long, but now I see the light. If you can’t see it happening today, it ain’t happening.

As far as human beings causing climate change: Something I’ve read since I was a kid is that the Amazon rainforest supplies 20 percent of the world’s oxygen. It has been called the “lungs” of the planet..The Amazon has lost 20 percent of its forest within the last 40 years, and it’s estimated in the next 20 years it will lose 40 percent more. Is that 20 percent oxygen production to be lost once the rainforest is nearly gone, or does that figure assume the huge area as completely denuded of vegetation? I really don’t know, and ask if someone does..Ranches and farms seem a poor substitute for the biodiversity of the original forest. Would such a loss lead to climate change eventually? Agricultural slash-and-burn smoke clouds there can be seen from space. Will less humidity and large floods through eroded landscapes eventually cause large regional weather pattern changes?.As I understand it, the majority of earth’s oxygen comes from tiny creatures in the oceans. With increasing heat and acidification of oceans, how will this affect things? Personally, I’m somewhat short of breath lately, but that might just be my age..Just as water is sold worldwide in those ubiquitous plastic bottles, I bet sometime in the near future enterprising companies will sell us small compressed cylinders of oxygen. So get in on the ground floor, you savvy investors..And don’t worry, we’ll get used to it. Humans will adapt, and as for plants and animals – well, they’ll just have to evolve quicker.

Nice to know Payne can stay warm with his head up his rear.

The Farmer’s Almanac was more accurate than the NOAA on predicting the weather this year….The EPA is a ship of fools these days adrift on a sea of stupidity.

“If it’s really our fault, why don’t we demand that China and India make the same draconian cuts the AGW folks want the US to make?”

I agree totally, as I have in the past in this forum. What we do in the US is peanuts compared to what India and China are doing to our planet; even if we “cleaned up our act” 100% (if that is theoretically possible) it wouldn’t matter much to planet earth without cooperation. I don’t see that happening. As a matter of fact, China has dealt with the problems of having to inform its citizens about health problems with breathing the air by loosening the requirements, so there will be fewer warnings. They have also gone on record as saying that air pollution is good because it gives people a common enemy. There is much to overcome. And as emptc12 points out, the deforestation around the Amazon is a potential death sentence.

I am not foolish enough to think that climate change originates with man’s use of fossil fuels. I am willing to believe we have contributed to this, and it would be nice to stop doing that. Nature will take its course, but “it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”