I am doing more research on the points you have raised. Thanks for your contribution to this debate.

You have raised about 3 huge points in your comment.

You’re getting into another big debate with the parent thing. Who are we to say what makes a good parent and where do you draw the line with morals and good upbringing? it’s very difficult, my standards differ from your standards and your standards will be too low a standard for someone else and so on.

I am of the same opinion about poverty and low moral upbringing producing evil people. However I also feel the media perpetuates this to an extent. Imagine 50 years ago if we read in the paper about a child being abused, there would have been an outcry and a stampede to the perpetrators house. Nowadays we are hearing about this every day, we are reading about it in novels and true life stories, we are seeing violence in movies every day, violence on games for kids. we have been conditioned to ignore these types of stories now, it’s unbelievable.

I don’t think population control would help the planet at all as it’s been shown that humans are contributing to about 3% of the problem (that’s if we take the level of CO2 in the air as a way to put a figure on this).

I feel like there’s not a lot to be done any way. You see, my own personal hypothesis is that the planet is over populated. No matter what country you’re in, surely you’ve noticed high population growth, skyrocketing housing costs and costs of living – demonstrating that greater demand equals greater cost. There’s a huge demand for housing and prices support this theory. Who would have thought that some places in the state of Montana would be out of reach to the middle-income earner?

Why is it that this topic never comes up in any of the Global Warming debates? The more mouths there are, the more energy consumption that will occur, burning even more fossil fuels, flushing more toilettes, and taking more showers, washing dishes, cutting trees, etc. This is the true root of the problem.

I am going to say the unthinkable, the subject that I know everyone hates to discuss but I have to so – let’s look at getting parents licensed because I know a hell of a lot of them who had no business having children. This is not about material accomplishments or successes. This is about a healthy psychological evaluation. We are just beginning to witness the tip of the iceberg when it comes to adults who were raised without morals, standards, consciousness, whatever you want to call it. Combine a rotten upbrining with a little poverty and those people have absolutely nothing to loose. So they molest, kill, steal, terrorize, cut you off, etc. I am really sick of reading about children who were killed and molested by MEN (or women). Who raised those people? Psychologists would argue that it is much deeper than how they were raised, but it seems that authorities worldwide are breaking up rings of perverts all across the west. Let’s take terrorists. They have the excuse of being brought up in poverty, but what is the other element besides poverty that would make a human kill another innocent human or baby on a bus in Israel for that matter?

I am all for population control as a beginning point to the global warming debate.

(Disclaimer: all of this is based on back-of-the-envelope approximations and, as you would put it, guesswork. But that doesn’t make it any less valid.)

There is, at a very rough estimate, about 3 x 10^12 tonnes of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere at the moment. Human fossil-fuel emissions amount to (another very rough estimate) about 1.2 x 10^10 t per year.

Now: it’s true that much more CO2 than this is generated from natural sources – decaying plant and animal life, respiration etc. But the problem is one of carbon *balance*. When a tree decays in the forest, it’s replaced by new growth, absorbing the carbon formerly contained in the tree. (This is why wood burning is a form of renewable energy.) And thus a form of equilibrium is maintained. The total atmospheric concentration changes only very slowly.

Let’s put some figures on this. If the figure you cite above (3.5% of CO2 emission is human-generated) is correct, then “natural” CO2 emissions must be of the order of 350 gigatonnes per year. But the forests and ocean life absorb nearly all of that. (This next part is total guesswork, but the point is still valid.) Some years the carbon sinks absorb slightly more carbon, some years slightly less. There may be an average long-term trend one way or the other, or there may not – it doesn’t really matter for purposes of this argument.

Now consider the human contribution *added* to that. If the natural long-term trend is, say, 1 Gt/year, then the significance of humanity’s contribution of an *extra* 12 Gt/year becomes somewhat clearer. And this is carbon that is *not* absorbed by natural sinks, unless we can somehow create more such sinks.

When we burn coal, nothing grows up in its place. We are digging impure carbon out of the ground and releasing it into the air, where it stays. It has nowhere else to go.

http://gorelied.notlong.com

For more information on the documentary you can go here.

http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindle/index.html

I wouldn’t dream of taking your comment off the blog. They are valid points you are making and i respect you voicing them on this blog.

Hi andy

Thanks for you comments I appreciate you tkaing your time on this.

If you want to dig your heels into another sector of what the general public doesn’t know, our food chain. Why doesn’t the public know that we have giant feed lots of cows that stand in filth and are pumped full of antibiotics to feed a convenient nation? What are the ramifications of letting the three big food companies control the USDA and promote a farmer welfare state? Is it really sane for us to let capitalism drive the health of the nation?

There are lots of secrets in the shadows that need to be in the public light through vehicles that trump truth. We also have to have a public receptive enough to want to take responsibility for those truths and I think that’s going to be another crux all together.

So many things to work on, so little time, so many deaf ears. Was it Plato or Aristotle that talked about those who sat in an open cave but stared at nothing but their shadows and became angry at the man who tried to tell them they could be free just by turning around?

All I know is the stronger I get, the more I am capable of, the more I can effect change in the world around me.

-a

Kudos to you for putting yourself out there on what you rightly deem a very ‘hot’ topic.

I don’t know if you will choose to post my comment, but I feel compelled to add my thoughts here.

Having watched this issue for many years with growing unease, and witnessing the unwillingness of both politicians and the general public to take the issue seriously, I take exception to the viewpoint that says no threat exists.

If only that were true; this is EXACTLY what both politicians, and hence the mass media, want people to believe. In my view, politicans are terrified of this issue because it is REAL and they not only don’t know what to do about it, they also know that the ‘appropriate’ actions would involve legislation that would FORCE poeple and corporations to act more responsibly and would, in turn, lose them the next election.

So what’s the solution?…You have someone like Al Gore, going around and speaking about his passion for saving our planet, and only when he is NO LONGER a politician can he even get an audience for this speech. Even if everything he says in his insightful – and yes, politically-charged – movie (An Inconvenient Truth) is exaggerated by half, there is still need for concern, and more importantly ACTION, as far as I can see.

What about the statistics citing that of the current 900+ scientists polled, 0% of them had any doubt that climate change is a threat, whereas the studied media coverage over the past years – including your own – putting a slant on the issue of ‘Wellll, we’re really not sure if this is REAL or not’ came in at – what, 58%?…

How can we rely on the media coverage of climate change when it is biased in favor of covering up an issue? And what of the FACT that the human race has increased in numbers from 3 billion ot over 9 billion in jsut the last 100 years?…that alone HAS to have an impact.

I would suggest people owe it to themselves – and their kids! – to at least watch the above-mentioned movie and then decide for themselves.

Please understand, Steve, that I respect and admire your work, and I also firmly believe in doing my own research on a given topic, and not blindly listening to the media and politicians – this problem is rampant in mainstream society; everyone wants to be told what to think – and your message of awareness is a very good one.

Thanks again, and I hope you will post this, in the spirit of sharing and openness which we both obviously value.

I wrote a post on my own blog recently about this, which can be read at: http://blog.breathingprosperity.com/2007/02/25/contemplations-our-beautiful-planet/