Thread: Is The Sky Falling ?

Everything is going the way it is supposed too. The Earth will be fine in the end. It will recover. Humans will also remain but there may only be scattered tribes of them here and there. History will repeat itself once again. Is that time near ? Is the sky falling? It sure feels like it. But from what I see, it is not going to be from nuclear war, global climate change, or something like a meteor. A financial collapse will do just fine for cleaning up our planet. I think this will happen long before the Earth spits us off. Poor choices by humans have always been there downfall.

Since, other than thebigspendur only few remember how life used to really be, I think China is a good example from our present what happens when some people are allowed to simply ignore the environmental costs of their business.
When they organized an international meeting recently they had to shut down some of their industry so that the foreign dignitaries don't have to see and breathe air as transparent as fog.

Unfortunately it takes a big government to force people not to shit where they eat, or if they do to clean up their mess instead of just moving to another place that hasn't been destroyed yet.

If the current carbon dioxide emissions have negative effect on global scale that is a cost and it doesn't go away by being offloaded to our children and grandchildren.

The earth will run out of fresh water before we can't get any more oil out of the ground. Without the water, massive famine is just around the corner. Much more than our fossil fuel burning habits if man is to continue on. I am convinced that man's time on the ball will come to an end, what organism has stuck around through it all?

Originally Posted by Splashone

The earth will run out of fresh water before we can't get any more oil out of the ground. Without the water, massive famine is just around the corner. Much more than our fossil fuel burning habits if man is to continue on. I am convinced that man's time on the ball will come to an end, what organism has stuck around through it all?

rats and cockroches will be around long after Humans are gone.

Originally Posted by mdwright

I think it's all nonsense. In the 1970's it was about global cooling, now it's about warming. As long as there's a crisis, that's the main thing. Keep funding the "research". What caused the Medieval Warming Period (1100 - 1400 AD), SUVs, carbon emissions? Climate has always changed and we didn't cause it. Regardless of the crisis the solution is always the same, more government regulation, more restrictions, more taxation, less freedom, in other words more socialism.

You are absolutely right. People forget about the previous generations false crises. I remember the global cooling "crisis" in the 1970's and the population explosion "crisis" of the 1960's. Closer to our time, people also forget that the amount of carbon on/in the earth has been relatively constant for millions of years, including our current era. The difference is that a lot of the carbon used by prehistory trees/vegetation is being put back into the environment by fuels, etc. Keep in mind that this carbon was in the environment before the trees/vegetation took up the carbon. The carbon emissions in the atmosphere "crisis" is another nonsense crisis in that the world will compensate for the uptick in carbon by producing more vegetation that takes up the excess carbon by way of forming hydrocarbons like cellulose.

Climate has always changed, as you say. It is interesting to observe how most people never heard of the major and minor ice ages in the world, or considered that even in our current last two centuries there were two minor cold spells worldwide and one hot spell worldwide during the Oklahoma/Texas dustbowl days in the 1930's. I'm pretty certain that because weather records from the 1930's were poorly kept, that that period of drought and heat was probably far worse than the current claim that 2014 was the "hottest on record". Some of the historical records of the 1930's Oklahoma and Texas dustbowl show temperatures in excess of 100 deg F for weeks on end, but there was no National Weather Service to compile the data as there is today. Point is there have always been variation in temperature worldwide, sometimes with relatively big swings, and that's the way it will always be.

Originally Posted by Splashone

The earth will run out of fresh water before we can't get any more oil out of the ground. Without the water, massive famine is just around the corner. Much more than our fossil fuel burning habits if man is to continue on. I am convinced that man's time on the ball will come to an end, what organism has stuck around through it all?

Maybe you should consider Israel where most of the irrigation in the Negev is done with desalinated water. Israel has been a leader in producing technologies to economically desalinate ocean water and use it for irrigation and people use. It always amazed me that California never really instituted desalination as a means to combat water shortages. Same with the other Western States that have experienced the same kind of water shortfalls or depletion of ground water supplies.

One needs to consider that the total amount of water in and on the earth is relatively constant. Some is underground and is being tapped at a rapid clip, and some is in the atmosphere that falls back to earth as rain, and yet still, the vast majority of water is in the oceans contaminated with salt that limits its use for irrigation and people and animal use. Point is, we won't "run out of water". We do need to find ways to change the distribution of water from the various sources. In this regard, desalination and rainwater collection seems a viable way to insure that humanity will always have a dependable source of useable water.

Heat wasn't the problem during the dust bowl it was poor farming methods and when the winds came the soil started to move.

Of course the earth is a closed system and every mineral and compound has just been recycled since the beginning of this planet. Just because there is more CO2 doesn't mean more plants will grow to absorb it. Most actually goes into the ocean.

In any case the end of man will come when one of the super volcanoes like the one in Yellowstone goes off and the Earth is blanketed in dust and darkness for years and years.

Originally Posted by DoctorSaul

Maybe you should consider Israel where most of the irrigation in the Negev is done with desalinated water. Israel has been a leader in producing technologies to economically desalinate ocean water and use it for irrigation and people use. It always amazed me that California never really instituted desalination as a means to combat water shortages. Same with the other Western States that have experienced the same kind of water shortfalls or depletion of ground water supplies.

One needs to consider that the total amount of water in and on the earth is relatively constant. Some is underground and is being tapped at a rapid clip, and some is in the atmosphere that falls back to earth as rain, and yet still, the vast majority of water is in the oceans contaminated with salt that limits its use for irrigation and people and animal use. Point is, we won't "run out of water". We do need to find ways to change the distribution of water from the various sources. In this regard, desalination and rainwater collection seems a viable way to insure that humanity will always have a dependable source of useable water.

And the whole population of Israel lives within 45 miles of the sea? Desalination (reverse osmosis) is far too expensive for most of the population. It also require a lot of energy (oops that's even more carbon). It is also proposed as a solution to non-potable water away from the sea as well. It just leaves you with some really toxic crap after you remove the water. Where do you dump that?

It is not a practical solution and to what end? So that we can fool ourselves into thinking we can support an even larger non-sustainable population. Here in the desert southwest, where we pump water 320 miles up hill from the Colorado river (based on some pie in the sky guessitmate of available water), the builders are saying "don't worry about water shortages. All you have to do is convert that farm land into houses." They figure an acre of houses uses about the same water. Great idea until you ask where will we get our food if this idea catches on! It doesn't matter they will have made their money...

Originally Posted by thebigspendur

Heat wasn't the problem during the dust bowl it was poor farming methods and when the winds came the soil started to move.

Of course the earth is a closed system and every mineral and compound has just been recycled since the beginning of this planet. Just because there is more CO2 doesn't mean more plants will grow to absorb it. Most actually goes into the ocean.

In any case the end of man will come when one of the super volcanoes like the one in Yellowstone goes off and the Earth is blanketed in dust and darkness for years and years.

The 1930"s dust bowl started because of several years of unseasonably hot and dry years. The poor farming practices and the winds that came up due to convection currents in North America certainly precipitated the hallmark of the dust bowl days, mainly swirling dust clouds. But, the major cause that precipitated the dust bowl was the hot and dry conditions that lingered for several years.

Originally Posted by DoctorSaul

The 1930"s dust bowl started because of several years of unseasonably hot and dry years. The poor farming practices and the winds that came up due to convection currents in North America certainly precipitated the hallmark of the dust bowl days, mainly swirling dust clouds. But, the major cause that precipitated the dust bowl was the hot and dry conditions that lingered for several years.

You might not have had the dust bowl days despite the years of hot and dry conditions if the original top cover of prairie grasses had not been stripped away for intensive farming. You needed both conditions combined to have a dust bowl era. Another case of man's practices aggravating a bad situation.

Bob