[opendtv] Re: Global warming - was A Station Group with a Future

  • From: "Bob Miller" <robmxa@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2007 14:03:09 -0500

On 2/8/07, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Bob Miller wrote:

> "clever"? Anthopomorhism again. No such thing exist.
> It is not "self regulating".

Don't be absurd, Bob. The ecosystem would not have survived 4.6 billion
years if it weren't self regulating. That it is self-regulating is not
even in doubt. The only thing in doubt is to what extent the system can
stand abuse.

> As we eliminate the particulate pollution  problem
> or even level it off we find/will find, it is suggested,
> that this particle pollution has masked the far more
> lethal problem of global warming from CO2.

It regulates itself. The extra CO2 encourages the growth of plant life.
The plant life absorbs the CO2 and cools the planet. Particulate
pollution encourages rain clouds to form, which in turn cause rain and
clean out the particulates and encourage plant growth.

Now you have acid rain encouraging plant growth. Great stuff.

All of this works as a system with feedback controls. The only question
is how far you can go before the system goes unstable.

Life, in its bid to survive, adapts. Ecosystems develop by chance and
the dictates of science. There is no cleverness, no feedback center,
no plan, no Earth brain directing all this.

>The ecosystem that has lasted 4.6 billion years included
> It is amazing how you can spin a story that is truly
> apocalyptic in its account of a world run amok and talk
> of clever balancing mechanisms.

Oh, BS.

No BS is saying that there was an ecosystem 4.6 billion years ago.
Ecosystems are formed by living things as they interact with their non
living environment. The oldest thing we can identify on this Earth
rock are 3.8 billion old rocks with no sign of life.

That leaves .8 billion years of no ecosystem possible at least as far
as we can know it so far.

Then the best bet is that first life lived at the bottom of the oceans
and though carbon based probably didn't use oxygen therefore no CO2 to
bandy about.

How to relate that ecosystem to the current ones is problematic. For
example for a few billion years nothing much happened and then,
possibly after one or the other of tens of millions of years in which
the Earth was one total snowball, NO free ocean surface at all, some
ecosystem, then we had a melt the end of which saw the oceans turn
green with life, a super bloom of micro-organisms followed by ever
higher level versions of this life form.

Some ecosystem, well balanced, can see an invisible hand directing
each little event all tied together in a neat understandable nothing.

Life in its bid for survival tries to control its environment. The
lifeless environment is not listening, it is not a partner, it could
care less. It will extinguish us without knowing, it is unknowing.

We are the highest form of that life and our purpose is to survive. We
should do our best to understand and control the lifeless environment
we inhabit.

To do so the first thing we must do is get rid of the idea that some
life force directs our existence. That the rocks that form our Earth
are benevolent partners is some game with a happy ending. That is if a
God exist he is not a director IMO. He may have set the rules and even
be paying attention but he is not changing the rules on the fly.

So far life has done an extraordinary job of surviving including
getting thru those Earth snowball days. One of life's more recent
experiments in survival was the development of a brain. We may see
whether that was a good idea or just a blind alley sooner than we
expect.

Bob Miller


Bert



----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:

- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org
- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word 
unsubscribe in the subject line.

Other related posts: