All Right, I've been silent about this long enough!!!

[Darlon]

I don't know why people always put scare tactics when talking about the environment, if you ask me its making me mad!!.


Taking a look at this site might enlighten some people about the whole pollution ordeal.

http://www.envirotruth.org/myths.cfm


p.s. I'm very sorry about this stupid topic, I just wanted to scream a little bit.

[ 02-06-2005, 06:49 PM: Message edited by: Darlon ]

[Sir Degrader]

GE is really the rant place. I agree with you in most matters.

An interesting site, but it's not the whole story. In fact, it's a very slanted site, created by the National Center For Public Policy Research (http://www.nationalcenter.org/), a very conservative think-tank. This "envirotruth" site is a forum for their ideological propaganda as applied to the environment.
If anyone is honestly seeking factual information on the issues, this isn't the place to go for it. It is a nice distillation of the political arguments of some neo-cons, but it definitely isn't unbiased or strictly factual.
It's no more a rational or balanced treatment of environmental concerns than what you would get from the earth first folks.

[Lucern]

Wow, that is quite a distorted site, though I agree scare tactics are unnecessary.

You could do a search on this very forum and find articles that contradict the information presented. Why is that a problem? Because you wouldn't have known that from reading the site. Scientists don't just pick and choose what to believe arbitrarily and back it up with research (at least, while they are engaged in scientific endeavors). Even if they want to, they'll have absolutely no credibility if they do not try to deal with opposing viewpoints. This site presents one viewpoint on climate change, often an appeal to authority from one Canadian scientist. By the way, look up the scientist - his body of work is not that of a paleoclimatologist, it's of a paleontologist studying benthic foraminiferal specimens. He may agree (or his ideas may have been cherry picked and misrepresented), but hasn't the scientific data or inclination to publish even one article. He teaches a class about climate change only from a geological perspective - which has little to say about human impacts that's not opinion. We're after all, a freckle on the backside of the geological timescale's behind.

There is always room for skepticism, like the 'what' and 'how much' questions about climate change that are evident in the fields that study this, and this site would be better off presenting the whole picture. No wait, it wouldn't, because the end result would not be "Envirowhackos are lying to us" - it would a complex grey area of politicized defenses and attacks on endless consumerism with a body of science that rarely correlates to any part of the political discussion. Given that science cannot prove but can only disprove hypotheses, it should be noted that both "Everything is fine, ignore environmental science", and "Everything is ruined because of us" are easily disproven.

This site presents only one of those, and indulges entirely too much in the logic that dictates "if one part cannot be proven, the whole must be wrong," that scientific creationists and other scientific luddites have been doing for years.

It's easy to dismiss it it broad terms. I'll go specific. Read, for example, the "MYTH #4: 'If the Earth Warms, It Will Be Disastrous for the Environment and Human Society." The reasoning that's credible in this piece is the one that suggests that the significance of climate change from the last 20 years is overblown. There's no way to prove that, of course, but it's a reasonable criticism. What's wrong with it is that it never mentions any other species other than humans and their crops. Is this the environment? I hope not. Slight change in temperature on a biochemical level have a huge impact on enzyme function efficiency, which can impact an organism's ability to survive and reproduce, which, expanded further, can lead to unexpected change on an ecosytem level. One species necessarily competes with others for food, sunlight, etc, and slight changes in this dynamic can have significant impacts. Given this, which is well documented in the annals of ecological science I assure you, who is really going to come out on the side of never worrying about temperature change? Take out the people who's answers have political motives. Anyone left? We don't live in a china hutch either, because every living thing on the planet has had the benefit of millions of years of evolution to deal with variable temperatures, but extinction happens. We'll likely not sacrifice ourselves on that particular altar, but we cannot survive on a handful of vegetables and domesticated animals as a species. We need the non-human-controlled sector of our ecosystems, and not just the cute, rare, or fuzzy portions of it.

And little things like, "let's compare a data set that includes temperatures since 1979 with the GEOLOGICAL timescale" are absurd. Unless we flew into the sun any variation would be negligible. These problems stated so matter-of-factly infest the site.

Note their list of mythbusters on the left hand side of the page. This is not the extent of claims on human impacts on the environment, or even close to it. The items themselves other than climate change are miniscule and petty compared to actual problems. Where are the parts about pesticides/herbicides, mass extinction due to land competition with humans, background radiation, elimination of key predators, or just plain old overexploitation of biological resources? They have an agenda, of course, and imo it's pathetically unsupported by the 'facts'. This inability is infuriating taken in the light that my government is much more prone to this site's kind of thinking - at least present a better developed reasoning for our actions/inactions.

[ 02-07-2005, 08:30 PM: Message edited by: Lucern ]

[Aerich]

**Applauds Lucern's latest post**

Well said.

Just to add on, the Doom and Gloom tactics re: environmental degradation are at least in part necessitated by fairly widespread indifference. It's part of human nature that we ignore things until after they happen; look at any disaster, and you will find that preventative measures were non-existant or insufficient before it happened, but quite comprehensive after the fact. Look at the recent tsunami and the belated setup of international tsunami warning systems around the Indian Ocean, look at the huge security around the USA and on airlines in the post-9/11 era, look at the prevalence of earthquake survival kits in a region before and after a quake, and look at the annual rush to buy snow shovels AFTER the first snow of the season. It's called "closing the barn door after the horse is gone", and we are masters of it, as a species.

We do tend to react instead of planning ahead, so one of the only ways to get a positive preventative reaction is to "create", or at least draw attention to, a disaster in the making. I'm not in the least apologizing for some of the eco-nuts out there (particularly the violent ones), but sometimes 10 words of emotional exaggeration is worth 1000 words of rational argument.

Lucern, that's one of the best posts I've read in a long while. Thanks for the enlightenment. [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]

[Davros]

Yes - great post Lucern. You displayed way more patience and rationality than I could have in adressing that woefully inept """envirotruth""" piffle. I would have resorted to calling the website people a bunch of blindly ignorant smegheads, but fortunately you saved me from going to the trouble of lowering myself [img]smile.gif[/img] .