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The Green Fallacy


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Y'know, Marc, I'm glad to hear you say that because in a post I made earlier today to a professional Industrial Hygiene Board, I cautioned my colleagues that if we don't grow a backbone, and stop tolerating this nonsense, we will loose credibility in the public eye.

With your permission, I would like to quote your timely message (I'll leave your name off, of course).

CPC

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Well, I think it's premature to say much of anything about warming and cooling patterns.

Near as I can tell, the earth has warmed and cooled a few million times in ways that are only now being discovered, let alone understood completely.

This model for civilization that we've stumbled into is not a particularly good model. It tends to run hard into things that the Earth is telling us are not compatible with each other.

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I was a Geography major in the 90s. Several of my courses dealt with climate change throughout history - we discussed sunspots and Milankovitch Cycles quite a bit, but the jury was still out on the "modern conveniences and western lifestyle are killing the planet" theory. We should have stopped there and done a bit (lot) more research.

-Brad

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That 'Scientist' is a boob. Everyone who is anyone in climate study has known that for a long time. What is astonishing is that the whole theory is based on his missing research and nobody has a copy! How in the hell is an entire field of science based on a missing document?[:-banghea

Greener living is a good idea whether you believe in global warming or not. I don't think we should all be living in yurts, growing our own food, and making our own clothes, but a little less consumption isn't gonna kill any of us.

Tom

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I think global warming is bunk and manufactured by folks that think they are smarter than common folks. I do believe the earth goes through cycles of cooling and warming. I think it arrogant to believe us puny humans can have any impact on creation. As you can probably tell I also don't think that if you set off a bomb inside any of your local home depot or lowes that once the smoke cleared there would be a fully functioning housing development. Didn't the smart folks tell us Valdez would be an uninhabital wasteland for decades? I don't see anything wrong with conservation and logic.

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First off, there is general (though not unanimous) agreement in the scientific community that Global Warming is real and human activity can affect it.

Sorry Jim – You’re on the wrong side of objective facts (again).

There is NOT general agreement in the scientific community that GW is real. There is general agreement in the Hollywood community, in the Democratic Party and on The Left – but the general agreement in the scientific community is that there is NO SUCH THING as Global Warming. Sorry mate, I hate to tell you this, Al Gore is not a scientist.

Cheers!

Caoimhín P. Connell

Forensic Industrial Hygienist

www.forensic-applications.com

(The opinions expressed here are exclusively my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect my professional opinion, opinion of my employer, agency, peers, or professional affiliates. The above post is for information only and does not reflect professional advice and is not intended to supercede the professional advice of others.)

AMDG

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I'm not sure what to believe anymore.

Man has been on the planet a very short time compared to what came before. The planet underwent periods of time where for hundreds of thousands of years there were many many open volcanoes belching stuff into the air 24/7/365 didn't it? Still, somehow creatures have manage to survive and evolve on this rock.

I've seen photographs of large cities from the mid-1800's where the sky was so thick with coal and wood smoke that you have to wonder how anyone managed to live.

When I was a kid and visited my grandmother's house up in Sydney Mines, NS everyone was heating their homes with coal or woodstoves and walking down the street the smoke was thick in one's lungs. Coming from the land of oil furnaces, I thought it was kind of cool, but looking back on it as an adult I realized that there is probably a good reason that emphyzema used to be a common ailment among the Sydney Mines populace but isn't now. I remember my Dad telling me that was what the average American town was like before WWII and oil and gas furnaces came along.

Can we really have produced in only about 300 years more toxins than all those thousands of volcanoes pumping crap into the air for thousands of years were able to produce? How about before the industrial revolution when men cut and slashed anything that they could use for fuel for millenia? How did we manage to get through that without poisoning the planet, and us, beyond recovery?

I agree, it won't hurt to live greener; in fact I don't think it would hurt if we just learned to live like we did before plastics came along. Plastics are made from petroleum, No? Maybe if the world weren't so dependent on so much plastic stuff just that alone would be a hugh shot in the arm for the environment and we wouldn't be so desparate for oil. I dunno.

My nightmare - something happens to send us backward a few hundred years and nobody is around to show us how to find iron ore, make steel, make nails, make iron, etc, etc, and we have to figure it out all over again from scratch.

Somewhere around here - probably in storage - is a whole shelf of foxfire books for when that day comes. I probably won't be able to get to them though; I need a keycode punched into a keypad to get to them.

ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!!

Mike

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First off, there is general (though not unanimous) agreement in the scientific community that Global Warming is real and human activity can affect it.

Sorry Jim – You’re on the wrong side of objective facts (again).

There is NOT general agreement in the scientific community that GW is real. There is general agreement in the Hollywood community, in the Democratic Party and on The Left – but the general agreement in the scientific community is that there is NO SUCH THING as Global Warming. Sorry mate, I hate to tell you this, Al Gore is not a scientist.

Cheers!

Caoimhín P. Connell

Forensic Industrial Hygienist

www.forensic-applications.com

(The opinions expressed here are exclusively my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect my professional opinion, opinion of my employer, agency, peers, or professional affiliates. The above post is for information only and does not reflect professional advice and is not intended to supercede the professional advice of others.)

AMDG

Huh? Wrong side of objective facts again? Would you care to explain this cryptic and baseless allusion?

Al Gore is not a scientist. Agreed.

Whether or not all of the hyperbole injected into discussions of GW is true or not is debatable. However, whether humans could be better stewards of their environs, is clear. We can, and it is in our best interests to try harder. If I have an agenda, that's it. What's yours?

Discrediting GW can only be propagated through a process of restricting information, ignoring primary sources, and selectively highlighting information. Of course, you already know this and seem to be conditioning those muscles on this forum.

If I'm wrong, we spend a little more money and keep things a little cleaner. I can live with that.

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Global warming sure is a volatile subject, but right or wrong, it has caused us to become keenly aware of tremendous wastefulness and that's good!

I love doing energy audits, because the benefits to my customers are so real. There's nothing quite like delivering a game plan with a client that will systematically reduce their effort and cost to live and help the environment in general do it's thing with less resistance from us.

I think if most folks can grasp how wasteful they are and where all that time and money could have gone instead of where it did go, they will care to modify their habits. It's similar to looking back on a smoking habit and realizing that you smoked enough cigs to purchase a Corvette.

In my lifetime, the rebound of the Chesapeake Bay and many other rivers and streams is nothing short of remarkable. Richmond, VA, for the first time in decades, did not experience ONE unhealthy air alert. That's surprising progress! I certainly would never classify myself as a tree-hugger, but blatant and careless abuse of the environment is just plain stupid and suicidal. If our personal environment was suddenly reduced to the size of a small glass dome, any one of us would suddenly become keenly aware of protecting it.

Bottom Line: Maybe GW is real and maybe it isn't. Should either conclusion encourage us to be more wasteful or care less about the environment we live in? Global warming may be questionable, but wasted effort and money and pollution are all too real.

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Who cares if its real or not, the fact is like so many others have stated its simply common sense to move away from polluting our environment. It is extrememly feasible to do so and is in our best interest in many ways. First and foremost, if not cutting down on pollution, cutting off our dependence on other countries, of which most hate us. If they have to falsify evidence to light a fire under countries as well as individuals asses than so be it. Even if your argument is right that climate change is false, its hard to believe that pumping tons and tons of carbon into the air we breath and depend on to live is a wise decision.

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Hello Greyboy!

Even if your argument is right that climate change is false, its hard to believe that pumping tons and tons of carbon into the air we breath and depend on to live is a wise decision.

Greyboy, Friend, it is a question of perspective. Let’s look at your post – it tells me that you are a very decent fellow and I laud your concern forthe Earth, but a little perspective may be warranted. Each time you exhale, your exhalation breath contains about 40,000 parts of CO2 per million parts of air (40,000 ppm). You exhale about 12 times per minute. Your exhalation breath is about 500 ml of air. That means that every minute, as a matter of just living, you exhale about 450 mg of CO2 into the atmosphere. OK – now imagine that the 6,803,042,109 of our brothers and sisters across the globe are doing the same thing – just breathing. That means that every MINUTE the average loading to the Earth’s atmosphere, contributed by humans doing nothing more than just breathing is about 3,100 metric tons every MINUTE of every day. That’s over 184 THOUSAND METRIC TONNES per hour and that’s just from humans breathing. And you are concerned about “…pumping tons and tons of carbon into the air we breath…â€

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Who cares if its real or not, the fact is like so many others have stated its simply common sense to move away from polluting our environment. It is extrememly feasible to do so and is in our best interest in many ways. First and foremost, if not cutting down on pollution, cutting off our dependence on other countries, of which most hate us. If they have to falsify evidence to light a fire under countries as well as individuals asses than so be it. Even if your argument is right that climate change is false, its hard to believe that pumping tons and tons of carbon into the air we breath and depend on to live is a wise decision.

While I can't agree that there is any justification for those few individuals deliberately falsifying evidence, for any end purpose, I applaud the rest of your post.

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First off, there is general (though not unanimous) agreement in the scientific community that Global Warming is real and human activity can affect it.

Sorry Jim – You’re on the wrong side of objective facts (again).

There is NOT general agreement in the scientific community that GW is real. There is general agreement in the Hollywood community, in the Democratic Party and on The Left – but the general agreement in the scientific community is that there is NO SUCH THING as Global Warming. Sorry mate, I hate to tell you this, Al Gore is not a scientist.

Cheers!

Caoimhín P. Connell

Forensic Industrial Hygienist

www.forensic-applications.com

(The opinions expressed here are exclusively my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect my professional opinion, opinion of my employer, agency, peers, or professional affiliates. The above post is for information only and does not reflect professional advice and is not intended to supercede the professional advice of others.)

AMDG

Classic Strawman.

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As I've been listening to this debate get kicked up over the last couple of years in the media, I find myself thinking of the war waged in Gulliver's Travels, y Jonathan Swift, over which end of the egg to crack open.

Maybe the the title of the thread would have more appropriately been named the Global Warming fallacy?

Again, I'm not, by any means nurotic about green, but it stands to reason that if there are two ways to accomplish a task, the green one will usually be cheaper and/or more beneficial in the end. And even if it isn't, at least it spawns increased deliberation, which is typically good.

As one of my favorite and particularly insightful elderly masonry laborers used to say, "I'm here for the reason, not the season." I miss that old fella [:-graduat and all his quips.

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So the Earth is said to be 4.5 BILLION years old.. 4,500,000,000

Scientists say in the past 150 years 150

They can tell a trend?

I thought every 10 thousand years was the climax of the climate.

I thought the sun went up and down in its journey around the milky way to the center causing us to get in hot and cool spots (ice ages and meltdowns)

Were certainly not in an ice age climax, so are we still in the meltdown or have we begun the ice age leg of the run?

Just my personl opinion, I don't believe scientists that are friends of polititicians

Matt

Global Warming is just a form of capitalism from people who claim they hate capitalism but know it's best. The sad thing is that there are many people incompetent enough they beleive every word some people can read from a teleprompter.

Al Gore, What's your electric bill?

Most likely your electricity is produced from coal fired plants.

Scientists also said CO2 levels were 5 times the current levels when dinosaurs were around.

CO2 is consumed by plant life, They need to survive dont they?

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The scientist has his area of expertise, just as the home inspector has his.

We need the home inspector? Likewise, we need the scientist, and each of the other thousands of specialties, that together have elevated our civilization to it's current quality of life. That's the smart plan. Look to the scientist for solutions which relate to science.

As for incompetents like professor Phil Jones, they're fodder for everyone, including us.

Marc

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Have you ever noticed that about the only folks who are profiting from going "Green" are those who sell the products to do it! Just look at all of the inspectors who have paid for the classes and then purchased all of the equipment and they are not making a dime of profit.

Look at the homeowners who spend $10,000 to upgrade their home in order to save $50 on their utility bill. 16 years down the road they will have recouped their investment on the first go round, but by then they will have spent another $7,000 or so to replace their HVAC system.

The logic meter just does not work when you get down to the money part of the equation. Sure it helps the overall or global environment or so we are told.

Disclaimer...... I was or I guess I still am a Certified Energy Rater... Back in 1992 I was certified under Energy Rated Homes of America, I think that they ended up becoming the founder of LEEDS. I performed over 200 energy ratings on homes (blower doors and the whole shebang). Most of the test were on homes that the owners could not afford to make the needed improvements! I think we sold the test for $250 to $300, they took about 2-3 hours on site and another 2 hours to write the report. Almost 20 years later and the fees for energy testing are just about the same! Just not much profit in them when you get down to it.

Oh, and Al Gores home here in Nashville! In 2007 and 2008 (it took 18 months) he spent over $400,000 making his mansion "Green" and it still has a monthly utility bill over $4,000 according to the local ABC news station.

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Have you ever noticed that about the only folks who are profiting from going "Green" are those who sell the products to do it! Just look at all of the inspectors who have paid for the classes and then purchased all of the equipment and they are not making a dime of profit.

Look at the homeowners who spend $10,000 to upgrade their home in order to save $50 on their utility bill. 16 years down the road they will have recouped their investment on the first go round, but by then they will have spent another $7,000 or so to replace their HVAC system.

The logic meter just does not work when you get down to the money part of the equation. Sure it helps the overall or global environment or so we are told.

Disclaimer...... I was or I guess I still am a Certified Energy Rater... Back in 1992 I was certified under Energy Rated Homes of America, I think that they ended up becoming the founder of LEEDS. I performed over 200 energy ratings on homes (blower doors and the whole shebang). Most of the test were on homes that the owners could not afford to make the needed improvements! I think we sold the test for $250 to $300, they took about 2-3 hours on site and another 2 hours to write the report. Almost 20 years later and the fees for energy testing are just about the same! Just not much profit in them when you get down to it.

Oh, and Al Gores home here in Nashville! In 2007 and 2008 (it took 18 months) he spent over $400,000 making his mansion "Green" and it still has a monthly utility bill over $4,000 according to the local ABC news station.

Thankfully, I refrained from the infrared equipment and a blower door. Most of the big stuff can be observed without them. It is a shame that in some arenas they're required.

It's still nice to help people realize that their habits and lack of attention to details cause them to literally and needlessly throw money up in the air or flush it down the toilet. Why not keep it and apply it to something useful or enjoyable?

I've ALWAYS seen the energy assessment as more a financial tuneup than a green effort, and that's always the way I've marketed it - learn about and do what saves you money through reasonable means.

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