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Originally Posted by wnker85
I wish I still had these pics that showed the pollution coming across the sea from china and dispearsing when it hit American and Canadian soil. Whatever we do in our own countries is not going to change the world climate. We should go to these bad countires and fix it there.
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I would have to disagree with this point for a few reasons:
1. Whatever you do, it will affect the environment in which you live. I am not speaking of environment here in the strict "tree-hugger" sense, but in the webster dictionary sense. Nothing is truly isolated.
2. Lead by example. It's much more effective. If you want a cleaner, sustainable world, work to create one. The notion of only working on remote areas does not work nearly as well as embracing the change in your backyard. Try to control China, S. America, or Eastern Europe. I think that it will be excessivly difficult. As an analogy, we are not having tremendous success reducing the cocaine traffic from Columbia, assuming that we are truly trying to halt / control it in the first place. You can work on improving the environment wherever you actually live. Texas, for example?
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Originally Posted by wnker85
Plus in the 60's (when they started to actually look at weather data and record it) these same "scientists" thought the world was cooling down. So, I can not listen to an over emotional person that is looking at data from 40 years ago telling me how the world is changing. Their sample time is way too small.
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I'm not sure if the "over emotional" tag was aimed specifically at me, or at the others speaking up in favor of environmental (tree-hugger use this time) awareness, but I will dismiss it as a strawman attack with mild emotional appeal. This is not a simple emotional issue of loving to hug teddy bears and save the manatees from Florida motorboats. How about this for a take on the discrepancies in the data / opinions of people, many of whom are undoubtedly intelligent and proficient in their fields? If you have multiple set of data, which seem to contradict themselves, then I would fall back on the mighty Occam's Razor idea. Which one makes sense and is the simplest? My personal concern for environmental issues and sustainability is based on recognition that reality is ontologically an inherently dynamic structure, wherein everything is affected by, and has an affect on everything else, to some degree or another. Thus, the question is simply to determine what type of effect you wish to perpetuate throughout reality. Wastefulness and excess waste, or conservation and cleanliness. Regardless of how good you think the quality of your environment is, I challenge you to prove it can't be made better. (hint, you can't prove this - it borders on becoming a logical fallacy)
Ok, I think that's enough of this for a while, but I become somewhat irked when people try to equate a concern for the environment with being emotionally hypersensitive. While it's true that one must care about the world in order to change it, the root concern is seldom based on pure emotion, but more often is based on rational principle which engenders emotion when the consequences of poor decisions are evaluated.