-Speaking of hibiscus, I'm curious -- are yours cursed with whitefly like mine? I got five beautiful specimens, miles above the usual nursery types, at the Huntington plant sale -- gosh, going on 8-10 years ago? Giant red and orange flowers the size of dinner plates.
BUT: From Day One, plagued with horrible whitefly. I tried every kind of approach, but nothing helped. Now I'm at the point of taking them out and redoing the entire area.
Excuse venting -- basically, I just wondered if hibiscus in your area are as badly affected as in So. Calif coastal...it's not just me, it's all over the area.
In fact, the respected magazine Science has reviewed this Pentagon report and the alleged scientific support for The Day After Tomorrow and concludes that "it is highly unlikely that global warming will lead to a widespread collapse" of the Gulf Stream, and
"it is safe to say that global warming will not lead to the onset of a new Ice Age".
In Nature, another highly-respected scientific journal, a researcher finds that halting the Gulf Stream would be impossible, arguing that "the only way to produce an ocean circulation without the Gulf Stream would be to turn off the wind system or stop the Earth's rotation, or both."
Now, although it is not going to kill us the day after tomorrow, global warming certainly is a reality. It is caused at least partly by mankind's use of fossil fuels. The effects will be predominantly adverse
- although high-latitude nations might prosper in a warmer world, tropical countries will have to deal with more heat-days, altered precipitation and higher sea-levels. So what is wrong with using a piece of popular entertainment to campaign for action to save people from that? As the Nasa research oceanographer William Patzert says: "The science is bad, but perhaps it's an opportunity to crank up the dialogue on our role in climate change."
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would be futile for me to try and refute the "nay-sayers" of "Global Warming", as is common in science and nature, there is contradictory evidence, some from erroneous measurements, some from oddities that can happen over a 500 million year of the geological record. Most of the quibbling comes from the use of models as predictors of future events. Models use hundreds of presumptions (premises) and not everyone can agree on the same presumptions.
The other argument is that science isn't science unless you can do it in a lab and get reproducible results. Obviously modeling the spread of a contagious disease, the effectiveness of a nuclear war head design. or the interaction of solar radiation variations and greenhouse gas concentrations can't be done in a lab but they can be approximated by computer models. The vast majority of the physical scientists believe that "Global Warming" is a fact but dither on putting a time table to it. The warm water passage that is developing in the Arctic, the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antartica, coupled with the dramatic decrease in size of the worlds glaciers have many scientists on edge and they are talking of tipping points were the heating will be come irreversible leading to hellish repercussions as imagined by Steven Hawking
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others
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Now you may say that this is an alarmist attitude to take, but if we act and "Global Warming" doesn't happen, then we look silly.
If we don't act, and "Global Warming" is real, which again, most scientists believe is true, it could lead to another mass extinction, including humanity.
It wasn't the industrial burning of fossil fuel that lead Eric and his crew out to Greenland. And with Eric and his crew in mind, it can be argued that if they had changed some of their old habits and adopted some of the Inuits strategies for staying alive, instead of the stiff-necked insistence on being good Norwegians, they probably would have survived.
Read "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond, for a fascinating account of Eric's Norse colony.
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great preponderance of scientists find "Global Warming" credible. It isn't a gamble we can afford to lose.
The arguments against "Global Warming" are the same arguments that were used against the dangers of cigarettes, acid rain, and ozone depletion (chloroflurohydrocarbons: CFCs), i.e. you can't prove it using the scientific method of repeatable results, yet we now know that cigarettes are a health hazard for the smoker and anyone around the smoker, and that acid rain, and the diminished ozone layer (protects us from ultraviolet radiation) are man made events.
Better people than I have tried to present the case for "Global Warming". Some people, usually people who don't want to stop polluting, or make money from fossil fuels, don't want to believe it, and will support voices against it.
January 3, 2007
Scientists' Report Documents ExxonMobil's Tobacco-like Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science Oil Company Spent Nearly $16 Million to Fund Skeptic Groups, Create Confusion
WASHINGTON, DC, Jan. 3-A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists offers the most comprehensive documentation to date of how ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry's disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.
"ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer," said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists' Director of Strategy & Policy. "A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years."
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We can't wait 40 years. We should have started in the last century.
Please note the use of citations to support an argument.
Please, don't go out of your way to corroborate your statement. A statement without corroboration is just opinion.
Article doesn't quite say what you imputed to it.
The article says,"According to the World Wildlife Fund, untreated waste has turned China's Yangtze River basin into the single largest polluter of the Pacific Ocean."
Although it's easy to view China as some sort of ecological evil empire, its fate is entwined with the U.S. appetite for consumption and growth. The United States still holds the title as the world's biggest consumer of world resources and largest emitter of all greenhouse gases. Our per capita emissions dwarf those of China, or any other nation for that matter. An estimated 7 percent of China's carbon-dioxide emissions derive from U.S. consumption of goods made in China.
Even if we are not causing global warming, we are killing the planet.
It is almost like the media is constantly reminding us of this overheating so we will forget about the other ways we are hurting the earth: land overuse, water diversion, recreational vehicles, factory farms, disposable everything, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, medicines, paints, solvents, logging... need I go on.
Exactly the same argument has been made for the British explorers who failed over and over to find the Northwest Passage. Instead of the "stiffnecked insistence on being good [Britishers]" they might have survived. Bu, one after another the expeditions -- notably the last Franklin one -- failed, and the most of the explorers died because (excuse this, amigas/os across the pond) in that era, post-Napoleonic Wars,* triumphalist Britain thought the sun shone out of their you-know-what. In their missionary deal to Christianize the "savages", they failed to notice that the "savages" had survived very nicely for thousands of years by adapting their food, clothing, and hunting methods to the local conditions.
*Post Napoleonic Wars, there were a lot of surplus naval officers on half-pay, who had no other way to find glory, so they signed up for these expeditions to find the Northwest Passage, a more direct way to the riches of the Orient.
Ironically, had they waited a few centuries till climate change really kicked in, they could have had an ice-free route through the Northwest Passage in this year of 2008. But by the time the Passage was traversed in 1906, it was no longer needed economically, the Panama Canal was completed in 1914.
It was a very good Norwegian indeed, my hero Roald Amundsen, who, with his small, efficient ship and experienced crew [antithesis of Franklin's huge Navy-style expedition] befriended the "savages". They taught him how to live off the land beween 1903 and 1906 -- the year he finished the traverse of the Northwest Passage.
The only "Brit" that I know of, and he was a card-carrying Scot who wasn't too good to learn from the locals, was the great explorer and mapper, Dr. John Rae.
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