Big Surprise

[andrewducker]

I post saying that the government should make the decisions that individuals find hard, but are in our own best interests, and I get multiple comments from people saying "But I don't want things made hard for me."

Not a single week has gone past in the last few months, and not a month in the last 10 years when I haven't read more about the climate of the whole fucking planet going horribly wrong, because we're polluting it.  A large part of that pollution comes from flying machines inefficiently burning up hydrocarbons and releasing great wodges of Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen Oxides at high altitude.

Imagine if every time you took a flight you had to grind up a couple of people and put them in the fuel tank.  You can bet that people would still be saying "But I want to see my family a lot."  At the _very_ least, airline fuel should be taxed enough to pay for the planting of trees to soak up the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide - at the moment there's no tax on aircraft fuel at all, making it effectively heavily subsidised compared to all other means of transport.

I'm sorry, but when the whole bloody planet is at stake, maybe we'll all have to make a few sacrifices.

Comments

[cx650.livejournal.com]

Bearing in mind that a large proportion of the 'doomsday' research is based on climate information from merely the last 30 years or so, and that if the same prognostications were based on all the available data from when such records began, I understand this to have been around 1820, the planet is approximately one degree COOLER. Either we are asking the wrong questions, or we are asking the right questions but in the wrong way, or (imho the far more likely proposition) mankind is being totally arrogant again and assuming a far higher level of importance for ourselves than we merit. Geological research has shown us that Ice Ages come and go with monotonous regularity and that there have been intervening periods when the mean temperature has been even hotter than that predicted in the 'we our killing our world' scenario.

As for "grinding-up a couple of people" I'm sure we can all think of candidates, LOL.

[andrewducker]

Bearing in mind that a large proportion of the 'doomsday' research is based on climate information from merely the last 30 years or so

Except for the ice core data we have that goes back arund 160,000 years?

mankind is being totally arrogant again and assuming a far higher level of importance for ourselves than we merit

Levels of CO2 and Methane are both higher than they've been at any point in that time, and CO2 for millions of years.

[cx650.livejournal.com]

Pardon the delay, I'm retrieving my reference material.