In article ,
Doug Freyburger wrote:

Nad R wrote:

My entire family except me are strong fundamental Christians. I am an
atheist with strong ties to science.

Just to check - When I read this what I see is you reject one actively
anti-rational religion and become an atheist without seeming to notice
that there are a ton of other religious options out there. How is that
a rational approach? It's the major weakness of many atheists than runs
like this -

1) Assume there is only one valid religion in the world. Ignore that
this is a false basic assumption that allows the claims of that one
religion to dictate the terms.

2) Find flaws in that one religion and thus reject all religions.
Become an atheist rather than even address that the competition exists.

3) Never notice that the question of addressing deity has little or
nothing to do with the question of which religion, if any, to use as a
framework for that. For that matter never notice that there are
religions that don't much care if you actually believe in deity or not.

There are only two religions out there that are actively irrational.
They happen to be the two with the largest populations but "eat crap, a
trillion flies can't be wrong" is false in pretty much every group other
than a gardening one with composters in it. If you have such objections
to Christianity I figure you're not going to convert to Islam in
reaction to the irrationality of Christianity.

Science addresses the how. Religion addresses the why. To go without
religion is to throw away ages of why and reinvent the wheel yourself.
To change to a different religion is to chose among why's that have
centuries or millinnia of working on specific why's.

They laugh at me and laugh at the scientific types as being stupid...

So look at the grillion other religions that have zero conflict with
science. This is a gardening group so consider one of the many nature
based religions. At one point I asked Thor if he cared how people
followed him. Thor is very good about being there but not so good at
paying attention to questions. After about a year of repeating the
question he finally came back with a shrugging "followers are good"
"have another ale". I conclude from that that it doesn't much matter
if you decide to follow his nature based system versus one of the many
others. But you don't seem to have noticed that options exist at all.

Religious people refuse to believe in global warming ...

This one I have trouble accepting. Century old photos and year old
photos of pretty much any glacier in the world make the conclusion so
trivial. What I have trouble accepting is the irrationality of the
stance of ignoring such simple and overwhleming evidence. On the other
hand I am also very slow about my stance on the degree of human
input. But my being behind the times on degree of human influence
changes little in how I would approach the issue.

I do have objections to how folks are reaction to the fact of climate
change. In the 900s cattle were ranched on Greenland so it's clear the
current records don't go very far back. But Greenland was settled in a
period of global warming that was clearly warmer than we are right now.
Exactly how bad was it to be able to ranch cattle on Greenland? This
matters on why I am slow to evolve my stance on the degree of human
contribution - There was not much human contribution in those centuries
compared to now.

Reading history books says it was a time of extreme social change. Ah
hah, there's the political motivation right there. Folks are grabbing
for power at a time near the beginning of extreme social change. They
want time to build momentum and use leverage. Clearly it's not about
whether global warming is happening but about who will be in power and
what they will do with that power. That means their degree of sincerity
is extremely crucial. Folks calling themselves environmentalists who
are anti-nuke, check, very low degree of rationality and thus very low
degree of sincerity.

Billy has dived face first into that political fray. What's wrong with
ranching cattle on Greenland? What's wrong with letting the social
change as it will as the USDA zones move? Why bother with an irrational
religion that battles with science when there are rational religions
with zero conflict with science that are nature based?

Somebody call?

It's called arrogance to say you know something, when you have no proof
one way, or the other. A theist claims certainty. An atheist claims
certainty. We agnostics see no proof one way or another. Theism, and
atheism are both a matter of faith.

As far as global warming goes, I'm down with dairy ranching in
Greenland, but when California's Central Valley floods because of rising
sea levels, where are you going to get your produce then?
--

And then there is living(?) with Global Warming.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?cha...eID=00037A5 D
-A938-150E-A93883414B7F0000

October 2006 Scientific American Magazine

Impact from the Deep

Strangling heat and gases emanating from the earth and sea, not
asteroids, most likely caused several ancient mass extinctions. Could
the same killer-greenhouse conditions build once again?

By Peter D. Ward

. . .
In today's oceans, oxygen is present in essentially equal concentrations
from top to bottom because it dissolves from the atmosphere into the
water and is carried downward by ocean circulation. Only under unusual
circumstances, such as those that exist in the Black Sea, do anoxic
conditions below the surface permit a wide variety of oxygen-hating
organisms to thrive in the water column. Those deep-dwelling anaerobic
microbes churn out copious amounts of hydrogen sulfide, which also
dissolves into the seawater. As its concentration builds, the H2S
diffuses upward, where it encounters oxygen diffusing downward. So long
as their balance remains undisturbed, the oxygenated and hydrogen
sulfide-saturated waters stay separated, and their interface, known as
the chemocline, is stable. Typically the green and purple sulfur
bacteria live in that chemocline, enjoying the supply of H2S from below
and sunlight from above.

Yet calculations by geoscientists Lee R. Kump and Michael A. Arthur of
Pennsylvania State University have shown that if oxygen levels drop in
the oceans, conditions begin to favor the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria,
which proliferate and produce greater amounts of hydrogen sulfide. In
their models, if the deepwater H2S concentrations were to increase
beyond a critical threshold during such an interval of oceanic anoxia,
then the chemocline separating the H2S-rich deepwater from oxygenated
surface water could have floated up to the top abruptly. The horrific
result would be great bubbles of toxic H2S gas erupting into the
atmosphere.

Their studies indicate that enough H2S was produced by such ocean
upwellings at the end of the Permian to cause extinctions both on land
and in the sea. And this strangling gas would not have been the only
killer. Models by Alexander Pavlov of the University of Arizona show
that the H2S would also have attacked the planet's ozone shield, an
atmospheric layer that protects life from the sun's ultraviolet (UV)
radiation. Evidence that such a disruption of the ozone layer did happen
at the end of the Permian exists in fossil spores from Greenland, which
display deformities known to result from extended exposure to high UV
levels. Today we can also see that underneath "holes" in the ozone
shield, especially in the Antarctic, the biomass of phytoplankton
rapidly decreases. And if the base of the food chain is destroyed, it is
not long until the organisms higher up are in desperate straits as well.

Kump and Arthur estimate that the amount of H2S gas entering the late
Permian atmosphere from the oceans was more than 2,000 times the small
amount given off by volcanoes today. Enough of the toxic gas would have
permeated the atmosphere to have killed both plants and
animals--particularly because the lethality of H2S increases with
temperature. And several large and small mass extinctions seem to have
occurred during short intervals of global warming. That is where the
ancient volcanic activity may have come in.

Around the time of multiple mass extinctions, major volcanic events are
known to have extruded thousands of square kilometers of lava onto the
land or the seafloor. A by-product of this tremendous volcanic
outpouring would have been enormous volumes of carbon dioxide and
methane entering the atmosphere, which would have caused rapid global
warming. During the latest Permian and Triassic as well as in the early
Jurassic, middle Cretaceous and late Paleocene, among other periods, the
carbon-isotope record confirms that CO2 concentrations skyrocketed
immediately before the start of the extinctions and then stayed high for
hundreds of thousands to a few million years.
(cont.)
----

The above article refers to CO2 in the 1000 ppm range. We are coming up
on 400 ppm presently.
---

If you like weekends, thank a union.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYIC0eZYEtI
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/3/7/michael_moore
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZkDikRLQrw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyE5wjc4XOw