OT of an OT: Ethanol

[Suicide Junkie]

I don't see the "stereotypical arrogant American attitude" in implementing tarrifs.

It is not the idea itself, but the manner in which it is presented.

To me, it sounded aggressive; "if we're gonna do it, we're gonna hit you up for it too."
My impression is that Europe is way ahead of us slobs on this side of the pond.

[Captain Kwok]

Europe is primarily ahead of us environmentally because of the fact that have little to no resources left- so it's by necessity.

[Thermodyne]

Captain Kwok said:
Europe is primarily ahead of us environmentally because of the fact that have little to no resources left- so it's by necessity.

Get out of the tour books and take a good look at Europe. I wouldn't advise drinking the well water.

[Ragnarok-X]

Thermodyne said:

Get out of the tour books and take a good look at Europe. I wouldn't advise drinking the well water.

Actually Kwok is right. Given you are looking at central europe and not china (with its waste-into-river-thingy) and russia (same).

[Thermodyne]

Suicide Junkie said:

It is not the idea itself, but the manner in which it is presented.

To me, it sounded aggressive; "if we're gonna do it, we're gonna hit you up for it too."
My impression is that Europe is way ahead of us slobs on this side of the pond.

Perhaps it is an arrogant American attitude. Have you seen the treaties that have been proposed for placing limits on greenhouse gasses? The developed world cuts emissions and the third world gets to slash and burn rain forest so as to graze cattle. I’m not sorry that America has been more successful than most of the rest of the world, but I will be damned if I’ll make concessions on energy so that Asia can continue its 1950’s industrial revolution. I’m all for protecting the environment, but the sacrifices I’m forced to make have to be made by the rest of the world. The way I see it, much of the world has a lot of catching up to do on environmental issues.

[Renegade 13]

Yep, the oceans used to be a lot lower than they are today. Shores used to be miles further out to sea than they are now. Then again, back then everything was covered in a hellacious amount of ice, so I don't think whatever was around back then cared too much about the extra few miles of "dry" land. Then about 18,000-6,000 years ago was a period of very fast rising of ocean levels, something like 30-40 mm per year. This of course corresponded to the massive ice shelves melting off of North America. Oddly enough, there was a time in the not-too-distant past when ocean levels were 6 meters higher than today, then retreated again. This is shown by the remains of coral reefs that are now high and dry above the ocean, and also by evidence of wave action on cliffs and stuff like that. So the ocean rose, stabilized, rose very quickly, fell again and is now rising slowly again. Most of this happened before man began the industrial revolution and started spewing many so-called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This suggests to me that "global warming" is nothing more than a natural cycle that has been blown out of proportion by the media and by environmental scientists who want big research grants...

I'm not saying mankind hasn't accelerated the process, but I bet it was coming anyways. The real questions are: To what effect are mankinds emmissions into the atmosphere truely effecting the natural cycle of things, Is is possible/practical/feasible to slow the amount of greenhouse gases that are let into the atmosphere, What would be the positive and negative results of the Earth's mean temperature rising by a couple degrees and would the positive outweigh the negative. Questions like this need to be answered before I'll even have a chance of truly believing the alarmists and start losing sleep over this issue.

[Renegade 13]

Interesting...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ice_sheet says:
If global warming occurs, over the next century the Antarctic ice sheet is predicted to gain mass primarily because it is so cold that the extra warmth will not melt it significantly but will supply extra moisture; conversely the Greenland ice sheet is expected to lose mass through melting. These effects are expected to approximately cancel [3]. See: sea level rise.

[geoschmo]

I don't know how accurate that particular model is. The fact is the south pole ice cheet is smaller now then it was a hundred years ago when we started measuring that sort of thing. This correlates nicely with the rise in temperature we've already seen over that period of time. Of course maybe that's just a short term cycle and not the beginning of a long term warming trend. It would be nice to think that the planet had all these nifty backup systems that would cancel out the effects over time, but that's just wishful thinking really.

The geological record clearly shows that the oceans were lower in the past. Perhaps as many as 300 meters lower during the most recent ice age that ended about 40,000 years ago. There is no reason to think that the current sea level that we've enjoyed for the last 3,000 years or so is special. The earth doesn't care that we've built our cities along the current coastlines.

[AMF]

In lieu of actually adding anything productive to the conversation, I'll just be lazy and throw in a relevant wiki-link with a nifty chart of global tempartures from 1860 onward...and a bunch of other stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

[Renegade 13]

What it boils down to is I'm not going to convince you, and you're (Thermodyne, Will, Hunpecked) not going to convince me. Might as well leave it at that. I'm sure everyone is getting tired of me rebutting, and you counter-rebutting and so on. Might as well stop....but don't view it as me conceeding your arguement, since I'm not