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To: Gondring

You dear, are completely daft.


23 posted on 10/16/2008 3:59:18 PM PDT by xcamel (Conservatives start smart, and get rich, liberals start rich, and get stupid.)
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To: xcamel
You dear, are completely daft.

Try educating yourself, and rise from ignorance into understanding.

Technology won't seem so much like magic, and
logic won't seem like insanity. ;-)

59 posted on 10/16/2008 7:42:18 PM PDT by Gondring (Paul Revere would have been flamed as a naysayer troll and told to go back to Boston.)
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To: xcamel; Gondring; Tolerance Sucks Rocks
You dear, are completely daft.

I'm not sure if I buy the downstream corrosion by oxygen argument, but his basic premise is sound. Excessive use of a number of things can have deleterious effects and require regulation. A classic example is nitrogen fertilizer. There is NO doubt that nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plant growth. That's why farmers put nitrogen-containing fertilizer on fields. It's good, it enhances productivity. But excess use is wasted, and it runs off the fields, into the waterways, and causes in-stream and downstream problems, primarily due to enhanced algal growth which leads to reduction of dissolved oxygen in the water -- which kills fish, bottom dwellers, like tasty crab and shrimp -- and also lower light levels, which kills seagrasses where larval fish and baby crabs and shrimp and other things hang out. So nitrogen fertilzer use in agriculture should be regulated. Same goes for phosphates in fertilizers and also in detergents.

IF the climate change effects of CO2 will become deleterious to the environment -- I'm pretty sure you know where I stand on that -- then excess CO2 from industrial emissions should be regulated. Despite everybody's love of bringing up the fact that we exhale CO2, the natural system is generally in balance*. It is the imbalance due to human activities, which is causing rapidly increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2, that needs to be addressed.

* In fact, if you look closely at the best flux estimates, were it not for human activites, atmospheric CO2 concentrations would probably be decreasing very slowly. I.e., without human activities, the natural fluxes out of the atmosphere exceed the natural fluxes into the atmosphere. (That includes all respiring organisms, from bacteria to humans.)

As always, I think it should be addressed technologically rather than economically. Just read an article yesterday about solar power stations in space -- might work, and also give NASA a stake in the national economy rather than just being primarily a research organization.

91 posted on 10/17/2008 6:35:38 AM PDT by cogitator
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