I just got off the phone with my Mother. She has been living in Toronto Canada for 50 years. She said they had a rainstorm that lasted for 2 hours and dumped nearly 1 metre of rain. She said that nothing has ever happened of the sort in her memory.
Her basement is gone. I am worried to tears. Toronto has always been knoen as such a safe city. And now the aftemath of the New Orleans storm is supposed to hit.
Insanity. Looking for a voice of reason.
[quote=“Lo Bo To”]I just got off the phone with my Mother. She has been living in Toronto Canada for 50 years. She said they had a rainstorm that lasted for 2 hours and dumped nearly 1 metre of rain. She said that nothing has ever happened of the sort in her memory.
Her basement is gone. I am worried to tears. Toronto has always been knoen as such a safe city. And now the aftemath of the New Orleans storm is supposed to hit.
Insanity. Looking for a voice of reason.[/quote]
Weather can run in cycles of up to 150-500-1000 years. Geologic evidence shows us that there were great storms, floods of Biblical proportion and massive earthquakes all through time.
These things surprise us, but if you learn a bit more about them you see it’s just a part of the natural weather process that many people forgot to study.
I studied the Mississppi River delta area while getting my BA. The levee system they have set up there is/was fragile. If one goes, huge swaths of land/people are flooded. In this case many levees broke upstream from New Orleans. Put that together with wetland degredation and you’ve got yourself a 500 year flood.
As for the rain in Toronto, I’m sure it’s happened before. Are you sure about the amount? One meter! Wow, that’s incredible. Hope your family is OK>
jds
Maybe this is the planets way of cleansing itself. we have a HUGE overpopulation problem and a species that just keeps breeding out of control and just keeps wasting. I know the weather goes in cycles and it isn’t actually the planets “reaction” but maybe it needs to happen.
We’re f*****g ruining the earth. 
We even shouldn’t have been here, they just forgot to pick us up after one of our motherships crashed on earth … 
But now we don’t have any choice as try to get things going without oil and coal … 
[quote=“jd”]Weather can run in cycles of up to 150-500-1000 years. Geologic evidence shows us that there were great storms, floods of Biblical proportion and massive earthquakes all through time. [/quote]That’s true but the world is heavily populated nowadays and it affects a lot more people when these cycles happen.
There are noticeable changes in the weather patterns all over the planet and I’m not sure all of it is natural. Some of it is natural and some of it is the result of mankind’s ability to screw everything up.
bobepine
Normally the earth has a ‘natural’ balance, with our species breeding out of control this balance is disturbed … an other choice we have is starting a new holocaust … hereby cutting earths population by at least half … better by 2/3th.
Just think about how many million tons off shit we dump every day … this causes a excess of methane …
[quote]“She [Nature] is irresistable; I mean the uncertainty of the snows in the winter and the dryness of our summers. It is astonishing how variable the former grows, much more so indeed than formerly; and I make no doubt but that in a few hundred years they will be very different from what they are at present. That mildness, when interrupted by transitory frosts and thaws, will become very detrimental to our husbandry. For though the quantity of snow may diminish, yet it cannot be entirely so with the frost.” - J. Hector St. John de Cr
Are we ruining the earth or just ruining ourselves? I have to say that the earth is much older than we are, and has done pretty well so far. Nature, according to some, is our sister. We have sprung from the same well, and so when we damage nature we damage ourselves. The earth created us, and the earth will take us away again. Did the dinosaurs worry about deforestation, or extinction of other species? It is the ability to think that will eventually destroy our race, and then something else will come along after that. Maybe a dinoman! A dinosaur that can think like man! I dont know how they’d open a can of beer though. 
I wouldn’t really recomend another holocaust. But I think for a few hundred years we would do good to instate China’s great idea (which was a good idea just a very unpopular one) of the one child law.
I think this would also help us to continue possitive evolution instead of the “only stupid people are breeding” type of evolution we seem to have now.
(flame away)
Mother nature created us and created us the way we are. We think because mother nature created us to think. We think for a reason. We destroy things for a reason.
Our ability to think will eventually save us and save the rest of the planet from extinction. That is why mother nature intended us to think, to make things, to travel and eventually explore space and time.
Mother nature created us and created us the way we are. We think because mother nature created us to think. We think for a reason. We destroy things for a reason.
Our ability to think will eventually save us and save the rest of the planet from extinction. That is why mother nature intended us to think, to make things, to travel and eventually explore space and time.[/quote]
That is very interesting DM, I never thought about that before. Maybe mother nature is trying to commit suicide, it certainly seems that way some days.
It’s just looking at things from a different perspective. Who knows what the truth really is? The answer will never be known.
I’m going to make a frank statement here;
Hunger and disease are natural, we are bringing earth out of balance by fighting both. We have the ability to do so, but it’s not what actually should be done. It’s just because we can think and some of us have a conscious that we are going to bring down society.
Earth can not sustain 8-10 billion people. Think about china and india for a moment, if only 25% of them is going to drive a car … have airconditioners … boats … throw away one can (coke or pepsi 
)everyday …
It’s changing how we use the resources and what we want daily or going back to the stone age.
[quote]Earth can not sustain 8-10 billion people. Think about China and India for a moment, if only 25% of them is going to drive a car … have airconditioners … boats … throw away one can (coke or pepsi Laughing out loud… )everyday …
[/quote]
Perhaps you are right - there are so many theories.
Is it no coincidence that the most populated areas are all located on the earths disaster zones - Japan has earthquakes and hurricanes and landslides - same for many other asian countries; same for Taiwan. Bad, dangerous traffic exists in most overpopulated countries.
India and Africa endure droughts. China has vast open deserts, droughts, unuseable land for the current technologies and an inability to co-operate.
Wars kill millions of people every decade. Wars happen because there are too many people disagreeing with too many people.
Are wars mother natures trigger for self policed population control?
Why are humans naturally predudice to people of other races? Why do we have religion, a bunch of systems which disagree heartily with one another and seek to destroy each other in a perpetual race for worldwide domination.
We have wars which kill off millions of people, but look at the huge amount of new technology abundant afterwards.
How about mosquitoes? New diseases like aids and SARS are all designed to keep down the population. Current trends suggest the earths population is starting to decline due to economic situations, longer life spans and other factors.
Using up resources could be mother natures way of shocking mankind into developing new technologies - technologies that are renewable, self sustaining and better for the environment. Because of this, technology could take an unexpected leap forward.
It’s what we need, because the current technology is limited by the price of oil. What company today wants to sell, develop and research water powered engines when there is oil to be sold. Rumour has it that shell bought the rights to one in the early nineties and the technology has never been released.
It could be all one big design in Mother Natures little experiment. Theres a reason for everything.
If there is an imminent need to find a way to survive, the human race as a whole will do it. 
Q. - What is happening to our world?
A. - Global warming is happening to “our” world. It is a shite state of affairs and no quantity of psuedo scientific bullshit about weather cycles, space travel, talking dinosaurs or mother nature commiting suicide or cleansing herself is going to make the least bit of difference. Wake up for fuck sake.
techcentralstation.com/083105JKG.html
Of course Bob, there might be some who disagree with you.
[quote]Katrina and Disgusting Exploitation
By James K. Glassman Published 08/31/2005
A profound tragedy is unfolding in New Orleans, the most beautiful city in America, with the richest cultural history and the most wonderful style of living. I lived in New Orleans for seven years. I was married there. My children were born there. I have many friends there.
My daughter, her husband and their little baby managed to get out of the city ahead of the flood on Sunday, driving 14 hours into Texas with the few belongings they could stuff into their car. They have no idea what has become of their house and their possessions, not to mention their friends, their pets, their jobs, their way of life.
Tragedies happen, and my daughter and her family are happy just to be alive. Their losses and those of hundreds of thousands of other innocents deserve mourning, prayer and respect.
That is why the response of environmental extremists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now.
Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces.
Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.
But that doesn’t stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: “Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now – Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.”
Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany’s environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): “By neglecting environmental protection, America’s president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflect on his country and the world’s economy.”
The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. “When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the international community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection.”
He goes on, “There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide.” In other words, thanks to Katrina, we’ll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)
Ross Gelbspan, in a particularly egregious, almost giddy piece in the Boston Globe that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, wrote that the hurricane was “nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service Katrina, [but] its real name was global warming.” He also finds global warming responsible for droughts in the Midwest, strong winds in Scandinavia and heavy rain in Dubai. The reason for all this devastation, of course, is that the Bush Administration is controlled by coal and oil interests.
And the Independent, a widely read British newspaper, reported today that “Sir David King, the British Government’s chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina.” King contended that “the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming.”
The Kyoto advocates point to warmer ocean temperatures, but they ought to read their own favorite newspaper, The New York Times, which reported yesterday:
“Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught ‘is very much natural,’ said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.’”
An article on TCS quoted Gray last year as saying that, while some groups and individuals say that hurricane activity lately "may be in some way related to the effects of increased man-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide,
a good many of the worlds leading scientists agree that it is having an effect on the worlds weather paterns. It astounds me to think that this would suprise anyone.[/quote]
OK, having an effect on the world’s weather patterns and causing global warming are two very largely different things in many people’s minds.
My mind isn’t made up BTW. The reason we have governments is to keep the opinionated laymen out of the decisionmaking process.
[quote]Q. - What is happening to our world?
A. - Global warming is happening to “our” world. It is a shite state of affairs and no quantity of psuedo scientific bullshit about weather cycles, space travel, talking dinosaurs or mother nature commiting suicide or cleansing herself is going to make the least bit of dif[/quote]ference. Wake up for fuck sake.[/quote]
Prove it.
I don’t think there has been enough time to monitor the effects of Co2 effectively. Until 50 or 100 years later, it will be pure speculation.