On 12/27/06 11:49 AM, "Jostein Øksne", <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> To keep focus on the controversy over man-made or not is very pleasant > because it means you don't have to do anything as long as there is any > straw to cling to claiming that all is well. Politically this may turn > out to be a mistake of Chamberlainian proportions. My comment is not really in response to Jostein personally. I believe everybody is concerned about possible negative influences inflicted by human activities. Who wouldn't? Problem is that no one really knows what to believe. There have been opposing studies about this for years and there is no conclusion AFAIK. I tend to believe that it would be wise to play safe. That's all I can for now. It is just a commonsense to minimize waste and I am switching to smaller cars and so forth, partly driven by economical consideration. As I said a few months ago, whenever I think about the amount of hot gas generated by burning non-regenerative fossil fuel, theoretically, it should be adding a lot of heat to atmosphere, let alone polluting gas which is another concern. CNN often shows as part of weather report, status of aircrafts in flight at any given time. They are filling the entire North American continent, and each of these commercial airliner burns thousands of gallons of fuel, every day, every year and for so many decades all over the world. There are thousands of ocean going ships at any given time around the world, and they only goes "inches" per a gallon of fuel. Now in macro view, consumed fossil fuel has mass which they lose when burned and much of it is converted to energy (which in theory has mass too) and wasted hot gas. So, is our planet losing the mass? Probably. With regard to heat, if you consider our planet as an independent mass, which it is, insulated by thin air, there must be a thermal equilibrium working somehow. If we just keep accumulating the heat, earth will certainly heat up, albeit ever so slowly and that's probably one reason of some scientists alarming climate change. OTOH, we have been receiving far far greater thermal energy from sun every day for millions of years and this heat energy applies homogenously on "everything" on earth surface. This energy is too great to compare to any heat mass human generates, majority of which started just about 100 years ago or since James Watt. But our planet did not heat up significantly last time I checked. This tells me that earth is dispersing a lot of heat into space everyday. Heat we receive or generate should go somewhere. This thermal equilibrium probably reached millions of years ago. Earth then may have been a little hotter because of more active volcano etc which produce so much energy and pollutant in every eruption. Even so, earth has been repeating minute thermal cycle such as repeated ice age etc ever since. Just taking a snap shot of a few decades worth of change, all sorts of conclusions could be devised but a few decades in a grand scheme of millions of years of earth's existence, I am not sure what to make of it. Then, there is God :-). He knows our destiny. If and when burning fossil fuel ever reaches unacceptable level from the viewpoint of both heat buildup and resource wasting, mankind must have created alternate solutions by then. Like a nuclear issue, climate change is so deeply mixed up with political considerations and opposing scientific explanations, it runs like a railway track. They all goes together but never cross. Ken -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
