JerryBoBerry said:
Jupiter551 said:
Right, but then they saw the devastation caused in places where there's been oil spills, toxic dumps, illegal dumping etc and realised it was self-evident that it was considerably more arrogant to think they could treat the place like a dump, and it would simply clean itself up.
It almost seems like some people conceive of the planet as some sort of magical ever-regenerating resource. Guess what - magic doesn't exist. Anyone want to explain the principle of convection, or suggest how worldwide energy emissions wouldn't warm the atmosphere?
Seriously, can you guys use logic for a second? You put chemicals in the atmosphere where the fuck do you guys think they're going? Lol and again, anyone who argues that we're not doing any harm, go build your house on top of a toxic dump site, you'll get cheap land and hey, it'd be totally arrogant to think we could make the ground toxic!
Thank you for mentioning oil spills, an area of interest for me. It's not actually arrogant to think the planet would clean itself up after an oil spill. There is actually hard undisputed evidence on that issue.
What most people think of when they hear oil spill is Valdez or Gulf Oil Spill and all those little duckies on the beach covered in the nasty oil, the beaches are going to be forever ruined, let's all gather hands and sing kumbaya, the earth will never recover from that, it's horrible, blah blah blah. What they don't stop to think about is oil products seep up naturally every day all over the earth. It's been happening for millions of years and the earth seems to handle it quite easily. You're superimposing the time frame of a few years to show all the damage done to one local area and then extrapolating that to geological time. That is wrong.
Coal Oil Point off Santa Barbara seeps around 25 tons of oil every single day and has been doing so for several hundred thousand years. In Turkmenistan there's a remote area where it doesn't work financially to bring in oil equipment so the natural gas that comes up out of the ground is left on fire. It's been burning continuously since 1971. Natural seepage accounts for about twice as much oil in the ocean than oil spills every year.
The simple fact is oil is natural. It is nothing more than rotten vegetation (plants, algae) and lipids from fatty tissue of higher forms of life. This is all compacted down in sedimentary layers and plunged down deep enough to attain the pressure and temperature for a long enough period to cook it into oil...and gas if cooked too hot. In essence it's nothing but Carbon and Hydrogen chained together. The earth can handle those rather easily all by itself.
What you are thinking of as bad is the short term effects on tourism and wildlife. But long term effects on the earth are non-existent. None, do not exist. Anywhere. Left alone and done nothing at all, even left going, the gulf oil spill would have zero impact over the long term on the planet. In fact looking at the total world wide natural seepage of oil that occurs every day now it really is a minor blip on the radar. The overall average of oil spills account for about 5% of oil pollution in the oceans. You know the oil that gets deposited on roads from cars? That all gets washed away by rain and makes it's way downstream to the ocean. A single city of 5 million people put the same amount of oil into the ocean as a large ocean tanker every year.
People confuse short term effects of concentrated spills, and they can be serious I will agree, with long term damage to the earth. This is in error. Long term there is no effect of oil spills on the planet. They've been happening naturally for millions of years before humans ever walked the earth and will continue to happen. Not a problem for the planet.
Think geological time for a while. If the Earths entire 4.5 billion year history were represented by a single 24 hour period then homo sapiens would not have appeared until 30 seconds before midnight. And all of recorded human history would have happened in the last tenth of a second. Even if it takes 30 years for the gulf oil spill to disappear that is nothing in Earth time. Now do you see the arrogance to think we could effect the planet? Stop thinking in your short life span. You are less than a flea on an elephant's back compared to the planet.
Oh, and as for the oil covered duckies. I say fuck em. That's also the planet at work too you know. Most birds fly away when an oil spill starts coming at them. Only the ones too damn stupid start to go swimming in it. Earth's Natural Selection at its finest right there. Weed out the dumb ass ones so the genes of the smart adaptable ones get carried on. It's how evolution works. You couldn't get more 'Earth friendly' than that right there.
http://www.livescience.com/5422-natural-oil-spills-surprising-amount-seeps-sea.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_to_Hell
Really interesting article on the non-existent long term (even short term, just a handful of years in reality) of oil spills.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...uth-theyre-calamity-doom-mongers-say-are.html
Raw numbers on the amount of oil going into the oceans.
http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/peril_oil_pollution.html
Couple things, in brief, though I realise your response wasn't brief so I apologise.
1. Natural is not a synonym for good. Hemlock is natural. It will also kill pretty much anything that eats it. Cyanide - also natural. Actually herpes is natural too, does that make it somehow 'better' than a synthesised cream to treat its symptoms?
2. Going and mining something (anything), refining it or not, and then spilling it somewhere it would never naturally occur is no more natural than manmade nuclear fission. Sure, it theoretically COULD happen without human intervention. Just like an oil spill of that magnitude COULD happen, but the fact is it never would - and if it did it would cause massive damage right?
3. The fact that crude oil is biodegradeable proves nothing. Yes, if you spill some oil, eventually the earth will recover (after widespread devastation) - however we have the capability to spill oil and other pollutants at a rate that NO ONE could argue the planet could possibly cope with. Are you suggesting if we covered the earth in toxic waste, killed virtually every living thing, that the earth would recover? I come back to toxic waste. You make the argument about crude oil because it's naturally occuring, well besides the fact that as I said above, nature is not a synonym for awesome, I think you're being slightly choosy with the spill substance. I used the Valdez incident as an example - one could just as easily use the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests of the 1950s and 60s.
The Bikini Atoll is still dangerously radioactive, despite decades having passed, and still dangerously uninhabitable - more than 50 years after the last test ended.
You never mentioned, btw, how quickly the earth's umm....'healing factor' kicks in. Cuz if it's like a few thousand years I think it might be kind of superfluous when measured against our odds of survival as a species lol.
The measured effects of one of the hydrogen bombs tested, note the ~600 mile fallout range, in this case much larger than the US government had predicted, and actually went on to fatally irradiate fishing boats and their crew out in the middle of the pacific ocean...
Look no one is suggesting that the earth and the ecosystem don't have mechanisms to deal with waste - obviously they do. What I am suggesting, nay insisting, is that we have and continue to grow our population, industry and emissions at a rate so great, and accelerating so fast that suggesting it can recover -
even as we pollute further and further - is like suggesting that because the liver can safely process the toxins from a moderate amount of alcohol then therefore it follows the liver could eliminate ANY amount of toxins, no matter how fast it is introduced. Ridiculous!
Here's what I can't wrap my head around: look at smog in somewhere like LA, or Tokyo (btw I've seen the sun rise in Japan blood red, because you can only view it through the smog!), and tell me that doesn't affect the environment. Look at radiation sickness, cancers, lymphomas and other illnesses that have been linked in one or another way to illegal dumping and proximity of toxic waste to habitation. How can you POSSIBLY suggest that the earth is simply happily recycling whatever we throw at it, without repercussion, when there's repercussion everywhere?!
Next time you take out the trash, have a look how much the people in your household use, consume and create. Then multiply it by every person on the planet, then realise why we have 'islands' of trash in our oceans that are hundreds of miles across and have been growing (and indeed new ones noticed) since they were first noticed around half a century ago. Not declining, growing. Rapidly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_garbage_patch
:lol:
