Quote:
Originally Posted by dyna mo
if you are asking me, the latest from California is this winter's snow pack was 5%, the worst on record since 1950. the governor has implemented stricter rules over public water rights, and launching campaigns to get people to convert their grass lawns to proper flora and fauna indigenous to this desert. According to what i've read but haven't sorted out is agriculture (which uses ~85% of all the water in the state) is maxed out on their restrictions, the term is they can't not get any less water from the state and feds, nevertheless, they are getting water from somewhere, haven't figured that part out.
anyway, it's not enough. But i can tell you this, i'm doing my part to conserve, both energy and my pollution footprint. I also volunteer at the beach and clean up trash 1 a month, basically, i've become a lifestyle conservationist. including water, 2 of us use less than 150 gallons of water a month. that is a hard act. regardless of my not liking how the politicization of the science of it all distorts the issue and stalls action on a government level, i still do my part. i bitch about the politicization of it here because i flip out over the "science is settled" fallacy. that's scary shit.
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I think you tend to put too much weight on the science is settled. Yes it's a bad terminology much like Global Warming is bad terminology. ie Scientist aren't very good PR agents so sue them..
They aren't saying there isn't a possibility that there is not some magic unicorn in the sky farting and heating up the Earth.. What they are saying is all the evidence points to excess CO2 gases (ie greenhouse gasses) and it's almost certain man is to blame for that excess CO2 gas.
The likelihood that it's not the cause of man due to our pollution output, is a extremely narrow chance. That's what they say when they say the science is settled. That it's pretty much 90% certain..
Yes we can argue that hey there is a 10% chance it's something else but that chance is so small that we need to act upon what we believe is true if we expect to have a difference.
Now lets just put that into perspective of what you said you do.. You say you help clean the beach.. Now you know very well that by doing this you have an effect on keeping that beach clean. You may not know where the trash comes from but you know that if you don't pick up that trash, it will keep growing and growing.
Now lets say that trash is CO2. We may not know where "all" of the excess CO2 is coming from, but we do know where a lot of it is coming from. This means we can have an effect by reducing human CO2 output and cleaning up the beach by not allowing the trash to get dumped in the first place..