On that note, I do recall seeing a magazine article stating that cows currently are a more relevant factor upon the environment than most man-made contributions. One cow is capable of producing several quarts of methane gas per day. Considering the demand for beef and dairy products, that's a considerable amount of methane. I guess copious amounts of methane is bad...?

Now, I don't have a doctorate in environmental studies so I don't know how accurate this is. The only magazines I read are the more credible ones such as Smithsonian, Scientific American, Consumer Reports and National Geographic, so I doubt the cow article came from a wild source out of left field. I just don't remember which magazine it was specifically, as it was maybe three or four years ago.

It's an interesting theory, at any rate, even though blame is being assigned through a sort of trickle-down process: America loves milk and beef; the cattle industry rises to the demand; the growing cow population pumps methane into the atmosphere; Earth suffers for our gluttony.

If there's any truth to this, I guess I'm doing my part by eating more fish, chicken and pasta than beef (only because these foods are often cheaper; frugality saves the day!)

Also, I fart indoors where the walls and furniture absorb most of the gas.

So if you leave your refrigerator open, does this mean that you are warming up the room?

I think the temperature of your gaseous fluidum in the warmth exchanger is going to go up and up because your power input of electricity in the compressor is the same. While the warmth transfer to the liquid phase is higher because you leave the refrigerator open.

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a3.../Image1-11.jpg

Crash --
CO2 is a pretty pissant little greenhouse gas. Its big brothers, water vapor and methane deserve more attention if folks wanna parade around saying the sky is falling. Methane likes to live life wildly as a gas, but it burns out fast (nooo, not literally). Methane in the atmosphere doesn't have a long life at all. CO2 and all that is emptied out by carbon cycles, but that's a slow rate. The CO2 that gets in to the atmosphere stays for a good few thousand years if I recall right. Methane has an atmospheric life of, like, a few decades.

Anyhow; yeah, cows do indeed chug out large amounts of methane. Also termites yield large amounts of methane. Yet another reason to kill all the bastards~ But there are also marshlands and what-not that yield it.

Animals farting is hardly anything new at all. The number of megatons of methane dumped in to the atmosphere annually is pretty large, but it is dealt with on its own. A concern some folks have with warming trends lies with the Methane traps in Siberia. But that delves in to the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis sorta stuff. And folks still don't know in that debate if the methane in the atmosphere during temperature rises is a cause or effect of the heat waves. Methane's supposed deadliness as a greenhouse gas directly correlates to this, but the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis (which is basically "Global Warming") is still a hypothesis. There's been no concrete proof, only speculation along some coincidences.

The amount of mercury in a light bulb is trace amounts at best.

If you do really worry about it that much, though, the EPA does mandate safe disposal methods for large users of fluorescent bulbs. I'm sure you could find some company nearby that will take in as part of a recycling program.

And, of course, recycling can be expensive and inefficient, but it really depends on the kind of material you're dealing with. Recycling mixed metals, such as steel, is still worthwhile, though it gets to be a hassle since you're mixing all these different kinds of steel, so it can only be sold as a very low grade type of steel. Paper's the same way where it can only be used so many times before it just degrades into junk and has to be scrapped. Aluminum, on the other hand, can easily be purified back to elementally pure and be reused infinitely (and for much less energy consumption than starting from scratch getting aluminum out of bauxite).

Good to know. I didn't see the "Contains Mercury" bit until recently. If there's a warning, that means I should probably get rid of it properly. =/

Most of us on a daily basis don't really use this bad boys, though. I mean, yea, you're right - in these arenas, recycling is prime.

But for us lowly citizens who use plastic bottles and canned goods, how efficient is the process?

penn & teller did a Bullshit! episode on recycling. how it's bullshit, and all. Shouldn't be impossible to find on the web.

personally, i do nothing to stop this global warming, cause it's a force that can't be stopped , nor is it a force we humans created. I find it humorous and saddening that people actually are conceded enough to believe this race of creatures have any impact on the planet whatsoever. do you know how impossibly hard it would be to actually destroy all life on the planet? it would take a collected, willful effort of everyone. EVERYONE. devoting everyday of their lives to creating a wasteland.

listen, go recycle, drive a prius, ride a bike to work, i don't care. if it makes you feel better about life, great. But nobody likes an evangelist, and since the planet's not in any danger (hell, higher CO2 means plants are actually thriving) please don't get angry at those of us who don't feel like changing our lives to suit your paranoia.

In short the answer is: not very. In a lot of ways it's better to just let it sit in a landfill and either be eaten away by bacteria (no joke), or wait until recycling the materials becomes cost-effective. That will only really work well, though, if your landfill sorts its material. In the future, I mean.

So in your view, if one single human being, wherever he may be on the planet, who has easy access to nukes or some such crazy type of weapon were to push that little red button and bomb a major city, and that everybody else who has the power to provoke this kind of thing were to do the same thing, that wouldn't have the teensyest little bit of impact on the planet???

I have more esteem of the human race than that. Now the universe... that may take another 10 years or so...:p

Not even thermonuclear war can definitely wipe out all life on the Earth. We'd have to try really fucking hard to make sure that life has no future on this mudball planet.

Yes, but I think it is safe to assume it would make a rather big dent in the actual shape of things.

I don't think most people are concerned about saving the dodo, they're more concerned about keeping up the current quality of life for humanity than anything else.

I actually read a pretty neat article about this guy that did a sort of archeology dig in an old landfill. They were able to find fully intact newspapers over 50 years old, as well as recognizable food scraps. Apparently if a landfill gets filled fast enough, there's not enough time for the bacteria and whatnot to start breaking the food down since pretty soon their oxygen supply gets cut off.

Well, if you tried to recycle it in your back yard, it probably won't be very efficient. If you live in an area with a fairly dense population and you've got large trucks picking it up (or if you can bring it to a recycling center without a whole lot of trouble) then it's really not that bad.

okay, don't remember saying anything about nukes or the quintessential "little red button"...but yeah, Brady's got the point. not even a crap load of nukes would completely destroy life on the planet. Maybe human life, but the planet will still keep ticking.

a rather big dent in the shape of things wouldn't effect the planet, it would only effect us. So i guess my beef is, if you're trying to save something, save yourself.

jesus, that sounded ominous.

Save yourself is the rule to live by. Mother nature is a crazy old lady whose done crazy, trippy stuff to herself that even Keith Richards can fathom. She's trying to kill us all, for sure.

We've gotta kill the bitch before she kills us first >=( But... How?

If a group of Japanese whale hunters can drive a species into near existence before someone has to stop them, and Indian and African hunters can drive a species of tigers to near extinction, what makes you think that some 3 billion humans cant burn up the earth?

Do you know what the slightest change in global temperature can do to suprisingly tender ecosystems?

And whether or not the affect is large or not you dont think that you can make a couple of small lifestyle changes? Its not even like the resources are hard to access, its easy.

Give me a break, seriously.

what are they, inverse whale hunters? when they kill whales to two new ones crop up in it's place?

okay, there are over a few million species on the planet. if some whales and tigers get killed off, you know what will happen? nothing. this is called equilibrium. the ecosystem will balance itself without that specie. Dodo's went extinct. the world kept going. ecosystems aren't that precarious. just finely tuned. you take out a section of an ecosystem, it'll just readjust itself and keep going.

humans can't destroy life on the planet. we are not that powerful. we are not that important.

and just because i can make lifestyle changes, i don't want to. and i'm not going to. not to be stubborn, but because i just simply don't have any motivation to do so. And there's the added bonus of upsetting treehuggers.

No, near extinction means that they are not croping up. You can destroy a couple thousand species by taking away there enviroment, like forest's and stuff. And it seems to me as if you are thinking on a universal scale, like milky way or something.

When you are the dominant species on the planet, your pretty damned important.

Treehuggers aside, your motivation should be simple sympathy for the planet that you live on, and yeah, that is being stubborn.

I am doing absolutely nothing to help the fight against Global Warming, because I'm just doing my part in trying to rid the Earth of Captain Planet and his hideous lies. I do recycle plastics and aluminum, though, because recycling does not directly impact the effect of looting and polluting. However, I get all my energy from dirty coal and use it to the fullest extent to which I am able.

Seriously, though, for me to make any sort of impact against global warning, a phenomenon which is caused by billions of people on the planet, is basically impossible. Unless I find an efficient way of producing hydrogen without massive amounts of power and support fusion reactor research, the latter I would so do if they took collections for that sort of thing.

If that's the way you think, then being friendly to someone does nothing to wiping out hostility on the planet so we might as well all not give a fuck for anybody around us. I take it you don't vote either?

Helping a single person has a very negligible effect on hostility on the planet as well. When you view things on a big scale like all of global warming or all of hostility and hatred, then nothing you do has any effect whatsoever. Being friendly to a person helps them, but there's no way to scale down the climate of a planet in a meaningful way like that.

And I did vote, even though I knew my vote for Bush wasn't going to count as my state went to Kerry. Just as a personal fuck you to the Democratic party for choosing such a terrible candidate.

Well, my point was that you can't take the fact that being only a single person amongst billions makes your actions have less of an impact stop you from doing things you believe are helpful. If you feel it is a waste of time then by all means don't do a thing about it. However you cannot warrant not taking action by the fact that your actions won't immediately solve the problem.

If you look at history, most revolutions took place when people decided that they had had enough of the current state of things, and by banding together they actually were able to change something. I admit, the problems we face today are a lot bigger than a single country overthrowing their king/emporor/dictator, but you must also consider the fact that information travels faster today than it had ever been dreamed possible in the past.

Also, you can't underestimate the effect a person can have on his/her entourage by their optimism, pessimism or their views of the world in general. It takes only a small spark to start a huge fire.

So show of hands, how many of you people are Deep Ecologists?

True environmentalists support nuclear power

:megaman:

Well fuck me... Have you been reading at all? NO ONE here is thinking on a "universal scale" as you speak of so mightily on top of that white high horse you're perched upon. You don't actually think that humans as a race are a significant enough force on the planet to actually wipe out itself and the planet, do you?

I mean, MANY species have gone extinct in the time that this planet has been around and there's scads of evidence to support that. Unless, of course, you're one of these creationists who think we coexisted with dinosaurs and rode them like pretty little horsies. Many species have seen a slow end to their existence and when they did, mankind wasn't around to "push little red buttons" to ensure that they'd remain dead. But you know who was around?

Earth.

It still is and it will find a way to balance itself out if it has to. If we have to die in the process for that to happen, so fucking be it. I seriously doubt that mother nature will take the time to write you a certificate of appreciation because you chained yourself to a tree so that a bulldozer wouldn't drop it like a bad habit. Gech just said it best:

Wait wait, so your saying that we dont hunt down animals until animals rights groups say stop? Oh no you must be infering some bullshit like "cutting down forest isnt bad for the animals that live there, they can just fly somewhere else, or well put them in a zoo or something".

That's exactly what I'm saying. If those animals needed tree-hugging prats like you to speak prophetic about their holier-than-everything-else protection, then there's a good chance natural selection is doing its best to apply the buffalo theory to the planet.