Re: LRO: Re: Wasted youth - Global warming

From: Mark Pilkington (mark@skywagons.com)
Date: Thu Apr 05 2001 - 12:05:12 EDT

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    A slighly different perspective...... We all think that the atmosphere is
    hugely thick and will absorb all we dump into it. The sky is the limit etc.
    Also we think that we have so much control over what we do. I fly planes as
    Marin does, and since I have been flying I have more of a feeling of how
    fragile the earth is and how little control we have over it if any. The average
    commercial airport runway is about 10,000 feet long, imagine how short one is
    as you drive past it. If that were upended vertically, it would reach higher
    than where humans can comfortably live. Now think of the 3000 miles across just
    the USA for example!(15,600,000 feet) The atmosphere is such a thin veneer
    around us. While on the subject of making things vertical, remember the Kursk,
    the Russian Submarine that sank? If that sub were upended where it lay 200
    feet of it would have been above water! It was 500 feet long and was in 300
    feet of water and we had no influance or control over what happened to it
    (apart from the political problems). The ocean is 20,000 feet deep in places.
    We are just on borrowed time here, we have had a huge influence on a small
    planet in a cosmic blink of the eye. We are damaging it, and we have to be
    careful. I am not an Eco-freak, but I did study Rural Resources and their
    Management for 4 years in England. I also fly 30 year old aircraft, drive
    Landrovers, hunt, shoot, and fish all of which are considered by some as not
    environmentally friendly. I am continually surprised by the surprise with which
    the media handles natural disasters, as if to say "the humans are here, no more
    volcanoes, avalanches, earthquakes, landslides, droughts, floods, fires or
    meteorites please" We could be gone in a moment if an asteroid hit us. The
    dinosaurs and their predecessors were here for 400,000,000 years and never got
    beyond being big dumb lizards. We have been (arguably) "civilized" for about
    10,000 years (150 in the USA;-)) and have managed to overpopulate and damage
    the planet almost irreversibly in that time. We do change things and we have to
    be careful.
    Having just read this through, I notice that it only mentions "Landrovers"
    once! Being alarmed at that, I will mention that I spent until 10pm last night
    gleefully putting the slave cylinders on my SIIa after getting a large package
    from England full of small peices of Landrover. Tonight is the night for the
    gynocological wrestling of the clutch slave cylinder into its unorthodox
    position on the side of my unenvironmentally sound, non-Landrover Chevy 327 V8.

    Thanks for getting this far!
    Mark Pilkington

    "Robert A. Virzi" wrote:

    > Bill, Peter, and others-
    > An interesting article on global warming, truth or fiction, can be found at
    >
    > http://www.latimes.com/news/science/science/20010401/t000027891.html
    >
    > Light reading, but a bit long. Covers such interesting phenomena
    > like the Ross ice shelf, ice ages, and temp fluctuation on geologic
    > time scales. Worth a read if you're planning to contribute to this
    > thread.



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