Tree Huggers

[Walter Powers]

If you haven't heard already, a major environmental report is going to be coming out next week. Some parts of it have been leaked. Among the findings within it include the fact that the amount of Antarctic sea ice is increasing, global average temperatures have remained pretty much flat over the past 15 years, and the threat of global warming is: “embedded within the background variability of the natural climate system and not dangerous." There is a news article I posted on it here:

http://www.virtualteen.org/forums/showthread.php?t=192193

Now of course the environmentalists and media are going to have to somehow devalue this report using their spin machine, as it essentially tells them that the trillions of dollars in regulations they've supported and millions of jobs they've killed wasn't for much of anything other then slightly less polluted air, because their stated objective of reducing global warming is now considered "not dangerous". They aren't saving NYC from being flooded by a hurricane like they thought. Nor are they saving Polar Bears and Penguins from extinction.

I would hope that President Obama and his progressive allies would apologize for greatly exaggerating this untrue "inconvenient truth", and destroying so much prosperity in an effort to solve an artificial problem. I doubt that'll happen though. They'll just turn up the propaganda machine and keep passing laws that give them more power.

What do you make of this? Does it surprise you? Do you support the trillions of dollars in EPA regulations, and things like green energy subsidies and tax credits?

If we'd just let the free market work, we wouldn't have killed so many livelihoods in an attempt to stop a virtually nonexistent problem.

[Sugaree]

If we'd just let the free market work, we wouldn't have killed so many livelihoods in an attempt to stop a virtually nonexistent problem.

That's the core problem with the free market, though. As much of a believer as I am in the free market, I don't believe that corporations are going to respect the natural order of things if it means getting in the way of profit. While, yes, the EPA has become more and more of an intrusive organization and should be scaled back by at least 70 to 75 percent, there is no excuse why we shouldn't have some type of regulations on environmental law.

If we were to let the free market just run amok and do whatever they wanted, I would be almost sure that you would see incidents like the Deep Water Horizon oil spill happening on a much more frequent basis. Without these regulations, without these safeguards, there would be no concern. Corporations do not always have the best interests of the public in mind, and that is why they must be regulated in certain areas.

What you might be failing to understand is, that while global warming may be a natural cycle, we may be at a time in our history to be able to drastically slow it down. This is what most environmentalist MEAN to say; however, their actions prove otherwise. I fully support operations like Greenpeace for trying to preserve nature as it is so that it can be there for future generations, but their support for extremist policies is what I have a problem with.

This is not to say global warming is a completely nonexistent problem. The earth's temperature has never been at one consistent temperature throughout its lifetime. But it IS worrying when massive glaciers that were in existence 15 or 20 years ago are gone because the temperature has gotten only slightly warmer. This may not be a drastic change, but it IS a change that nature adjusts to. While it is not our duty to preserve nature (since nature, on its own, changes constantly), it IS our duty to make sure we aren't making things worse.

Think of it this way: If you lived in a clean house, would you want someone to bring in a bunch of filth and dirty up the place? Of course not, you'd want to keep it clean. However, you also realize that your living space becomes dirty, which is why you clean it so often. This is my own way of thinking on the environment, since I was a Boy Scout. If everyone can take that attitude of leaving the earth better than when you came, I do think we could drastically reduce some of the natural cycles.

[Sir Suomi]

We should always keep our minds on what is best for our environment. I sure as hell don't want my grandchildren needing to wear a mask outside due to the fact that our air is so messed up from air pollution. Also, we have an delicate global ecosystem. Kill off one species of plant, you kill off the organisms that feed on that plant, which kills of those who rely on those organisms for food, etc. Next thing you know, the only remaining animals are domestic animals and the few remaining members of the near extinct species spending their final days in a zoo. Although there are certain regulations that I would wish to be voted out, I do agree on how Obama has (tried) to take a positive step towards our future.

[Gigablue]

If you haven't heard already, a major environmental report is going to be coming out next week. Some parts of it have been leaked. Among the findings within it include the fact that the amount of Antarctic sea ice is increasing, global average temperatures have remained pretty much flat over the past 15 years, and the threat of global warming is: “embedded within the background variability of the natural climate system and not dangerous." There is a news article I posted on it here:

Firstly, this report presents no new data. It is an analysis of preexisting data. Secondly, it was only analyzed by a few dozen scientists, while the original data collected by the IPCC was analyzed by thousands. Basically, this report is irrelevant and should be treated with much skepticism.

Now of course the environmentalists and media are going to have to somehow devalue this report using their spin machine, as it essentially tells them that the trillions of dollars in regulations they've supported and millions of jobs they've killed wasn't for much of anything other then slightly less polluted air, because their stated objective of reducing global warming is now considered "not dangerous". They aren't saving NYC from being flooded by a hurricane like they thought. Nor are they saving Polar Bears and Penguins from extinction.

You discredit your argument with your use or ad hominem attacks against environmentalists. Also, the economic aspect of this issue is irrelevant. Your facts about climate change are wrong. The earth will be severely affected if we don't do something.

Sea level will rise significantly unless we stop putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Within the next hundred years, many of our coastline cities could be under water. This will be far more devastating for the economy than anything suggested by environmentalists.

What do you make of this? Does it surprise you? Do you support the trillions of dollars in EPA regulations, and things like green energy subsidies and tax credits?

Green energy is a good idea. Even if climate change weren't happening, we have a limited amount of oil on the planet. We will run out eventually. We need to more to sustainable energy sources.

If we'd just let the free market work, we wouldn't have killed so many livelihoods in an attempt to stop a virtually nonexistent problem.

The free market can't handle climate change. The free market has one goal: to make money. If that means destroying the planet, they'll do it. We need government regulation to stop them.

[Stronk Serb]

By destroying species, especially plant species, we shatter entire ecosystems. The environment should come before the economy, because if the sea levels rise, or the air or water get's polluted, our children and their grandchildren will be in one heck of a trouble.

[britishboy]

tree huggers- hate em, they're hurting large and small companies, and terrible for the economy, they overreact about everything

[Sugaree]

tree huggers- hate em, they're hurting large and small companies, and terrible for the economy, they overreact about everything

Correction: only the extremists overreact about everything; I have yet to see any regular "tree hugger" go apeshit over a company using plastic over paper.

[britishboy]

Correction: only the extremists overreact about everything; I have yet to see any regular "tree hugger" go apeshit over a company using plastic over paper.

I have, on the news, a local council wanting to remove some old trees and the hippies tied them selves to it

they you get the hippies living in places that can only be described as torture with their no luxuries at all and the hard labor!

[Walter Powers]

That's the core problem with the free market, though. As much of a believer as I am in the free market, I don't believe that corporations are going to respect the natural order of things if it means getting in the way of profit. While, yes, the EPA has become more and more of an intrusive organization and should be scaled back by at least 70 to 75 percent, there is no excuse why we shouldn't have some type of regulations on environmental law.
I don't think we should have none, just not to the point of destroying millions of jobs. Also, the free market allows for this thing called a "boycott". If Walmart is doing something you don't like, such as using plastic bags, you don't have to shop their.

If we were to let the free market just run amok and do whatever they wanted, I would be almost sure that you would see incidents like the Deep Water Horizon oil spill happening on a much more frequent basis. Without these regulations, without these safeguards, there would be no concern. Corporations do not always have the best interests of the public in mind, and that is why they must be regulated in certain areas.

Safety regulations are different. I support laws requiring oil rigs to be maintained and inspected. I don't support, however, this nonsense opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline which will generate thousands of jobs.

What you might be failing to understand is, that while global warming may be a natural cycle, we may be at a time in our history to be able to drastically slow it down. This is what most environmentalist MEAN to say; however, their actions prove otherwise. I fully support operations like Greenpeace for trying to preserve nature as it is so that it can be there for future generations, but their support for extremist policies is what I have a problem with.

Again, this report says that global warming is a very small problem, slowing down, and very much unaffected by human activities.

This is not to say global warming is a completely nonexistent problem. The earth's temperature has never been at one consistent temperature throughout its lifetime. But it IS worrying when massive glaciers that were in existence 15 or 20 years ago are gone because the temperature has gotten only slightly warmer. This may not be a drastic change, but it IS a change that nature adjusts to. While it is not our duty to preserve nature (since nature, on its own, changes constantly), it IS our duty to make sure we aren't making things worse.

Again, this report is going to show the temperature has remained constant and arctic ice is actually increasing. I think we'll have an interesting discussion after it comes out.

Think of it this way: If you lived in a clean house, would you want someone to bring in a bunch of filth and dirty up the place? Of course not, you'd want to keep it clean. However, you also realize that your living space becomes dirty, which is why you clean it so often. This is my own way of thinking on the environment, since I was a Boy Scout. If everyone can take that attitude of leaving the earth better than when you came, I do think we could drastically reduce some of the natural cycles.

If I lived in a clean house, I'd want to keep it that way. But not if it costed me trillions of dollars to make a microscopic difference.

We should always keep our minds on what is best for our environment. I sure as hell don't want my grandchildren needing to wear a mask outside due to the fact that our air is so messed up from air pollution. Also, we have an delicate global ecosystem. Kill off one species of plant, you kill off the organisms that feed on that plant, which kills of those who rely on those organisms for food, etc. Next thing you know, the only remaining animals are domestic animals and the few remaining members of the near extinct species spending their final days in a zoo. Although there are certain regulations that I would wish to be voted out, I do agree on how Obama has (tried) to take a positive step towards our future.

I sure as hell don't want my grandchildren sitting around a fire in a hut eating environmentally-friendly seaweed cakes.

We do have a delicate ecosystem. What kind of environmental regulations do you support? Any aimed at stopping global warming are a waste, as this report will show it is a mostly made up problem.

And what has Obama done?

Firstly, this report presents no new data. It is an analysis of preexisting data. Secondly, it was only analyzed by a few dozen scientists, while the original data collected by the IPCC was analyzed by thousands. Basically, this report is irrelevant and should be treated with much skepticism.

This report isn't out yet. Can you read? This is leaked info from the report conducted by the IPCC, which was analyzed by thousands, that is going to come out this week.

You discredit your argument with your use or ad hominem attacks against environmentalists. Also, the economic aspect of this issue is irrelevant. Your facts about climate change are wrong. The earth will be severely affected if we don't do something.

So it doesn't matter if we're living in huts as long as the air is clean? Give me a break! If we have a strong economy, we can find and fund solutions to the problems that may come our way.

Sea level will rise significantly unless we stop putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Within the next hundred years, many of our coastline cities could be under water. This will be far more devastating for the economy than anything suggested by environmentalists.

Again, this report will show the sea ice levels are increasing. It will also show that the rate of global warming is decreasing, if not stagnant, and there's little effect human activity has on it, so there's nothing we can do about it. This is no conservative think tanks report. This is the IPCC, so it's as accurate as the prior reports that made you believe the greenhouse affect argument.



Green energy is a good idea. Even if climate change weren't happening, we have a limited amount of oil on the planet. We will run out eventually. We need to more to sustainable energy sources.

Great. Put your money where your mouth is and get a solar panel. But don't outlaw oil. The free market will make that switch eventually for us. Once oil is to hard to pump out of the ground, it's price will go up and less people will buy it.



The free market can't handle climate change. The free market has one goal: to make money. If that means destroying the planet, they'll do it. We need government regulation to stop them.

What's wrong with boycotting them?

Guess what: The regulatory state's motive isn't anymore moral; they want money too. With a free market, you don't have to pay careless regulators and lawyers six figure salaries, or hold a gun to anybody's head. In a free market, the people making money are doing something the people want, like pumping oil out of the ground or designing smartphones.

By destroying species, especially plant species, we shatter entire ecosystems. The environment should come before the economy, because if the sea levels rise, or the air or water get's polluted, our children and their grandchildren will be in one heck of a trouble.

We aren't destroying species. Oh wait, I take that back, we destroyed the Spotted Oil. (Sarcasm, look it up. The tree huggers were screaming because the Spotted Owl was going extinct, and they thought it was because of humans. So they essentially shut down the logging industry in the northwest and created hundred of ghost towns and killed millions of jobs. Decades later, we found out it was being killed off by another kind of owl and not humans. To my knowledge, the idiot extremists never apologized for ruining so many lives.)

I reiterate: Would you really prefer to live in a hut making $500 bucks a year as long as you had clean air? If we're rich, we can invent things to combat emviremental problems.

tree huggers- hate em, they're hurting large and small companies, and terrible for the economy, they overreact about everything
Agreed.
Correction: only the extremists overreact about everything; I have yet to see any regular "tree hugger" go apeshit over a company using plastic over paper.
You obviously haven't been to Oregon. Portland stores are now required to use reusable cloth bags. They outlawed plastic ages ago.

I have, on the news, a local council wanting to remove some old trees and the hippies tied them selves to it

they you get the hippies living in places that can only be described as torture with their no luxuries at all and the hard labor!

And then you get the hippies like Al Gore who cruise around in their Learjets and limos telling people to conserve energy.

[Sugaree]

they you get the hippies living in places that can only be described as torture with their no luxuries at all and the hard labor!

oh the horror! Living without...luxuries!

[Stronk Serb]

We aren't destroying species. Oh wait, I take that back, we destroyed the Spotted Oil. (Sarcasm, look it up. The tree huggers were screaming because the Spotted Owl was going extinct, and they thought it was because of humans. So they essentially shut down the logging industry in the northwest and created hundred of ghost towns and killed millions of jobs. Decades later, we found out it was being killed off by another kind of owl and not humans. To my knowledge, the idiot extremists never apologized for ruining so many lives.)

I reiterate: Would you really prefer to live in a hut making $500 bucks a year as long as you had clean air? If we're rich, we can invent things to combat emviremental problems.

That is one species that we did not exterminate, how about the Falkland Fox, the lions, they were all across North Africa, the Romans purged them, the elephants, the rhinos which are on the verge of extinction, the tigers also. By destroying species and their habitats, we cause large damage to ecosystems. Who said anything about living in a hut? Just make cleaner ways of production, transport and also start relying on new power sources, and perfect the current less-polluting ones too. By perfecting nuclear power usage, we can stop relying on coal and oil, and by perfecting nuclear waste disposal, we make a yet cleaner environment, hell, if mining and engineering technologies go up, we might have nuclear-powered cars and rotor planes.

[Cpt_Cutter]

"So it doesn't matter if we're living in huts as long as the air is clean? Give me a break! If we have a strong economy, we can find and fund solutions to the problems that may come our way."

You just used that logic. Just let that sink in for a second. Now imagine this. *ahem* "OH GOD EVERYBODY THE RUSSIANS JUST LAUNCHED THEIR NUKES AND WE'VE GOT NO DEFENSES FOR IT BECAUSE THEY SAID THE THREAT WAS "MOSTLY EXADURATED" "IT'S OK TOM, WE'VE GOT SUCH A STRONG ECONOMY WE CAN BRIBE THE MISSILES TO CRASH AND FUND THEM OUT OF THE SKY"

That is the exact logic you just used, and guess what? It doesn't work. At all. If you have a problem that you haven't prepared for for the entirety of the time you had to do so, it doesn't matter how much money you have, you're still that many more years behind on research, and that much further up S**t creek. Money cant change that, no matter how much you throw. :)

[darthearth]

I was finally able to read most of the report and found that it was lacking in rebutting the evidence for climate change. Such as, Antarctic sea ice is increasing but the reasons for this is not necessarily that the climate is cooling. Stuff like that. They also failed to effectively counter defenses of the infamous "hockey stick". Basically the report was a rehash of previous arguments that have been addressed, failing to successfully challenge the rebuttals.

It wasn't just leaked information from the IPCC (it was from the NIPCC, a conservative counter to the IPCC), it was associated with the conservative Heartland Institute.

But even though I acknowledge climate change I question whether warmer temperatures are really going to have the magnitude of negative impact suggested by some. (Coasts are affected? Move inland. Oh, sorry about your extravagant beach house) I find myself lacking the emotional urgency of it all. I think regulations should be kept to a minimum and do not support government subsidies beyond select and disruptive R&D.

[Kasp]

Calling these people 'Tree Huggers' seems a bit derogatory