Did anyone happen to see on the news the other night about how 100+ nations got together and celebtrated signing the Kyoto Protocol? Well as part of their celebration they released one helium baloon for every nation that signed... fukn faggets, if they were *that* serious about environmental issues they wouldn't be littering the place with fukn baloons.

/rant

They may have used biodegradeable balloons.

Politicians sure know how to party.

Kyoto Clock

Kytoto protocol is about greenhaus gasses, not littering.

Any ballon will bio-degrade, eventually... but until it does the balloon will end up in the ocean then fade then look like a jellyfish and a turtle will eat it and die.

I wish I had a turtle to hug :o(

As suspect as the Kyoto protocol is hast, you would do far better if you were not getting your information from a Cato institute hack.

last edited by Rommel at 16:38:08 22/Feb/05

Kyoto does seem like a nice way for people to make money. Hope it actually stands up.. would be a shame to bulldose acres of bushland to plant pine forests only to find out your newly created carbon sink was no longer worth even $5 a tonne because China and India still hadn't joined and everyone realises it's a farce.

It's probably much cheaper to dump iron in the worlds oceans to reduce CO2 concentration than it is to reduce emissions. 1 tonne of iron dumped in the ocean will remove around 5000 - 50000 tones of carbon. Also, the oceans already remove 30 times as much carbon than trees do.

last edited by hast at 17:20:24 22/Feb/05

also we don't have to watch the ocean like we do trees they have to be looked after and what not.
that site is very interesting cheers man

Though they are still uncertain of the long-term impact upon the marine ecosystem if they were to do this on a large scale.

"hey man, what do you reckon would happen if we dump 10million tonnes of iron into the ocean?"

hahah no one will just give up huge amounts of iron to throw into the ocean.

^^ I have a commodore I can donate to the cause >: )

CO2 is only one greenhouse gas though.

The other thing is that by making these changes they are also stiffling further growth. Without this cap it might get to be an even faster rate of warming becuase it was allowed to continue to rise rather than just be lowered a tiny bit by our standards today.

I rekon Earth is boned already, it would take some extream events to set it right again.

And with the cap the world may still warm because
a) the cap wasn't enough -- kyoto isn't enough
b) the world is warming regardless of the CO2 levels

in either of those cases you may have destroyed one of our best chances of dealing with future warming.

personally i think we should mould the environment and not let the environment mould us. thats what sets man apart from beasts.

Unfortunatly nature proves to be a tough entity to mould. There is more power in nature then Humans have ever made. It is so complex that the worlds most powerful computers and brains only have a small grasp on how it works. We mould something here, something there gets changed. Also Humans and every other creature on the planet is what it is because of the environment, as much as you want to think otherwise, it moulds us.

personally i think we should mould the environment and not let the environment mould us. thats what sets man apart from beasts.

Technology can't save use forever. It has been helping us along nicely for many years in many aspects though.

Even if everysinglef***ingperson on the planet was absolutely environmentally friendly as possible, the globe simply cannot sustain the present population.

Do we go on without stressing? Or do we try and prolong human existence for a while longer by being smarter? Meh. In any case we are reasonably lucky being in the 1st world so we will never have to worry about resource shortages.

It'll keep going till the caps melt, the currents change, and after a hundred or so years, an Ice Age occurs and the world "reboots itself" so to speak.

And them pesky hoomans that helped it on its way will mostly die off.

problem with the globe 'rebooting' is PCB's, heavy metals, radioactive waste etc which doesn't just go away

the dumbest thing about the kyoto treaty is the way it is implemented with every country that signs having to cut thier emmissions by a set percentage. so if you are a filthy polutting third world country you can cut your overall emmissions by the set percentage, at very low cost, & still be producing more greenhouse gases than another country that already had emmission controls before the kyoto treaty. australia, for example, has federal laws about emmissions that pre-date the kyoto bs... so if we are to cut our already low emmissions it would cost a freakn fortune! whereas somewhere like malaysia can copy all the things we already do with our power stations, for a moderately low cost & achieve a huge percentage drop in emmissions.

greenies & conservationists are always blowing stuff out of proportion anyway. i remember my greenie uncle did his science degree specialising in enviromental studies. back in the late 70's he & his group of pinko commies told me & everyone else who would listen that by the year 2000 there would be a hole in the ozone layer at the south pole that reached africa, australia & south america. (WRONG!) they predicted that greenhouse gases would make for rampant global warming & a subsequent rise in the sea level & major coastal flooding in all countries. (WRONG!) they predicted that the methane in the amazon delta would melt & cause accelerated global warming. (WRONG!)

the MAJORITY of greenhouse gases come from tectonic plate movement, humans produce a piddling amount in comparison... greenies still bitch that it's that balanace that is effected by this piddling amount... i predict they are also wrong about that. without the greenhouse gases that are produced by tectonic plate movement the earth would suffer a period of wildly varying climates & then freeze solid.

you also forget when they predicted global cooling and mass starvation

But what if those balloons where filled with helium and ozone lol

Demon, you do realised had we continued to keep using CFCs at the rate we were we probably would have had a bigger hole in the ozone layer.

The amount of carbon put out into the atmosphere pre-human activity was balanced (something like 6 gigatons of carbon is emitted naturally) and the trees etc absorbed all of that.
But because of humans, even though we aren't putting that much carbon out into the atmosphere, the rate of absorption is less than the rate of overall carbon output. So, over the years its accumulated and now its caused global warming through the greenhouse effect. It has actually started increasing rapidly because we have started putting out more gas and third world countries that had previously not been burning stuff have begun to industrialize themselves.
In saying that however, the US is still the largest emitter of carbon into the atmosphere per capita.

i realise that some models predicted that a droppoff in cfc use would decrease the expansion of the hole in the ozone layer... however in the late 80's these models were proven to be incorrect. who'd have thought it! the hole in the ozone layer started shrinking before the decrease in cfc's could possibly have affected it... & then years later it started growing again... well after cfc use had been minimised.
sure the people of the earth are putting out more greenhouse gases than ever before... but even one volcanic eruption eclipses that & the earth has no problems at 'balancing' it. if this 'rapid growth' model is still the case in another 10years i might lend it some credence... till then its just another prediction model that only really proves one thing.. prediction models on complex systems are highly unlikely to be correct.

still!... i am all for cutting down on pollution! & i know the yanks dont take it very seriously at all. i just dont like things like the kyoto bs because it punishs countries that already have anti-polluting policy. if it were done purely on an emmission / capita basis you would hear no complaints from me.

But there's really too many variables to consider when you think about it...


More population could change emissions. The need for more paper (and tree lopping) could also have contributed. So there's a few factors you gotta keep in mind when you say that cutting back on CFC emmissions aren't particularly effective.


I say all the countries should pool together and create some sort of solar powered ozone generator/cannon that directly fires ozone into the holes of the atmosphere :P