What happened to the hole in the ozone layer?

But what if you didn't have to make that choice. The CFC episode shows when we work together we can do great things and achieve almost anything. We can't we build a world where we have wolves, sharks, polar bears and mosquitos and even capitalism if that turns out to be viable in a world where humans can thrive? I think we can if we choose to.

Are you saying we have to have one or the other - that humans can't thrive without destroying the ability of the Earth to provide life? Are we we that stuck in the current paradigm that we can't change our relations with the planet? That hardly sounds like the greatest creature ever made to me.

I think we can do better.

Man doesn't own anything. It is a gift to live a human life on this jewel of a planet. We evolved into this moment and have a choice what to do next.

You said yourself that this is a dynamic unstable planet. Conditions change all the time - it is what drives evolution. This can be taken from us at any time.

The vermin ruled this planet for billions of years. There is nothing to say that they will not again or that intelligent life cannot perish from this Earth from the folly of their own lack of imagination.

 

Man is just another creature among the riot of life that has paraded through the ages. Not even around a 1000 of the years the dinosaurs were around and yet besotten with the illusion that it is all about him and that he is the greatest thing ever!!!!! Was there ever anything so devoid of wonder and gratefulness than the conceit of pride?



Do you ever feel like a kid lost in the woods whistling in the dark. If you tell yourself these things do you think that will make them true?[/QUOTE]
They are not true because I say them, I say them because it’s true.

How many doom day scenarios have come true? Not one. Not even the one where the Killer bees were going destroy Man and his arrogance. Not even the one about the ants taking over the world. None. Not even the Day After and Soylent Green. Yet they keep pitching fear of doom and gloom—and I keep getting denied the 25th century of nuclear power turbine jets, nuclear fueled Deloreans, resorts on distant galaxies, private space travel, the end of cancer, and cloths that clean themselves. Go figure.

 

Accidents of nature’s are just that, accidents. Nature is neither creative nor destructive as a conscious choice. Nature is just what happens. Jets, spaceships, neonatal surgery—they don’t “just happen”; they require a creative mind, a human being. And that makes the human being life’s greatest expression of itself, and why it must be free to live in its own honor, by its own effort, for its own sake.

If the requirement of saving the planet and humanity is the enslavement of the creative mind, it won’t work, and hell is all that will be created.

 

[

Who talking about enslavement of the creative mind? I'm talking about freeing us from the destructive nature of our current system and creating a new way of relating to the Earth -our only home. The innovation and creativity in finding ways to clean up the planet and restore habitat could create a whole new cycle of economic activity and create thousands of jobs. Just by making our buildings more energy efficient and creating greenspace we could cut emissions drastically and just by innovating cleaner forms of energy such as hydrogen batteries and fusion we could change the world and lift millions out of poverty and climate desperation and halt the flood of refugees that are bound to come.

As Goldblum said in Jurrasic Park, (I'm paraphrasing) the lack of humility in the face of nature is simply astounding.

Let me put in to you another way. When I worked in labs, we used to plate E. coli on agar and then provide optimum conditions in regard to temperature, nutrition ect,. The course of growth is always the same. There is a period of rapid population growth on an exponential scale and then a plateau and after a certain period, the inevitably enter a decline where they have exhausted all nutrients on the plate and are drowning in their own filth and metabolic waste products. Here is what it looks like on a simple curve:



Guess what, the Earth has a carrying capacity and despite your claims of how magnificent, intelligent and wonderful we are, there is nothing to suggest we are any different than any other biological system in a closed environment ( Earth is not really closed but for human purposes it might as well be )

In fact you can see the same curve and exactly the same thing happening in the Earth - exponential growth until we exhaust resources and drown in our own filth. Now you say that anything we do to stop this course is enslavement of the human mind.

I disagree. I think if we can find a way to turn around the course we are on it will be humanities greatest achievement. Far greater than sending rockets to mars or inventing the internet.

What's stopping us? An economic system designed to reward unbelievable wealth to a few individuals and corporations with the power to extract wealth and resources at will while putting little or nothing back and an ethos of ignorance that tells us that greed and cruelty are the only way "free" people can relate to each other and the planet.

 

See, as I said, it’s not about the environment or ecology, it’s about the destruction of capitalism (free trade among free individuals) and the end of individual rights, and the enshrinement of socialism and the gang warfare as the new norm in order to feed the empty souls of the egoless.

As to CFCs—it’s is true that chlorine atoms break apart ozone molecules, but I’m strongly skeptical of any claims that the use of CFC’s will result in human extinction, or global warming, or a new Ice Age. “Could be’s” and “maybe’s” isn’t science, it’s conjecture, and not a very good guide for determining what actions to take.

BTW:
“In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus famously predicted that short-term gains in living standards would inevitably be undermined as human population growth outstripped food production, and thereby drive living standards back toward subsistence.“
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-malthus-predicted-1798-food-shortages/

Still waiting.

 

We did something about it.... thats why it didnt come true... jeebus people...

 

Except Malthus was talking about population growth...

 

They actually gave aerosol cans credit for that? Ha!

We owe Algore an awful lot. He gave us the internet!

 

Another thread pretending scientists are on a mission to destroy capitalism. I guess the iron lady was in on it too eh?

 

Uh...I remember we stopped using certain products en masse and before you knew it, the scientists were proven right.

 

Another one pretending environmentalism isn’t the new collectivism; another collectivist pretending that the end of capitalism isn’t the mission; another “hater of the good” pretending the enslavement of the individual to the state isn’t the final solution.

Reality will not “friend” you.

 

Except it’s human population creating and using the CFC’s—which are still be used today—and still releasing chlorine—and the Ozone is still here. What happened? Oh. DuPont created a different kind of CFC, HCFC, and eventually, HFC. Again, the capitalist in a quest of profit, solved a problem. The profit motive. Don’t you just love capitalism? I do.

Furthermore, what happens if there is too much Ozone? Increased respiratory irritations, leading to increased pneumonia, resulting in more deaths?

And isn’t ozone a greenhouse gas? Wouldn’t that increase global warming? Perhaps banning the CFC’s are contributing to global warming. Maybe it ought to be reversed.

Addition, how does anyone know what the ideal level of ozone is?

My point being: Doomsday predictions are never scientific, are never right, and are always used as emotional blackmail to feed the power-lusting politicians and bureaucrats, and to chain Prometheus to a rock to feed the vultures.

 

He was talking about population growth outstripping available resources not pollution. Nice try but no cigar. We are talking about scientists, not doomsday preppers.

 

Even the “iron lady” of capitalism disagrees. I guess she was a collectivist commie afterall

 

She did have a streak of altruism in her; though she was nearer to capitalism than Reagan.

Hmmm. Makes me think Tull. Are you...as thick as brick, or is obstinance just a dominate personality trait.

 

The Ozone layer was depleted by massive solar activity.
The Ozone layer where pressure is much less, allowing O, O2, and O3 to all exist simultaneously.
Protons from the sun interact with Earths oxygen rich atmosphere, creating an ever increasing quantity of water on the planet.
The sun is currently just past its solar minimum, where solar activity is at its lowest point.

 

These products, which are CFCs, are still being used worldwide. While it is true chlorine breaks apart Ozone, the logical chain to human extinction because we use air conditioning if chock full of missing links hidden by unfounded assumptions.

I suspect, as some others do, that the sun plays a lot stronger influence on earth's atmospheric workings than humans spraying on underarm deodorant.

 

Hmmm. I'd say the folly is in worshiping the earth and the sky afraid of the imagination of the human creativity, denigrating the skyscrapers and spaceships. The future belongs to those walking straight with eyes that fill the horizon of their vision with the dreams in their souls of what can be--not to the those bowing to Ra and Gaia in awe, but to those bowing to Apollo and Prometheus as a salute to the glory of what the human mind can do.

The Ideal Man:

 

Nah, you and Rand would have us believe that we cannot and should not change the destruction we are causing in habitats all over the world with unregulated extraction and no regulation on our waste products and that we should exhaust the ability of the planet to sustain life - all for the gross profit of a handful of billionaires and corporations who then condemn half the planet to living in poverty in ruined wastelands like Camden, New Jersey or parts of de-industialized Detroit.

No one is denigrating skyscrapers or spaceships. I am only suggesting that we innovate new and more efficient energy-conscious ways of building them and create new jobs and opportunities for private business to clean up the waste we leave behind and take care of the planet for future generations.

It is you who are condemning us to the slavery of gilded era inequality and blind subservience to power and wealth. That is what Ayn Rand represents - blind subservience!

It is you who are suggesting that we are nothing better that our basest instincts of greed and cruelty and that we should aspire to no more - how pitiful a proposition that humanity does not have the ability to innovate and change and that we are doomed to the same thing that always came before - probably to our own ruin.

No! As Abe said, I think there are better angels to our nature and that we just have to let go of failed ideology and crass greed to unlock the potential we have and that we are fully capable of living in harmony with this planet rather than exploitation until there is nothing left.

Why do you hate America, Starjet?

 

Hey, speaking of the ideal man, could you post some of the soft core port she wrote as Hedges was talking about? I just want to see if she is any better at that then science fiction.

 

Take it to the market, leave the government’s gun holstered, best wishes. The government never makes anything better, only worse.

 

As to America—sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing; but the altruistic/collectivist path we are on, I curse to hell.

Wherever there is capitalism, life thrives; wherever there isn’t, life whithers—South Korea vs North Korea—Venezuela vs Brazil—Cuba vs Florida—Hong Kong vs China—America vs Russia, and every other single nation that embraces socialism. They all become killing fields and cemeteries.

It’s not I who is hating America, it is those with one empty hand held out while the other is holding the government’s gun as they rob the productive, the creative, the producers, the living.

It’s not America’s fruit and plains, nor her mountains majesty that make her great, it is her freedoms that made her great—freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom to build, to create, to own property, to create wealth, to live the life one chooses, not to serve humanity, but to grow and flourish as a creative being.

If the choice is between serving the politician and his gun or the capitalist with his wallet, I’ll choose the capitalist every time. Why? Because capitalists posses the greatest virtue, the ability to make money; and politicians preach the greatest vice, sacrifice for the good of all.

 

Hmmm. Read We the Living—I’m sure you’ll enjoy Sasha’s and Irina’s last train ride, as well as Kira’s first intimacy—and the final act of the final chapter of Kira’s story is stunning in its simplicity and beauty.

 

Take it to the market, leave the government’s gun holstered, best wishes. The government never makes anything better, only worse.

So you propose slavery to market forces which we should be powerless in our slavery to controlregulate or improve on?

How did that work out in 2008? 1929? The panic of 1890?

Capitalism has had a good run but it's greatest eras of prosperity are when it is accompanied by strong social programs and good public policy to ,mitigate it's tendency to always centralize wealth and political power in the hands of a vanishing minority while leaving devastated industrial wastelands in it's wake just like those you see all over the post-industrial US and all the other places where capitalism extracted resources for creating fabulous wealth for a few corporations and individuals. The truth is, capitalists just don't like to clean up their messes - never have.

All those places you described have either been attacked by western forces such as Cambodia and Laos which directly led to Pol Pot taking power and killing fields, had brutal western backed dictators in place to ensure capitalist control of land and resources such as Cuba or are subject to sanctions because they do not toe the western corporate rules of conduct such as Venezuela.

Bolsonero is busy destroying the Amazon and stealing oborigianal lands and murdering them with vigilante death squads if they resist.

Some freedom.

But it is the workers who have increased productivity not the capitalists. Far from being creative, productive or producers, in many cases they live in extravegant wealth while the people who actually produce are having their portion of the pie pulled away from the table:

The freedom's you think you have are largely an illusion for a vast majority of the American public and the freedom's you describe are vanishing every day.

You and Rand think there is virtue in selfishness, greed and cruelty. How shallow and meaningless to acquire great wealth but have no moral compass or greater purpose.

The human spirit is so much more than this.

"The un-examined life is not worth living"
~Socrates

 

One bit of hyperbole deserves it.