[pablonite]

The Pacific garbage patch is like the outhouse for the world, just because there is a rather large turd floating around in the bowl without a flush knob doesn't mean people will stop using it.

It will be years before it overflows. Relax dude!

[timmac]

The Pacific garbage patch is like the outhouse for the world, just because there is a rather large turd floating around in the bowl without a flush knob doesn't mean people will stop using it.

It will be years before it overflows. Relax dude!

I don't think you have to wait years, it seems that plastic breaks down to micro size and fish eat it along with plankton, and it appears that the small micro plastic is everywhere now, check these clips out, its a bigger problem than you can see..


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en4XzfR0FE8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnUjTHB1lvM

[CherBear1983]

Every ocean has a garbage heap, the Pacific is just the biggest one.

[americandream]

Wait till the Chinese and Indian masses get to grips with disposable nappies and bottled water.

[Pretorian]

Wait till the Chinese and Indian masses get to grips with disposable nappies and bottled water.

Why wait?

[mcgowanjm]

Wait till the Chinese and Indian masses get to grips with disposable nappies and bottled water.

The vast amount of Chinese/Indians will look to eat their first meat,
besides rat. Then try to move up from there.

[Pretorian]

Less peope==more air
More people= more plastic

Why would anybody choose to have more plastic over more air?

[pablonite]

small micro plastic is everywhere now

Yeah, that's for sure! No worse than depleted uranium fragments in your backyard, or toxins in your drinking water, or pieces of 10,000 different cows in your hamburger, or...

It's a non issue as far as I am concerned, until someone can make a profit cleaning it up it will continue to swirl around in the bowl.

[Ludi]

It's a non issue as far as I am concerned

That's nice.

http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/

[americandream]

Why? You volunteering?

Less peope==more air
More people= more plastic

Why would anybody choose to have more plastic over more air?

[VMarcHart]

It's a non issue as far as I am concerned

That's nice.

He's only concerned with whether or not his mommy will make him a hot toddy tonight.

[pablonite]

It's a non issue as far as I am concerned

That's nice.

He's only concerned with whether or not his mommy will make him a hot toddy tonight.

Hi!

We've been through this before, I remember you have issues with your mother. Not much progress there eh?

[VMarcHart]

We've been through this before, I remember you have issues with your mother. Not much progress there eh?

I pick on you and YOUR relationship with your mother because you act like a kid who's still going through development.

You need to grow up pronto!

Should I dig your anit-gay posts?

[pablonite]

Should I dig your anit-gay posts?

Whatever turns you on but sorry if I offended you on a personal level at some point. Goodbye!

[dorlomin]

Link

At the time of the compilation of the "Domesday Book" in the late 11th century, vineyards were recorded in 46 places in southern England, from East Anglia through to modern-day Somerset. By the time Henry VIII ascended the throne there were 139 sizable vineyards in England and Wales - 11 of them owned by the Crown, 67 by noble families and 52 by the church.

So by the middle of the little ice age there were three times as many vinyards recorded as their were during the MWP.

HH Lamb Climate, history and the modern world

The occurrence in medieval York of the bug Heterogaster urticae (F.) whose typical habitat todays is on the stinging nettles in sunny locastions in the south of england, discovered by the city of York archaeological investigations to have been present in both the Middle Ages and Roman times, presumably indicates prevailing temperatrues higher than todays.

Heterogaster urticae

Found throughout southern Britain in open habitats, and recently recorded from the north (including Scotland), this bug often forms conspicuous aggregations on nettles, the hostplant. Adults overwinter, emerging and mating in the spring, during which the sexes may remain coupled together for several days. The new generation is complete from late summer onwards.

Just reading up in my spare time and thought I would share these titbits for the next time the MWP rears up with Enlgish vineyards.

Incedently Pepys, the famed London diarist notes drinking wine grown around London so that would be the 1660s.

[Ludi]

Just FYI, climates warm enough to grow some palm trees may be too cold to grow olives.

[Loki]

Anyway - The main reason I think man made global warming is a load of cobblers is the fact that ALL politicians are ramming it down our throats daily. Green this / that, Carbon trading / new taxes etc etc.

And NO POLITICIAN EVER mentions Peak Oil.

Gasmon

You should learn about climate science from climate scientists, not politicians.

[Ludi]

Anyway - The main reason I think man made global warming is a load of cobblers is the fact that ALL politicians are ramming it down our throats daily. Green this / that, Carbon trading / new taxes etc etc.

And NO POLITICIAN EVER mentions Peak Oil.

Gasmon

You should learn about climate science from climate scientists, not politicians.

NOT A POLITICIAN, I guess >>>>>> http://bartlett.house.gov/Issues/Issue/?IssueID=2057

'PEAK OIL

Oil and natural gas are not forever. They are finite resources. The U.S is relying upon countries that do not like us to sell us their oil. We are competing against other countries to buy oil, such as China, which is now the world’s #2 importer behind the United States. Increasing world demand and global peak oil, or stagnating production, means that oil prices will rise.

The end of cheap oil and natural gas is coming and coming fast. My hope is that more attention is going to be focused not only on the problem of global “Peak Oil”, but possible solutions to meet this challenge with the same drive and ingenuity our leaders and great minds put into getting a man to the moon.

To further this initiative, in 2005, I along with Rep. Tom Udall established the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus. I also introduced a House Resolution that expresses “the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States, in collaboration with other international allies, should establish an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency that was incorporated in the `Man on the Moon' project to address the inevitable challenges of `Peak Oil'.”'

[lper100km]

Peak Soil – rhymes with oil and paired with agrifuels.

As if there is not enough to worry about. None of this is recent news, but like peak oil, is beginning to escape the confines of the specialized media. I heard an extensive interview this morning on CBC radio dealing with this issue and referring to it as 'Peak Soil'.

Sustainability at present levels? Maybe, but not where we are headed.

Extract from http://stephenleahy.net/2008/09/14/peak ... al-crisis/

"No one knows how much food-producing land will be left by 2050, when another three billion people are expected to join the current global population of 6.5 billion. What we do know is that right now, 99 percent of human food calories come from the land. Global food production has kept pace with population growth thus far thanks chiefly to the extensive use of chemical fertilizers. But food production per acre of land is starting to decline, primarily due to loss of productive land and water shortages. The latter is often the result of soil erosion because soil and vegetation act as a sponge that holds and gradually releases water. And that soil erosion, in turn, is exacerbated by chemical farming practices that over time break down soil structure.
Add to these challenges climate change’s impact on soil erosion and the competition between growing food and producing biofuels, and it’s frightening to consider the challenge of feeding nine billion people when nearly one billion go hungry right now. Arnalds summarizes the challenge: More food will have to be produced within the next 50 years than during the last 10,000 years combined. “Securing food in many places will become a crisis of rapidly growing proportions.”

I'm sure there was no pun intended in the last comment.

Other Peak Soil references
http://www.energybulletin.net/52788
http://tinyurl.com/2frw9mp

Are we going to see an increasing number of reports directing attention to peaking in other natural resources?

[paimei01]

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915

Plato wrote of his country's farmlands:

What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man. . . . Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.

Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country's soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat's strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major “corrective” famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period. The incidence, however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an influx of new food to Europe.

Also see this book: http://www.scribd.com/doc/7829413/Danie ... My-Ishmael , page 24 for the entire story.