A glimpse of hell

[bemildred]

Santarem, Brazil - As the light plane banked left, the smell of smoke reached the cockpit. The landscape below was an ashen green, the sun above an orange glow behind sooty billows of gray.

The Amazon forest was burning, and it was more than a sign of human encroachment. It was also the sight and scent of a dangerous chemistry, of tons of carbon dioxide - transformed from wood and leaf - rising into an atmosphere already loaded with it.

In cooler confines some days later, at an international climate conference in Argentina, British scientists told of a different, slow-motion kind of chemistry in the tropical forest, one foreseen by supercomputers running intricately programmed models of global warming.

"In the Amazon, the vegetation dies back because there won't be enough rain," explained climatologist Vicky Pope, detailing one of the most sophisticated studies yet - by Britain's Hadley Centre - of what a warmer world would mean.

IOL

[Ripley]

1. Selfish America.

The international pact called the Kyoto Protocol, a limited first step in trying to control emissions, takes effect on February 16, though without participation of the United States, the biggest emitter; it maintains the emissions cutbacks would set back its economy too much.

Amazing how so many poor countries have the ability to take the long view and understand the serious consequences of global warming, yet the Richest nation on Earth doesn't give a shit.

America's exportation of greed is also killing the Amazon basin. Burger King clearcuts forests there in order to make more grazing lands for their outsourced cattle.

[RC]

2. The root of the problem is both

the extreme arrogance of the human species and our sheer numbers as we kill off most other life forms for our immediate needs without any thought for tomorrow.

The day of reckoning will all but wipe us out as the Earth adjusts and corrects the damage we are doing to it. We are the product of one correction and the coming correction will likely eliminate us from the gene pool.

[bemildred]

3. I prefer to think of it as stupidity.

While humans as individuals can be quite intelligent, all the evidence
suggests that in the mass they are dumb as rocks, amoebas, and pond scum.

[RC]

4. Me thinks you

insult rocks, amoebas and pond scum.
The rest of the animals, vegetables and mineral are not destroying their one and only habitat.

[bemildred]

5. Ah, but they have not the power.

We, unfortunately, do.

[RC]

6. Yes, unfortunately we do.