Was watching a Smithsonian show about the planets in the solar system.
As I turned it on they were talking about Venus and speculating that at one time it had an atmosphere and was likely very earth like.
THAN THE SUN STARTED WARMING UP and it caused the planetary water to evaporate, carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere and it had increased volcanic activity causing the planet to die.
No cars, no humans, no Venal Warming.
Yet in the next sentence they blamed man for causing the same on earth.
Fucking retarded.
Venus went into a "runaway" greenhouse effect... Whether that's caused by nature or man, it's the cause. Venus is also close enough to the sun that liquid water does not exist on the surface of that planet, which is crucial for thermohaline circulation and cooling. Another critical thing it's missing is the early single cell lifeforms that essentially terraformed this planet making it suitable for complex life.
Plus think about this: it's not like we imported shit from outer space to fuck this place up, everything necessary was already here. Would you argue we couldn't fuck up the planet if we just threw all the oil taps open and let 'em run into the ocean? What if we did that since 1948? Saddam burning those oil wells, don't think that was bad for the planet?
See, in the end burning of fossil fuels is releasing all the carbon that was locked up eons ago by those simple lifeforms. Think of it this way: because of life on Earth, because of our proximity to the sun, because of liquid water, we avoided what happened to Venus. We had organisms that exchanged O2 for CO2 and methane. They locked this up inside their cell walls when they died. Now we release it all in few short years and you really believe nothing will happen?
So by turn, do you also think that it's just impossible for us to damage the planet? That it can take anything? If that's the case, why not let the rivers in Ohio keep burning, why clean 'em up? Why bother with superfund sites? Let's just teflon the fuck out of everything while we're at it too and bring back leaded fuel. While your'e at it, just go ahead and warm up your car and vent the exhaust in the house, not because of the environment but because of the holy dollar: this way you can stay warm, warm up your car AND save a few shekels on the heating bill. If you can vent your car outside ad infinitum, why can't you just warm your housie house a bit in the am? Because we apparently can't do any harm. Or maybe we can and just don't wanna look at it. It'd too costly or it's too life changing or it engenders you to one political party or another... It's our fucking planet and it transcends all this.
So yeah, all I get from what you said was that the shit necessary to ruin a planet is already there, only on Venus nature sped it up sans humans and on Earth the humans are the ones that are doing the speeding up. But since we're of nature, one could argue that all is the same except for the process.
I don't know, I sorta see it from a "Day the Earth Stood Still" viewpoint: this planet cannot be allowed to die so one species can live in relative comfort for a few centuries. The idea that it doesn't belong to us also sits high in my mind --the people that came before owed us like we owe the people that come after us. And all the flora and fauna.
We're at a tipping point, and if our technology doesn't doom us, it will have to save us. I just hope people don't wait to wake up on this one until it's too late.
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