Re: Life Duty Death

Joseph Askew (
Mon, 18 Sep 1995 23:37:27 GMT

In article <> (Beese Erik William) writes:

>Yes but the world is in an equilibrium. Throw off that equilibrium by a
>little bit (as man has done) and you must face consequences. Such as:

It depends of course on the nature of the equilibrium. Some
are highly stable some aren't. But then I wouldn't want to
bore the less intellectually gifted with hard concepts like

>1) massive de forestation affecting earth's ability to cleanse atmoshere
> It is true that the rain forest is NOT our major supplier of O2
> but it IS our major cleanser for air.

No it is not. Or at least no one has shown it is. Water is
far more likely to be the major cleanser because bacteria
can more readily live in water. Not to mention most serious
pollutants are dissolvable in water and so end up there any
way rather than in trees.

> It is also true that the
> amount of pollution thrown up by Mt. Pinatubo is about equal to
> ALL of man's pollution efforts since the industrial revolution BUT

Nice to see some sense but of course you are still wrong. This
volcano did not put out large amounts of CO2, it did put out a
lot of chlorine and sulphur. You should be more specific.

>SINCE there is less cleansing of the atmosphere AND because MAN has added
>to the natural pollution count THEREFORE there is a problem.

This is total nonsense. It does not follow. It depends on
the natural capacity of the Earth to remove said chemicals.
It may well be that the capacity of the Earth is far greater
than either all the natural sources AND all man made sources
put together. Indeed the present evidence suggests it is.

>That problem
>is our lungs getting a lot of junk the and we as an organism don't need.

Really? More from the _National Enquirer_ school of
Environmental journalism? Your source for this is?
Name three types of "junk" we don't need as an organism.

>It is a problem of emergent properties. The whole is greater than the sum
>of th parts

Only greenie bullshit from what I can tell.

>2) Man has created MANY chemicals that nature does not create THEREFORE
>there is no balancing force or buffering layer that can help stop
>destruction (Ozone by CFC for example) again emergent properties.

Bullshit. Evolution at work. We now have bacteria that can
eat PVC. It does not follow that what we produce cannot be
removed, cleaned or buffered. Not to mention that the amounts
we make are miniscule against the sinks we have to dump them
in. The atmosphere for example and the seas.

>there is no defense/protection THEREFOR the problem is much greater than
>may previously be expected.

Another claim without a shred of evidence.

>get the picture?

The facts are that most of the chemicals that are highly
useful to us are also highly useful to other organisms and
so identical or similar chemicals are often found in nature.