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09/22/2005 09:02:45 AM · #1 |
I've moved a political post from the General discussion thread to here. If you have political comments on Hurricane Rita, please direct it here.
From user DanSig:
Originally posted by rgo:
Just tossing this out there...Anyone ever take a biblical reading into these recent disasters? Given the predominance of conservative thinking in the US these days, I think this is a question that begs to be asked.
Is America being punished for its sins? Consistent application of a literal reading of the bible when it comes to creationism, etc., should also be applied here, yes?
So for what sins are Americans being punished for now by the almighty? Plenty of examples from the bible of a mighty civilization getting retribution in the form of natural disasters.
same thing I was saying on another thread yesterday, but got censored by someone... I guess it's all in the way you say it, I think the USA is being punsihed for what they do to other countries (probably get censored for bringing up politics)
but still it's just a storm, it all depends where it hits how much the damage will be, in Asia and Africa it would cause catastrofic damage, houses are built with straws, leafs and mud, there would probably be nothing left, in USA it causes severe damage, most houses are built from wood, steel and glass, and a big portion will be destroyed, but still something left to rebuild, in Iceland we would suffer minor damage, the oldest houses would be damaged, but the newer houses (built after 1980) would probably get through the storm undamaged, unless hit by flying debris, the flood would affect the coastline, but we build on high ground, so water would have to raise more than 10 feet to cause damage, 50 feet to be serious damage.
and it would probably only take a few days to get everything working again after a storm like Rita !
-- end user DanSig |
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09/22/2005 09:11:12 AM · #2 |
From user rgo:
Just tossing this out there...Anyone ever take a biblical reading into these recent disasters? Given the predominance of conservative thinking in the US these days, I think this is a question that begs to be asked.
Is America being punished for its sins? Consistent application of a literal reading of the bible when it comes to creationism, etc., should also be applied here, yes?
So for what sins are Americans being punished for now by the almighty? Plenty of examples from the bible of a mighty civilization getting retribution in the form of natural disasters.
end user rgo
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09/22/2005 09:18:03 AM · #3 |
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read... [rolls eyes]
Yeah, I think I recall the "plague of hurricanes" being somewhere between the frogs and the locusts. Give me a break.
This is nature, people. Find something else to argue about. Worry about your own country or something. Sheesh.
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09/22/2005 09:24:17 AM · #4 |
Originally posted by laurielblack:
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read... [rolls eyes] |
I dunno... for me, the claim that Bush caused the Indian Ocean tsunami by detotating submarine-based nuclear weapons trumps this one as the most ridiculous. Not by much, though... |
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09/22/2005 09:25:05 AM · #5 |
Okay, if a natural disaster is God punishing a country for its sins, and the US is being punished for actions against other countries, then what can we make of the Tsunami that killed many more thousands and distroyed so much more? What was the sin of those countries? And what of AIDS (a different form of natural disaster) in Africa? And the earthquake in Turkey and mudslides in Mexico? If you are going to correlate one event to another (a natural disaster as an effect of a country's military action, which would be the cause) please make sure the pattern fits all instances. You have created a 'rule' where there are more exceptions than followers.
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09/22/2005 09:31:27 AM · #6 |
I believe that this is a sign Bush has lost the Mandate of Heaven. God is saying its time for him to go.
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09/22/2005 09:34:44 AM · #7 |
Originally posted by scalvert:
Originally posted by laurielblack:
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read... [rolls eyes] |
I dunno... for me, the claim that Bush caused the Indian Ocean tsunami by detotating submarine-based nuclear weapons trumps this one as the most ridiculous. Not by much, though... |
You're right...my bad! ;)
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09/22/2005 09:37:44 AM · #8 |
And what did the martians do to cause their climate to shift!
//mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/newsroom/20050920a.html
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09/22/2005 09:41:06 AM · #9 |
Personally, I'm waiting for someone to rant up about how Bush's reaction to this threat against his home state seems much more organized than how he handled the Louisiana landfall of Katrina... nver mind that it's just possible we LEARNED something from Katrina and that's galvanizing a more orderly reaction...
Robt.
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09/22/2005 11:04:12 AM · #10 |
| Isn't this similar to what the insane televangelists preach in the U.S.? Except they would claim the American people are being punished for being sinful and degenerate in their personal lives. What's really scary is that so many of their followers actually believe it. |
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09/22/2005 11:31:27 AM · #11 |
To all the folks confused over whether or not God is striking back at man from Katrina remember this:
Weather is unpredictable, so unpredictable (sometimes hitting with great force) that many cultures worshipped it as a GOD. |
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09/22/2005 11:52:34 AM · #12 |
this is nothing like a "natural" disaster, there's nothing natural about it, these increasingly stronger hurricanes and more frequent has nothing to do with nature, its man made.... not directly but indirectly, these hurricanes, the Asian tsunamis, and other weather related disasters are because of polution caused by man, and the USA refuses to take part in the Kyoto agreement on decreasing polution, so you just keep poluting more and you get more weather anomiles, here up north we hardly polute at all, all our energy is clean, no polution from powerplants, even our buses are being replaced by hydrogen powered buses, and we have only normal weather all year round, no disasters, mega storms, floods, drout, tsunamis, or anything related to polution changing the weather.
so clean up your country and air, and these storms will slowly disapear, stop thinking about a quick profit and start thinking long term, like most of the world !
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09/22/2005 11:54:54 AM · #13 |
| I won't comment on the religious implications, but I would like to make a couple of points. First hurricanes are a natural way for the earth to disipate heat. Even the anti-environmental set is now admitting that the world is warming. As this happens there will probably be more severe weather. I beg to question why the Bush administration backed out of the Kyoto Accord which has been the only world wide effort to stop global warming. Is Bush responsible for Katrina? Of copurse not, but his refusal to help solve the problem of global warming will probably make matters worse down the line. |
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09/22/2005 11:56:17 AM · #14 |
ok, with all the hurricane that we, USA, have been experiencing is overwhelming, so is the whole world under great weather systems that we don't even hear about. According to the Bible, the world has always been this way and it's decaying rather quickly and not only with weather systems that destroy our cities. Our magnetic field and gravity is decaying too. Again, referring to the Bible, these events are because of the Fall of Man and his sin.....this is deep and complication issue and they're are many resources and discussion about these Ideas. However, I don't believe that these hurricanes are penetrating the US because NOT just (our) sins, it all Mans sins......Just look at how we treat each other and the land that we live on...results have been from SIN...doing bad things...........it's world wide, just not the US alone....
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09/22/2005 12:00:37 PM · #15 |
Originally posted by bear_music:
Personally, I'm waiting for someone to rant up about how Bush's reaction to this threat against his home state seems much more organized than how he handled the Louisiana landfall of Katrina... nver mind that it's just possible we LEARNED something from Katrina and that's galvanizing a more orderly reaction...
Robt. |
yeah, I thought about that too....just waiting for the Press to start jumping to the point. However, I'm glad to know that we learned a few things from Katrina and then use better judgment againt and with Rita....
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09/22/2005 12:07:19 PM · #16 |
Why in the world is this reposted?
Makes me ill to see it again.
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09/22/2005 12:11:19 PM · #17 |
Originally posted by dustin03:
Our magnetic field and gravity is decaying too. |
There's plenty of (billions of years old) geologic evidence for the periodic reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, preceeded by a weakening. There's some evidence that the poles may be getting ready to reverse polarity soon.
I would love to hear about gravity weakenng -- I've never heard of any such thing, and can't thnk of a mechanism by which that could occur. Even though we are experts at converting the Earth's resources into pollutants and waste, their mass does not leave the Earth, and I don't think we've dissapated enough mass as heat to significantly affect the Earth's gravitational field. |
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09/22/2005 12:23:34 PM · #18 |
Originally posted by GeneralE:
Originally posted by dustin03:
Our magnetic field and gravity is decaying too. |
There's plenty of (billions of years old) geologic evidence for the periodic reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, preceeded by a weakening. There's some evidence that the poles may be getting ready to reverse polarity soon.
I would love to hear about gravity weakenng -- I've never heard of any such thing, and can't think of a mechanism by which that could occur. Even though we are experts at converting the Earth's resources into pollutants and waste, their mass does not leave the Earth, and I don't think we've dissipated enough mass as heat to significantly affect the Earth's gravitational field. |
Well, I've read about how the gravity is decaying. It made sense to me and saw how it could and can be. I'm not a scientist of any form so I can't really comment on a professional level. However, just reading some scientific data, I can only conclude my own opines about this...I just know that it it appears that the world is decaying as everything else, as the human body does from the cradle to the grave.
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09/22/2005 12:29:06 PM · #19 |
Originally posted by hyperfocal:
I won't comment on the religious implications, but I would like to make a couple of points. First hurricanes are a natural way for the earth to disipate heat. Even the anti-environmental set is now admitting that the world is warming. As this happens there will probably be more severe weather. I beg to question why the Bush administration backed out of the Kyoto Accord which has been the only world wide effort to stop global warming. Is Bush responsible for Katrina? Of copurse not, but his refusal to help solve the problem of global warming will probably make matters worse down the line. |
I agree. Hurricanes are a natural thing. Unfortunately, due to higher populations in higher target areas, we are going to have more loss of lives and property. The warmer climates are making these storms increase in power and with Bush not signing the Kyoto Accord isn't helping matters either. If we don't do something to offset the damage we are doing to our environment, we won't have one left that's safe for us to live in.
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09/22/2005 12:37:28 PM · #20 |
Originally posted by DanSig:
this is nothing like a "natural" disaster, there's nothing natural about it, these increasingly stronger hurricanes and more frequent has nothing to do with nature, its man made.... not directly but indirectly, these hurricanes, the Asian tsunamis, and other weather related disasters are because of polution caused by man, and the USA refuses to take part in the Kyoto agreement on decreasing polution, so you just keep poluting more and you get more weather anomiles, here up north we hardly polute at all, all our energy is clean, no polution from powerplants, even our buses are being replaced by hydrogen powered buses, and we have only normal weather all year round, no disasters, mega storms, floods, drout, tsunamis, or anything related to polution changing the weather.
so clean up your country and air, and these storms will slowly disapear, stop thinking about a quick profit and start thinking long term, like most of the world ! |
While your statement of the problem is excellent (global warming is a disturbing trend and man-made pollution is a major contributing factor which should be reined in) and while it is true that our government pulled out of the Kyoto Accord (which I don't udnerstand at all and consider indefensible), there's not a lot of logic in the rest of what you said.
For one thing, Iceland doesn't exist in a little bubble of its own, protected from the rest of the world's weather. Your "normal weather all year round" is not a direct offshoot of your admirably "clean green" approach to these issues as much as it is a function of your unusual position in relation to the prevailing high-altitude winds and ocean currents.
As to your hydrogen-powered buses, with the current state of hydrogen-power technology, it takes substantially MORE energy to produce hydrogen in a vehicle-useable form than it does to produce gasoline or diesel fuel. There's no such thing as a free lunch. One way or another energy is being expended to produce your fuel, anyone's fuel, and there's a price to be paid for that.
I suppose it is possible that in Iceland you are using geothermal energy to "crack" hydrogen and therefore are making it in a very clean manner, but globally this isn't the case. Most hydrogen that is produced in the world is produced by means of burning coal or natural gas to generate electricity. The equation is not particularly favorable to hydrogen, unfortunately, and many doubt that it ever will be.
In order to produce hydrogen from water one must break down extremely stable molecules by a process known as "electrolysis". This is a very energy-intensive process. It currently takes about 56 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce one kilogram of hydrogen. In the U.S. we have a large amount of coal that can be used to generate this electricity, for example, but coal-fired powerplants are only about 40% efficient, so we have to burn 140-odd kilowatt-hours of coal energy to net the useable 56 kilowatt-hours of electricity to generate that kilogram of hydrogen.
If the fuel cells in your buses were 100% efficient, you'd be able to get roughly 33 kilowatt-hours of energy from each kilogram of hydrogen, but the current state of the art allows only at best 70% efficiency from the fuel cell, so the energy yield per kilogram of hydrogen is around 23 kilowatt-hours.
Another problem is that enough hydrogen to produce as much energy as a gallon of gasoline takes up over 3,000 gallons of storage space at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. So to use hydrogen in vehicular applications we must COMPRESS it and STORE it under extremely high pressure, at6 least 4,000 psi (Honda's fuel cells run at 5,000 psi). The energy required to do that trimsd the energy yield of a kilogram of hydrogen to 17 or so kilowatt-hours. Liquefying hydrogen, the direction BMW is experimenting with, requires a whopping 40% of hydrogen's energy content.
Bottom line; using fuel cell technology, it takes 140 kilowatt-hours of coal to produce 17 kilowatt-hours of eelctricity from a fuel cell, an energy efficiency of only 12 percent in round figures. It's been calculated that it takes, on average, 0.46 kilowatt-hours of electricity to power a passenger vehicle for one mile. This means that if the entire U.S. vehicle fleet were running on hydrogen, we'd need 1.6 trillion kilowatt-hours of eelctricity from thise fuel cells. In round terms, this means we'd have to produce TWICE the energy from coal that we currently consume in gasoline. And the kicker is that the use of hydrogen-from-coal would produce a [i]2.7 fold increase in carbon emissions and the pollution that comes with them.
Even granting that not all of our hydrogen is made using coal power, even when you factor in the current mix of sources (natural gas, solar, hydro, nuclear, and wind power) we'd still be doubling our carbon output.
Crack hydrogen with clean renewable, hydro power? e'd have toincrease our hydro ouput by 15X to do that. Where can we build these dams, and at what cost to the environment? Photovoltaic cells? It currently takes around 7-8 years of onstant output for the cell to generate an amount of electrical power equal to what was expended in its construction.
And so forth and so on. It ain't that simple, Dan...
I guess this is a major digression though, LOL...
Robt.
Message edited by author 2005-09-22 12:39:42.
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09/22/2005 12:50:16 PM · #21 |
Originally posted by DanSig:
...we have only normal weather all year round, no disasters, mega storms, floods, drout, tsunamis, or anything related to polution changing the weather.
so clean up your country and air, and these storms will slowly disapear, stop thinking about a quick profit and start thinking long term, like most of the world ! |
As bear stated your weather isn't a direct offshot of your clean approach. How about you move your country to a different location where these natural disasters are more prone to happen like warm waters of the gulf or tropical areas where rain causes mud slides or places where the earth plates are more active and see how much your green approach helps the country.
Saying that you don't have disasters becuase you don't pollute is almost as silly as saying America is being punished for our sins. If I remember correctly God does not punish us for your sins, His son took this punishment for all of us.
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09/22/2005 12:52:43 PM · #22 |
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09/22/2005 12:54:24 PM · #23 |
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09/22/2005 01:08:25 PM · #24 |
Originally posted by DanSig:
this is nothing like a "natural" disaster, there's nothing natural about it, these increasingly stronger hurricanes and more frequent has nothing to do with nature, its man made.... not directly but indirectly, these hurricanes, the Asian tsunamis, and other weather related disasters are because of polution caused by man, and the USA refuses to take part in the Kyoto agreement on decreasing polution, so you just keep poluting more and you get more weather anomiles, here up north we hardly polute at all, all our energy is clean, no pollution from powerplants, even our buses are being replaced by hydrogen powered buses, and we have only normal weather all year round, no disasters, mega storms, floods, drout, tsunamis, or anything related to polution changing the weather.
so clean up your country and air, and these storms will slowly disapear, stop thinking about a quick profit and start thinking long term, like most of the world ! |
Dan, I'm sorry but you are being quite ignorant here. Get that gun away from your foot before you pull the trigger. Our country may not be like yours but that's why we don't all live in Iceland.
If you look at the history of the world, the temparature goes in cycles, as does the intensity of natural disasters. The dinosaurs were not at fault for whatever natural disaster caused their extinction, yet something of a huge magnitude happened that wipe out their entire species. I'm not saying that global pollution isn't a part of it, but it's not entirely the fault of the U.S. either.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is....don't tell our country what we're doing wrong, just be happy you live where you do and don't have to live with us world wreckers.
If you want to get into countries paying for their sins, then look at Africa, where government corruption is abound and in a much graver situation than this country. Focus on the rediculous famine they are going through.
edit...oh yean and to reiterate what bear said....Hydrogen is not more efficient for us right now, because to get hydrogen you must extract it from water, and how do you do that? By using traditional (coal, oil etc) energy source...and you burn more energy than you get to use from the hydrogen.
Message edited by author 2005-09-22 13:10:38. |
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09/22/2005 01:17:14 PM · #25 |
What Bear said regarding hydrogen. I don't agree with pulling out of the Kyoto Accord, but signing on isn't a magic pill that would clear up the environment overnight either. Tsunamis aren't related to weather, global warming or pollution- they're seismic events caused by natural shifts in the earth's crust, and Iceland is in no way immune. Any notion of the Earth's gravity decaying because of pollution is pure fiction. Gravity is determined by mass, so you'd have to jettison a measurable amount of Earth into space to affect it.
I don't think anyone can decisively claim that hurricanes are stronger than ever because of our actions, or that such disasters are some sort of supernatural punishment. Despite recent blockbusters, there are far more destructive earthquakes, tsunamis and other events in recorded history (the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in China may have killed over 500,000). The strongest Atlantic hurricane on record was in 1935... well before heavy industrialization would have affected the environment, and certainly before our current government's policies. Bear in mind that these records only date back to the late 1800's (with the inherent limitations of that era). There were no shortage of powerful hurricanes before then, and odds are that some of them were stronger than today's. Likewise, there is no shortage of geological evidence of far worse catastrophies (asteroid strikes, massive earthquakes, volcanoes and floods) that took place long before there were any humans to blame or punish.
Our acts upon the environment may create a more favorable climate for storms, but strong hurricanes existed before mankind could have an effect, and they will still occur long after we're gone. Yes, of course we should take better care of our planet, but even if all technology and pollution ceased today, there would still be natural disasters 100 years from now to blame on President Bush VII. |
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