Re: Creationists Don't Like Other Sciences, Either

On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 18:00:32 GMT, Mark Isaak <eciton@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

>On Thu, 18 Jan 2007 22:05:27 +0000, Luminoso wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 19:44:34 GMT, Mark Isaak <eciton@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>>On Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:48:30 +0000, Luminoso wrote:
>>>
>>>>>Sure, after a few thousand years our environment may settle into a
new
>>>>>balance - but the question is "can man survive the change?" Maybe,
but I
>>>>>doubt civilization will.
>>>> 
>>>>    Both will survive quite nicely, although I doubt there will be the
>>>>    same line-up of nations after a few thousand years. 'Eternal
empires'
>>>>    have risen and crumbled in less time than that.
>>>> 
>>>>    People can survive tropical temperatures just fine. The main
concern
>>>>    is the food. 'Traditional' foods may have to be forgotten in favor
of
>>>>    tropical varieties.
>>>[snip more along the same lines]
>>>
>>>A common theme in flood myths around the world (and in other disaster
>>>myths, too) is that when one person warns of the coming catastrophe,
>>>almsot nobody listens.  Or they say, "Oh, we can just run to higher
ground
>>>when it happens."  Those people invariably die in the flood.
>> 
>>    Well, this 'flood' is ru****ng at us at about one or two
>>    millimeters per year. If you can't run to higher ground
>>    that fast, well, Darwin isn't very forgiving. 
>
>Boy, are you in denial.

   I get this picture of you in your living-room wearing water-wings
   and flippers just WAITING for that big wave to wash over your city
   any moment now ...  :-) 

   Did you ever meet people who belonged to the John Birch Society ?
   They essentially sat in their basements, surrounded by arms, just
   SURE the red horde would come racing over the hill at any moment
   to convert their children to godless communism ... very much the
   vision depicted in the 'Red Dawn' movie. 

   Amusing to see how the ultra-conservative JBS paranoids and the
   ultra-liberal Al Gore Society paranoids are so much alike  :-)

>>>This happens not only in myth.  People had been warning New Orleans of
>>>their coming flood for decades.  A very few people listened and moved
>>>away; others had their homes, if not their lives, destroyed.  The same
>>>scenario is currenly being replayed around the Sacramento delta.
>> 
>>    Actually, MOST people left New Orleans before the storm hit.
>>    Most of the remaining 50-odd thousand might have evacuated
>>    had city and state authorities heeded the warnings from the
>>    hurricane center a couple of days sooner. Of course big storms
>>    so rarely hit 'just right' that officials hesitated to disrupt
>>    everything over yet another false alarm ... 
>> 
>>    The doofi who live on flood plains or muddy hillsides are
>>    a mix of cases. Some clearly ARE doofi in denial, stubborn
>>    idiots who think they can wish nature away. Many are simply
>>    poor and cannot relocate. Identified as a flood plain, even
>>    their land isn't worth much. So they stay ...
>
>Yes, they are just like you.

   Ah, so you're psychic too ... able to do detailed psychoanalysis
   at a distance ! You should have a TV show, right after John 
   Edwards' speaking-to-dead-people show. 

>>>Now the people in a position to know are unanimous in warning of
>>>catastrophe.
>> 
>>    Actually, that makes me suspicious rather than confident.
>>    Has the smell of mass hysteria and political correctness.
>
>If they were saying, "We know it's true because we know it's true," then
I
>would agree with you.  But they are saying, "Look at all this data.  This
>can only lead to one conclusion."  Have you looked at the raw data?  Do
>you know enough meteorology to evaluate it?  (Don't bother answering that
>last question; I already know the answer.)

   There has been tons of 'data' ... so much that it's hard to
   sort out, hard to tell the good from the bad too. Extremists
   often 'factoid' the opposition to death. I'll have to look
   up a 17th century manual on all the ways you know witches 
   exist, what evils they do and how to find the satanic culprits.
   I'm sure they had a a mountain of data too ... 

>>>Sea levels will rise to displace hundreds of millions of
>>>people (most of whom, following the pattern described above, will not
>>>leave in time).
>> 
>>    They will be 'displaced', but VERY slowly. Modern structures
>>    aren't even built to last that long - 50 years or so before
>>    someone tears them down, often less. We'll just build-back
>>    from the sea as the sea, very very slowly, rises. 
>> 
>>>Hurricanes will very likely increase in severity.
>> 
>>    No proof of that. Hurricanes are heat engines, needing
>>    both a heat source and heat sink in order to function.
>>    uniformly increasing air and sea temperatures yeilds
>>    no net change in the thermodynamic equation. 
>
>And what does that have to do with reality?

   That's pure science laddie ... thermodynamics 101. 

   Actually, if the air and sea temperatures become more
   similar you won't get any hurricanes at all. You need
   a hot steamy ocean and a cold dry stratosphere to form
   the necessary temperature differential required to drive
   the 'engine'. 

   Could it be that YOU are willing to ignore scientific facts
   if they don't fit your global-warming panic theme ??? 

>>>Climates will change rapidly enough to cause mass extinctions. 
>> 
>>    Nothing new there. We've had those many times 'recently',
>>    every time an ice-age starts or ends. Large-scale extinctions
>>    happen all of the time on relatively small timescales because
>>    of random alterations in microhabitats, screwing-over the
>>    life that optimized itself to exploit those habitats. The
>>    term is 'overspecialization'. Note that rats and roaches
>>    were never affected. They're unspecialized, just like us.
>
>So you admit the effects with be globally catastrophic, you just happen
to
>think that global catastrophes are nothing to be concerned about.

   I'm not very concerned because there won't be a 'catastrophe',
   merely a ****ft in species dominance and range. If 2000 species
   of beetles disappear, I really don't care. They will eventually
   be replaced by 3000 new species. 

>>>Extremes
>>>of both hot and cold, wet and dry, will increase.  Climate patterns
which
>>>farmers depend on will change in ways that they will not predict, and
>>>people will starve.
>> 
>>    Gee, you act as if it's all going to descend with a big bang.
>> 
>>    Nope. Not even close. Indeed, individually, we'll bareely
>>    notice a difference even over a lifetime. 
>
>People have already noticed differences.  Major, life-changing
>differences.

   People THINK they notice a difference - but all they're seeing
   is random variation within boundaries well established by 
   history. There have been long warm periods and long cold periods
   just within the last 1000 years or so and short-term weather can
   be just about anything, 'records' are constantly broken. 

>>>Now here you are saying the equivalent of, "Oh, we can just run to
higher
>>>ground when it happens."  Well, suit yourself.  I happen to agree with
you
>>>that some people, and some civilization will survive.  The survivors
will
>>>be the ones who begin preparing now.  You will not be one of them.
>> 
>>    If you want to join the sheep, go ahead. Personally
>>    I'll refrain from following you all over any cliffs ...
>
>Everything you have written sup****ts my main point.  Thank you for your
>response.

   Everything you have written sup****ts my main point. Thank you for
   your responses.