It is a mistake to conflate pollution with global warming. No one thinks pollution is a good thing. The lake you grew up with was polluted. Mankind producing CO2 is not pollution, it is mankind living.

We are carbon-based life forms. We emit CO2 in a variety of ways by the simple fact of our existence. Therefore the argument about CO2 is a matter of degree. It isn’t a case of yes or no regarding CO2, it’s actually how much is too much.

I happen to believe that the real reason the CO2 issue is being promulgated is because there is a basic hatred of mankind, of human life. In the movie “Matrix,” one of the agents is interrogating Morpheus. He says, “Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.”

These same people are inevitably pro-choice, pro euthanasia, and pro health care rationing under the guise of end-of-life counseling. They will stand up against the death penalty, but the only ones who end up on death row are, surprise, murderers.

I think the issue is really about being pro-death.

Ruminator: You began by improperly phrasing the question. The fact that nature can impact the environment is not a synonym for nature automatically “threatening” the environment. It’s true that nature can be said to “threaten” people at times (particularly if you are the one too close to an erupting volcano). But to say that nature (using volcanoes as an example) is a “threat” to the planet’s “environment” is silly. Volcanoes are an intrinsic part of the environment. [Had you used non-terrestrial examples like asteroids or sunspot activity/solar flairs, I guess you might call these an actual threat to the earth’s environment, since they are exogenous not intrinsic factors.]

Volcanoes can severely change the environment by making it warmer or colder. This may “threaten” some species, but others thrive in those conditions. The earth has been periodically much warmer and cooler than it is now throughout its history, which benefited certain species and not others. Volcanoes were in part responsible for this, just as they were in helping greater the conditions for greater or lesser oxygen levels in the environment. These changes didn’t “threaten” the “environment”, but instead impacted it, which lead to certain advantages/disadvantages.

Like I said earlier, every time I fart I produce methane, which goes into the environment. But you can take all of humanity’s farts, as well as the CO2 emitted from all the factories in the world, and even though this may seem like a large number, it begs a further series of questions/observations:

1. Exactly want is the cumulative effect of all the other non-human flatulence and C02-producing sources on the environment?

2. Even assuming that man’s impact is as significant as these natural sources, is CO2 really driving global warming [the world’s temperature has stabilized or fallen since the 1940s according to AGW’s own BS measuring system, even though industrial production has increased].

3. What is the world’s “normal” temperature (a necessary piece of the puzzle if we are to conclude that man is making things artificially hotter/colder).

4. Over what time is a trend actually established (50 years, 150 years, 500 years, 5000 years?)

5. What about the sun and other non-C02 producing sources that impact the environment?

6. Pollution is not “climate change”.

The fact is, the AGW “settled science consensus” is riddled with phony assumptions and manipulated data. There is no “honest effort” to explore man vs. nature’s role in the natural cycles of the earth. Man has been chosen as the culprit for “climate change” because there’s no grant money to alter sunspot activity or stop volcanoes from erupting.

You need to have a look at my latest article “The Myth of Man-Made Global Warming: Phase 4”

It’s an artificial distinction to exclude man from nature anyway. Man is a part of nature, and the effects of man’s presense, for better or worse, is no different than volcanos or any other faeature of nature.

Whenever “consensus science” posits that man is responsible, I like to point out the obvious things that are being downplayed (sunspots, volcanoes, etc.), in addition to the obvious flaws in collection data (no true world wide global temperature readings were possible until the space age, and 30 years is just as insufficient as 150 years to spot a “trend”), in addition to the motivations for focusing on man instead of nature as the culpret (research grants, other political agendas), as well as the phony assumptions that go into manufacturing a “consensus” that leads to “settled science”.

Every time I fart I impact the environment. Just don’t tell me we ought to focus on my methane production as the cause of anything when the natural world/sun are impacting it too.