@AC
Oh, it's amusing alright. I have at least one anti-fan. Truly died-in-the-wool hates-my-guts type. I suppose it's that part where I try to apply reason and logic to everything, worship at the alters of science, impartiality and objectivity and believe in the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. It pretty much makes me the socio-political inverse of a Tea Party member, some of which have taken a severe dislike.
So they aren’t downvoting a chemical reaction, they are downvoting me personally. There are all sorts of fairly innocuous comments which aren’t politically, religiously or socially charged which get downvoted simply because it’s me making them. Apparently I logiced so hard I grew a downvoting troll.
I simply cannot tell you how proud that makes me. It’s like wining at the Internet every single time I post a comment! The best part about the whole thing is that I don’t have to post lies, misinformation, slander, instinctualist/emotionalist nonsense or otherwise troll the readers and denizens of the various fora I take part in. Simply taking the time to research the subjects that interest me, developing a complex and nuanced belief system based on multiple sources of information and then posting my thoughts and insights is enough apparently to earn a cyber-downvote-stalker.
Every single time something like that occurs, I let out a deep laugh. People who do silly things like downvote a post that simply contains a chemical reaction do all the hard work of proving my points for me. I can only shake my head in wonder at the kinds of ignorance people in this world cling so passionately to.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH is the rallying cry of these people. Down with governments, intellectualism, science, reason and logic! They vote and they scream, riot and parade with their instincts, their emotions and the sense of morality handed down to them by their pastor. They don’t question the world around them, they don’t reason beyond the overwhelming belief system prevalent in the hive-mind with which they associate. It’s spectacular. It’s mind boggling. It’s more than a little bit terrifying.
It’s also amazing fodder for one of the books I am writing; one that is going quite well, actually. My editor loves it; the internet is a fantastic place to fundamentalism in all of its various forms – whether religious or not.
@The elephant in the room:
The release of CO2 – while a greenhouse gas – is actually a remarkably good thing in this case. Methane is hugely more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. It can do a lot of damage in a very short time and is something we have no method of actually coping with. For all the hubbub made by eco-fundamentalists about CO2, it really isn’t “the end of the world.”
When we as a society do actually start caring about climate change there are some fairly easy ways to deal with CO2. You plant an absolute ****load of trees, grow them largeish and then bury them. CO2 is the one greenhouse gas we actually can cope with, should we ever choose to.
Methane, OTOH, is completely outside our technological capability to cope with. It doesn’t stick around quite as long as CO2, but it does a lot more harm in the time it is present in the atmosphere. There are far worse things yet than methane, and frankly it is these that we should be concerned about curbing…not CO2. CO2 is a battle the eco-fundamentalists should have saved until much later.
Curbing our CO2 footprint impinges far too much on the lifestyles of certain people who simply are too self-focused to ever be concerned about it until the effects are right in front of them. Given that we can actually reverse CO2 damage, it would have been a far better choice to save that particular gem until much, much later. In the meantime, we could have focused our efforts on curbing the release of far more dangerous gasses into the atmosphere, and delayed global warming another 50 or so years. Enough time to pretty much run out of most of our easily-obtainable fossil fuels anyways, making the CO2 issue something we’d have to cope with out of necessity anyways.
Alas, we’re now too far down the rabbit hole to climb back out of it, and so we have a huge socio-political war on our hands: people who understand science and who choose to apply it to the world around them versus people who are terrified of either paying more for their creature comforts or being forced to give them up. All of which are helpfully exacerbated by the ever more fanatical (and ludicrously violent) political imagery used by all sides of pretty much any and every debate going.
So, long rant short…the CO2 thing, not such a big deal in the long run. Far worse if the methane had escaped. The consumption of all the oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico, OTOH, has proven to be catastrophic.