How to Combat Anti-Climate Change Fools

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
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[quote]Da Man reloaded wrote:

[quote]lucasa wrote:

[quote]drunkpig wrote:

LOL. You have no clue how anhydrous is even made, do you? Or even it’s chemical make up. NH3. That’s your “oil in the soil”? I live around farms, and I’ve never seen anyone oiling their fields.[/quote]

This stance against anhydrous, to me, is the hallmark of someone who has no clue about farming or food production and possibly even biology in general (I doubly love the one’s that buy into the myth of “sustainable coffee”). If you don’t understand why anhydrous is used and have never worked with it (or why coffee can never be sustainable) and say we can produce food without it, you don’t realize that you’re effectively saying that we could just as easily get into space without solid-fuel aluminum/perchlorate boosters and go back to using plain old lift-based flight.

Like we never tried manure and decided to pick the biologically compatible equivalent of mustard gas for shits and giggles.
[/quote]
plants can be grown without anhydrous, though. I have some in my back yard.

and crop rotation was practiced for only god knows how long.

are you saying that food cant be produced on the scale we need it without anhydrous? or seriously saying plants will not grow at all without it?

and before you go there, i am not a tree hugger that likes to spout off about ‘locally grown/locally sourced’ and smells my own farts.

it is an honest question[/quote]

i think there was some gmo talk earlier. i am against them for 1 reason - complete and utter lack of data.

may be perfectly fine, may be the poison that kills us all. There is ZERO data.

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[quote]Da Man reloaded wrote:

are you saying that food cant be produced on the scale we need it without anhydrous?

it is an honest question[/quote]

I won’t say it’s not a genuine question, but it is pretty easily dispelled on an anecdotal level. The plants growing in your backyard right now are predominantly the noxious variety and you’ll have to rid your back yard of them if you want to grow anything even remotely worth eating you probably don’t care if they’re growing at 10% of their nominal capacity or less.

I meant what I said on a couple of levels. First, if you could just use manure (or lift in the case of flight or space travel) why on Earth would a sane person choose anhydrous (or solid-rocket fuel)? I mean, farmers have been vaporizing themselves and their surrounding villages with ammonium nitrate for over a century, if manure could do the job, then the use of hazardous compounds like ammonium nitrate begs the question, “Why?”. It would be like saying, “You know, my refrigerator holds temperature levels too reliably cool, offers no chance of suffocating me or burning me and is too cost and labor effective, I should refrigerate all my food with dry ice.” The only reason you use dry ice is because it does something your refrigerator can’t. If you buy that we could feed the world using manure or organically-originated fertilizers, the only explanation on this level is that all these farmers are oil-hungry morons with death-wishes who haven’t yet found a better way to make money and and suffocate or blow themselves up.

You would only cling to methods like that until a better one came along. On the other level, yes, without anhydrous or mineral nitrates, it’s impossible to farm productively enough. Try it. You can certainly get the plants to grow without it, but to grow enough of the right kinds of plants and to do it repeatedly, season after season, or even several times a season you will need distilled or mined chemicals. The whole “Nitrogen from oil” B.S. ignores parts of history where people actually were producing “Food from oil” (we even handed out a UNESCO prize for it). Yes, we are tied to oil for our food. We’re constantly getting better at being so. Organic farming is doing a great job of consuming more work, land, water, sunlight, and time to liberate us from the oppression of oil. Once we can generate nitrogen cheaply and easily from nuclear power or a solar reactor, we’ll still use that rather than switching to organic farming.

323

[quote]Da Man reloaded wrote:

i think there was some gmo talk earlier. i am against them for 1 reason - complete and utter lack of data.

may be perfectly fine, may be the poison that kills us all. There is ZERO data.[/quote]

Incorrect, possibly millions of years of data. We’ve been selectively cross-breeding plants for genetic traits since before we knew plants had genes that we could selectively cross-breed for. Plants themselves have been doing it longer. We we’ve been doing f*cked up and much more dangerous stuff with agricultural genetics for quite a long time.

There’s more data supporting the safety of GMOs than there is supporting the idea that organic foods and farming methods are healthier and more productive than conventional farming. Quite the opposite, no one can even be suggestively demonstrated to have been killed by GMOs, but people have, rather conclusively, died from consuming organic produce because of the way it was produced, repeatedly.

EDIT: And please don’t be one of those zealous retards that wants to demand a greater level of scrutiny for GMO foods than they demand for their conventional foods. The type that is okay with dying because of natural means but somehow see death from synthetic products as some sort of sin, like consuming pork or eating meat during Lent.

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[quote]Da Man reloaded wrote:
plants can be grown without anhydrous, though. I have some in my back yard.[/quote]

Anhydrous Ammonia is nitrogen - that’s all it is. Plants have no need for anhydrous (NH3). But NH3 provides a bio-available source of nitrogen in the soil. Along with phosphorus and potassium, nitrogen is a mineral that is not usually returned to the soil.

That’s not all that big of a deal if you just have some grass and a few bushes in your back yard. But - If you’ve fertilized your yard in the last 5 years, you have introduced harsher chemicals to your property than anhydrous.

Crop rotation hasn’t died, it’s just not all that efficient, and the mere act of rotating a crop is not going to do anything for the soil profile unless you are rotating with nitrogen fixing crops, or crops which produce more nitrogen than they consume, and therefore increase the amount of nitrogen in the soil.

Commercial farming is all about efficiency. If a farmer can achieve the same results as rotating crops with an application of anhydrous, potassium and phosphorus, there is no real reason to sit out every third corn season to grow peanuts, or alfalfa, or soybeans.

I must confess that I am not familiar with soybeans, as they are not grown in my area.

Using anhydrous is the most efficient way of introducing nitrogen to the soil. Nothing can grow without nitrogen. Without nitrogen, you can’t have protein. There is nitrogen in just about every soil in the world. But in many areas, there is not enough to grow crops efficiently.

[quote]and before you go there, i am not a tree hugger that likes to spout off about ‘locally grown/locally sourced’ and smells my own farts.

it is an honest question[/quote]

Most people have no clue where their food comes from, much less know how it is produced. The notion of sustainable farming is about as laughable as the notion of a humane slaughtering plant. Neither one of them exist.

325

[quote]Da Man reloaded wrote:

i think there was some gmo talk earlier. i am against them for 1 reason - complete and utter lack of data.

may be perfectly fine, may be the poison that kills us all. There is ZERO data.[/quote]

Not to beat the dead horse, as Lucasa has already answered this, but GMO is a contrived, politically correct, progressive pile of donkey dung.

Humans have been genetically modifying their grains, their meat, their draft animals, and even themselves way before Mendel started playing with peas. Even the organic farming freaks use genetically modified seed, and they will breed up their meat animals to be more efficient on grass-only diets.

WHether it’s done in a laboratory, or done in the farmer’s fields and breeding pastures, genetic modification has been going on since we stopped hunting and gathering.

326

[quote]drunkpig wrote:

I must confess that I am not familiar with soybeans, as they are not grown in my area.[/quote]

It’s not uncommon in the Midwest to rotate soy in every other or third crop specifically for “rotation purposes”, and by “rotation purposes”, I mean that corn and wheat can’t always be the most valuable grain. It’s not uncommon to see a field of alfalfa or clover. Even with rotations, added nitrates still increase yields. There is a tendency not to fertilize clover or alfalfa, but cash crops like wheat, corn, and soy almost always get fertilized.

Saying farmers will put down anhydrous for soybeans should pretty well explain the whole ‘organic’ situation.

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LOL. Some butt hurt farmers in this thread.

Even funnier that I got called a progressive.

Go and show me anywhere where I said anything was healthier or better. I didn’t. My official stance is that no body fucking knows. Nobody in this thread knows the ultimate consequences of modern farming, GMOs, synthetic fertilizers, and the like. To do a fully controlled study on one single aspect of it would take decades and be astronomical in cost. Much less trying to do fully controlled studies on conjunctions of thousands of chemicals over long periods of time.

Anyone that says otherwise is full of shit. People vastly overrate the ability of science, industry, and government to understand astronomically complex systems.

The absolute best way to guess at what is or isn’t okay is what we evolved eating, and that doesn’t include any farming.

I am not saying organic is a solution. I’m not saying I know a solution. I’m saying preaching the wonders and miracles of modern farming is bullshit. Yes, the industry has done all kinds of cool gene manipulation, figured out a ridiculously cheap way to produce calories, and saved a bunch of people from starving. They may also be largely responsible killing people with cancer. DDT saved a lot of people from malaria and won a guy a nobel prize. And if this were the 50s, the same people would be on here praising the wonders of DDT and posting stuff like “all indications are it is perfectly healthy”. Same could be said of a thousand other modern wonders and innovations from hydrogenated oils to beta-carotene supplements. It’s an amazing wonder right up until it’s absolutely proven that it kills people, and sometimes still even then.

The fact is, farming is an industry that runs on fossil fuel. As such, even if there were no other negative effects, it isn’t sustainable.

And in all the bitching about what I said, no one actually contradicted any factual information I gave. Basically all I’m saying is that talking about how awesome modern farming is is really liking the smell of your own fart. Especially when that same person is talking about how organic farming is a good way to die. The same people that say GMOs are safe say organic farming is safe FYI.

I fart too. I’ve eaten my share of grains. I eat monsanto products. My car runs on oil. But I do acknowledge it all smells like fart.

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Not sure if already mentioned but Michael Crichton’s State of Fear is a fun, fast-paced tale revolving around this topic.

And from what I recall, one of his not-so-subtle points was the arrogance involved in thinking we’re actually capable of “fixing” such a thing.

edit - ok, looks like that’s already been well covered

330

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
LOL. Some butt hurt farmers in this thread.[/quote]

I’m not a farmer. I just abhor the level of ignorance you so proudly display.

Your official stance was that farmers put oil into the soil, which is an outright lie. Anything after that is merely you trying to out lie the first lie.

No one has argued that. Do you run around fighting imaginary windmills every time you have been proven a liar?

So we should eat only that which we can kill or gather? Somebody’s taking the paleo thing a bit too far. Please point to period of time when humans reached their zenith, and stopped evolving. I was under the idiotic impression that we are still evolving.

More people have died from malaria since DDT was banned than have died from cancer supposedly caused by DDT. You spout ignorance as if it is fact.

The entirety of North America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim run on fossil fuel. Sustainability is a subjective term. You have no proof that it is unsustainable. But then again, you seem to use untruth as if it were gospel.

You gave very little factual information to contradict. I called you out on a lie. And you’re still lying.

Then you’ve never been near a field that has recently been treated with cow manure.

331

[quote]drunkpig wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
LOL. Some butt hurt farmers in this thread.[/quote]

I’m not a farmer. I just abhor the level of ignorance you so proudly display.

Your official stance was that farmers put oil into the soil, which is an outright lie. Anything after that is merely you trying to out lie the first lie.

[/quote]

No, that fossil fuel is required to generate the cheap synthetic fertilizer modern farming runs on. Which is a fact.

Okay, my bad. If you guys are claiming that no one really knows the impact of modern farming practices, I agree.

Basically, yes. And no, we’ve probably not made and significant evolutionary changes in the last .1% of our existence. In terms of evolution, farming is the blink of an eye. Nor am I saying that it isn’t possible to be healthy in agriculturally based world. I’m saying that you can’t really know, but what we did for 6+ million years is probably the safest bet.

Actually, not ignorance, you again didn’t read what was written. I specifically was pointing out that DDT saved a bunch of people. No where did I say DDT gave anyone cancer. Nor did I say it hurt more people than it helped.

So, you think we should still be using DDT? Would you let your pregnant wife handle it? Would you put it on your food?

I agree, pretty much everything runs on fossil fuel. Doesn’t change how farming works. And no sustainable is pretty objective, projections of what is or isn’t sustainable can be subjective.

Proof? Fossil fuels are limited.

LOL. I live on a cow and sheep farm. My driveway runs through a pasture. But again, for not reading what I wrote, I said, “it all smells like fart”. “All” includes organics.

But you guys keep spreading the unbiased truth to us ignorants about how organics are deadly.

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[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

No, that fossil fuel is required to generate the cheap synthetic fertilizer modern farming runs on. Which is a fact.[/quote]

Fossil fuel doesn’t ‘generate’ fertilizer. NatGas is used to produce NH3. You said farmers put oil into the soil, which is an outright lie. In your flare for the melodrama, you left the truth sitting on the curb.

[quote]
Okay, my bad. If you guys are claiming that no one really knows the impact of modern farming practices, I agree.[/quote]

By your own logic, no one knows the impact of any type of farming.

[quote]
Basically, yes. And no, we’ve probably not made and significant evolutionary changes in the last .1% of our existence. In terms of evolution, farming is the blink of an eye. Nor am I saying that it isn’t possible to be healthy in agriculturally based world. I’m saying that you can’t really know, but what we did for 6+ million years is probably the safest bet.[/quote]

What would be significant in your world? Sorry, but the notion that it is healthier for us to eat what the cavemen ate may sell a lot of books and motivate a lot of people to change their bad eating habits, but using it as factual support in a debate? Even you can do better than that.

Yes. I think we should still be using DDT. It works. Bringing back some of the pesticides and herbicides that the EPA and FDA banned would loosen the hold that companies like Monsanto have on ag production.

Would you force your wife to live by a stagnant pond all summer?

[quote]I agree, pretty much everything runs on fossil fuel. Doesn’t change how farming works. And no sustainable is pretty objective, projections of what is or isn’t sustainable can be subjective.

Proof? Fossil fuels are limited.[/quote]

Your proof is a line of peak oil bullshit? Try again.

[quote]
But you guys keep spreading the unbiased truth to us ignorants about how organics are deadly.[/quote]

Organic farming is not a viable competitor with commercial farming on any level. The ignorance isn’t that a person prefers organic to commercial. The ignorance is what you displayed. The half-truths and outright lies are not the arsenal of one with a defensible position.

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[quote]lucasa wrote:

[quote]Da Man reloaded wrote:

are you saying that food cant be produced on the scale we need it without anhydrous?

it is an honest question[/quote]

I won’t say it’s not a genuine question, but it is pretty easily dispelled on an anecdotal level. The plants growing in your backyard right now are predominantly the noxious variety and you’ll have to rid your back yard of them if you want to grow anything even remotely worth eating you probably don’t care if they’re growing at 10% of their nominal capacity or less.

I meant what I said on a couple of levels. First, if you could just use manure (or lift in the case of flight or space travel) why on Earth would a sane person choose anhydrous (or solid-rocket fuel)? I mean, farmers have been vaporizing themselves and their surrounding villages with ammonium nitrate for over a century, if manure could do the job, then the use of hazardous compounds like ammonium nitrate begs the question, “Why?”. It would be like saying, “You know, my refrigerator holds temperature levels too reliably cool, offers no chance of suffocating me or burning me and is too cost and labor effective, I should refrigerate all my food with dry ice.” The only reason you use dry ice is because it does something your refrigerator can’t. If you buy that we could feed the world using manure or organically-originated fertilizers, the only explanation on this level is that all these farmers are oil-hungry morons with death-wishes who haven’t yet found a better way to make money and and suffocate or blow themselves up.

You would only cling to methods like that until a better one came along. On the other level, yes, without anhydrous or mineral nitrates, it’s impossible to farm productively enough. Try it. You can certainly get the plants to grow without it, but to grow enough of the right kinds of plants and to do it repeatedly, season after season, or even several times a season you will need distilled or mined chemicals. The whole “Nitrogen from oil” B.S. ignores parts of history where people actually were producing “Food from oil” (we even handed out a UNESCO prize for it). Yes, we are tied to oil for our food. We’re constantly getting better at being so. Organic farming is doing a great job of consuming more work, land, water, sunlight, and time to liberate us from the oppression of oil. Once we can generate nitrogen cheaply and easily from nuclear power or a solar reactor, we’ll still use that rather than switching to organic farming.

[/quote]
ok, thanks. just the tone of your post made it sound like you were saying plants wont grow AT ALL without anhydrous ammonia. Plants need nitrogen, duh. But for a second i thought you may have gone off the deep end saying the only reasonable method AT ALL was anhydrous ammonia.

I concur that the scale demands such methods.

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[quote]lucasa wrote:

[quote]Da Man reloaded wrote:

i think there was some gmo talk earlier. i am against them for 1 reason - complete and utter lack of data.

may be perfectly fine, may be the poison that kills us all. There is ZERO data.[/quote]

Incorrect, possibly millions of years of data. We’ve been selectively cross-breeding plants for genetic traits since before we knew plants had genes that we could selectively cross-breed for. Plants themselves have been doing it longer. We we’ve been doing f*cked up and much more dangerous stuff with agricultural genetics for quite a long time.

There’s more data supporting the safety of GMOs than there is supporting the idea that organic foods and farming methods are healthier and more productive than conventional farming. Quite the opposite, no one can even be suggestively demonstrated to have been killed by GMOs, but people have, rather conclusively, died from consuming organic produce because of the way it was produced, repeatedly.

EDIT: And please don’t be one of those zealous retards that wants to demand a greater level of scrutiny for GMO foods than they demand for their conventional foods. The type that is okay with dying because of natural means but somehow see death from synthetic products as some sort of sin, like consuming pork or eating meat during Lent.
[/quote]

I am far from a zealot, but i beg to differ that what you say is data. “cuz that is how it has always been” is not data.

I deal with data driven decisions every single day. Data must be provided to justify any deviation from the norm. The norm being the food before modern GMO methods. There is no such data anywhere, so from a scientific and engineering standpoint the change cannot be justified. “Just cuz” is not justification. “It should be ok” is not justification.

the gene tinkering being done today is a far cry from cross-breeding seen in nature or even that of the farming of years past. cross pollination cannot be equated to modifying a certain gene in a plant via modern genetic engineering methodology. Once again because there is no data demonstrating such a claim.

And stop with the organic strawman bullshit. I have already stated I do not buy what they are selling.

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[quote]drunkpig wrote:

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

No, that fossil fuel is required to generate the cheap synthetic fertilizer modern farming runs on. Which is a fact.[/quote]

Fossil fuel doesn’t ‘generate’ fertilizer. NatGas is used to produce NH3. You said farmers put oil into the soil, which is an outright lie. In your flare for the melodrama, you left the truth sitting on the curb.

[quote]
No, I did not. I never said anything about oil going into soil. You are the liar. And natural gas, coal and oil are used./quote]

[quote]
Okay, my bad. If you guys are claiming that no one really knows the impact of modern farming practices, I agree.[/quote]

By your own logic, no one knows the impact of any type of farming.

[quote]I agree, pretty much everything runs on fossil fuel. Doesn’t change how farming works. And no sustainable is pretty objective, projections of what is or isn’t sustainable can be subjective.

Proof? Fossil fuels are limited.[/quote]

Your proof is a line of peak oil bullshit? Try again.

Again making up stuff and lying. I never said they were a competitor. Sure, call me out for claiming the farming industry is a fossil fuel industry and isn’t ultimately sustainable. And I should have made clear in my initial post that I meant fossil fuel and not just oil. saying just oil was factually incorrect. But the guy that says organic farming kills, let that “truth” go by without a word.

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I think Pig has trouble thinking outside the box , farming on many levels is not sustainable and to work toward a sustainable program would be the intelligent thing to do.

One of the main issues no one has addressed is water . the west is going to have major issues in the west

A program I have heard about would restore big parts of the Great Plains back to grass lands and you could raise all kind of grass fed meats and save a lot of water

I do not know how many have seen a feed lot or a dairy . Today they are cesspools . Besides being a blight to the environment they are credited to antibiotic resistant bacteria .

I know since you have had econ 101 that you are an expert and that information can not be acquired by reading or research . But even considering the economic aspect of our food chain there are many costs that are not calculable

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Oh, hey, what’s going on here?

Sorry, I haven’t been around, I’ve been hanging out at the “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum”. Kind of boring, though, no cars or people or factories.

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I edited that post and fixed it and it has reverted back. sorry.

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It’s rather difficult to make heads or tails out of your post, so I’m going to pull out what I can decipher and go from there.

[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
No, I did not. I never said anything about oil going into soil. You are the liar. And natural gas, coal and oil are used.[/quote]

What you did say was: "Yes, they fertilize with things like manure and crop rotation, not oil."

Unless they’ve developed some new fertilizer application process that does not involve direct contact with soil, there is no other way to apply fertilizer except by introducing it directly to the soil. So, the logical conclusion to your statement is that farmers introduce oil directly into the soil.

Even if you want to excuse the statement away by saying you meant fossil fuels, you would still be wrong. Anhydrous contains no carbon. Is a fossil fuel used to produce NH3? Yes. But that’s not what you said. Not even close.

[quote]Well, I can get into observational studies on indigenous populations with migration studies to westernized diets if you’d like. Or I could recommend some reading. But I’m not the one advocating the safety of making changes. In my opinion if you are going to put chemicals and gene spliced plants on the market, the burden of proof is on you. And proof of that variety is basically impossible.
[/quote]

But chasing down the diets of extinct nomadic natives - who were farming long before we arrived - will prove the superiority of the hunter gatherer diet? Maybe you should save that one for later.

[quote]Despite your cancer claims DDT is linked by numerous studies to all kinds of stuff. Infertility to miscarriages. You may go move in next to a stagnant pond and hose the area down with DDT if you want. Personally I’m not going to move into a mosquito infested area. To each his own I guess.
[/quote]

So was saccharin, aspartame. But the levels one would have to be exposed to were stupid. And the EPA knows that. It was popular to be against DDT, and the EPA did not miss the opportunity to take advantage of it and seize some power.

And it’s not just malaria that would be controlled in swampy 3rd world countries. I would suggest that the West Nile Virus could be controlled if there were an effective insecticide on the market as powerful as DDT. But there’s not. So I guess it’s a moot point.

  1. I didn’t make anything up. I made a comparison. If it came across as me putting words in your mouth, then I am sorry for your misunderstanding.

  2. Farming is not a fossil fuel industry. Not in any sense of the term.

  3. Commercial farming is far more sustainable than any other form of food production we have ever had. Hunting and gathering is untenable in today’s first world countries. And I don’t care to live like the pigmies in New Guinea.

If you want to regress back to the time of running around the forest trying to kill your food with nothing more advanced than a sharp stick - knock yourself out. $50 says you’d be dead in the first two weeks from eating some noxious weed, or poisonous berry.

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[quote]SteelyD wrote:
Oh, hey, what’s going on here?

Sorry, I haven’t been around, I’ve been hanging out at the “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum”. Kind of boring, though, no cars or people or factories.[/quote]

Yawn :slight_smile: