Climate change is supposed to happen, it can't be stopped so drive Humvees and fuel inefficient cars (if you can afford it)!
This shows that the Arctic used to be sub tropical climate, now its technically a desert. This article does not mention the asteroids that hit the Earth millions of years ago, or say how continental drift may have placed the arctic in a different place. What it does say is that
"Millions of years ago the Earth experienced an extended period of NATURAL GLOBAL WARMING. But around 55 million years ago there was a sudden supercharged spike of carbon dioxide that accelerated the greenhouse effect.
"
Since HS I have not met a teacher, except maybe one Earth Science teacher in 10th grade, that believe in man made climate change. At SAC both my Biology Professors are skeptical of it, one believe in climate change, but does not think its as man made as people believe it to be, my current biology teacher is even more skeptical, says its nothing more than a hypothesis, not a theory, and that there is some bad science behind their claims, such as taking core samples of the Arctic ice, since gases can pass thru ice....
Sea levels of the earth have been increasing since the last ice age, this is why in Europe where the Lighthouse of Alexandria used to be is no longer accessible by foot, before that even the Mediterranean Sea was a marsh, and if you wanted to go even further prior to the formation of dry land by the Holy One, the Earth was covered by water (Gen 1:2,9)
Whether global warming is happening or not, should it really matter? I've seen articles where scientists claimed that global warming was happening a few years about, but not now.
What few people know is that NASA is reporting that climate change is occurring on Mars and at the same rate as on the planet Earth, with a change over 30 years of about .5 degrees Celsius.
Anyway here is the article of the Tropical Arctic.
==========================================================================
By Associated Press
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient vacation hotspot with a 74-degree Fahrenheit average temperature, alligator ancestors and palm trees. It's smack in the middle of the Arctic.
First-of-its-kind core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that 55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise, three new studies show.
The scientists say their findings are a glimpse backward into a much warmer-than-thought polar region heated by run-amok greenhouse gases that came about naturally.
Skeptics of man-made causes of global warming have nothing to rejoice over, however. The researchers say their studies appearing in Thursday's issue of Nature also offer a peak at just how bad conditions can get.
"It probably was (a tropical paradise) but the mosquitoes were probably the size of your head," said Yale geology professor Mark Pagani, a study co-author.
And what a watery, swampy world it must have been.
"Imagine a world where there are dense sequoia trees and cypress trees like in Florida that ring the Arctic Ocean," said Pagani, a member of the multinational Arctic Coring Expedition that conducted the research.
Millions of years ago the Earth experienced an extended period of natural global warming. But around 55 million years ago there was a sudden supercharged spike of carbon dioxide that accelerated the greenhouse effect.
Scientists already knew this "thermal event" happened but are not sure what caused it. Perhaps massive releases of methane from the ocean, the continent-sized burning of trees, lots of volcanic eruptions.
Many experts figured that while the rest of the world got really hot, the polar regions were still comfortably cooler, maybe about 52 degrees Fahrenheit.
But the new research found the polar average was closer to 74 degrees. So instead of Boston-like weather year-round, the Arctic was more like Miami North. Way north.
"It's the first time we've looked at the Arctic, and man, it was a big surprise to us," said study co-author Kathryn Moran, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island. "It's a new look to how the Earth can respond to these peaks in carbon dioxide."
It's enough to make Santa Claus break into a sweat.
The 74-degree temperature, based on core samples which act as a climatic time capsule, was probably the year-round average, but because data is so limited it might also be just the summertime average, researchers said.
What's troubling is that this hints that future projections for warming, several degrees over the next century, may be on the low end, said study lead author Appy Sluijs of the Institute of Environmental Biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Also it shows that what happened 55 million years ago was proof that too much carbon dioxide - more than four times current levels - can cause global warming, said another co-author Henk Brinkhuis at Utrecht University.
Purdue University atmospheric sciences professor Gabriel Bowen, who was not part of the team, praised the work and said it showed that "there are tipping points in our (climate) system that can throw us to these conditions."
And the new research also gave scientists the idea that a simple fern may have helped pull Earth from a hothouse to an icehouse by sucking up massive amounts of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, this natural solution to global warming was not exactly quick: It took about a million years.
With all that heat and massive freshwater lakes forming in the Arctic, a fern called Azolla started growing and growing. Azolla, still found in warm regions today, grew so deep, so wide that eventually it started sucking up carbon dioxide, Brinkhuis theorized. And that helped put the cool back in the Arctic.
Bowen said he has a hard time accepting that part of the research, but Brinkhuis said the studies show tons upon tons of thick mats of Azolla covered the Arctic and moved south.
"This could actually contribute to push the world to a cooling mode," Brinkhuis said, but only after it got hotter first and then it would take at least 800,000 years to cool back down. It's not something to look forward to, he said.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
More on abortion
"For those in favor of abortion, to appeal to the absence of a capacity for consciousness has seemed a risky strategy. On the basis of the studies showing that movement takes place as early as six weeks after fertilization, brain activity as early as the seventh week, it has been suggested that the fetus could be capable of feeling pain at this early stage of pregnancy."--Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, p. 142. (2 Ed.)
By the way, he is PRO-CHOICE but he admits that an embryo at that point is likely conscious. His belief that abortion is tolerable because the woman's life is greater than that of the baby's, he admits that abortion is killing an innocent life.
There are some in the prochoice side that give honest answer's or at least intellectually more reasonable ones, there is one feminist who also says a fetus is a person, but because of utilitarianism the value of the mother is greater than that of the child.
Here are some of the most unreasonable arguments for abortion:
1)It is not a life/human until born.
That's just plain stupid, the child has the same number of chromosomes as an adult, same DNA, and it fits the 7 biological criteria for being a life.
2)It's just a clump of cells.
A clump of cells with a heart, brain, DNA?
3)It's my body, leave me alone!!
A sort of self centered argument, drug addicts use the same argument (when they're not stoned), by this line of thinking suicide should also be okay since a person is doing what they want to their own body.
By the way, he is PRO-CHOICE but he admits that an embryo at that point is likely conscious. His belief that abortion is tolerable because the woman's life is greater than that of the baby's, he admits that abortion is killing an innocent life.
There are some in the prochoice side that give honest answer's or at least intellectually more reasonable ones, there is one feminist who also says a fetus is a person, but because of utilitarianism the value of the mother is greater than that of the child.
Here are some of the most unreasonable arguments for abortion:
1)It is not a life/human until born.
That's just plain stupid, the child has the same number of chromosomes as an adult, same DNA, and it fits the 7 biological criteria for being a life.
2)It's just a clump of cells.
A clump of cells with a heart, brain, DNA?
3)It's my body, leave me alone!!
A sort of self centered argument, drug addicts use the same argument (when they're not stoned), by this line of thinking suicide should also be okay since a person is doing what they want to their own body.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Serrin Foster of Feminists for Life Views the Abortion Debate
WASHINGTON, D.C., 5 MAY 2003 (ZENIT).
The U.S. Senate's vote in March for a ban on partial-birth abortion may signal a growing pro-life trend in the country.
Recently, Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life of America, shared her thoughts with ZENIT on pro-life feminism and on trends in the abortion controversy. Her lecture, "The Feminist Case Against Abortion," was included in a 2001 book entitled, "Women's Rights."
Q: Your name, Feminists for Life, strikes some as contradictory. What do you see as the connection between feminism and being pro-life?
Foster: We are often asked: "How dare you call yourself a feminist?" We proudly continue a legacy of pro-life feminism born more than 200 years ago when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." After decrying the sexual exploitation of women, Wollstonecraft condemned those who would "either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born." Shortly thereafter, abortion became illegal in Great Britain.
The now-revered feminists of the 19th century were also strongly opposed to abortion because of their belief in the worth of all humans. Like many women in developing countries today, the early American feminists opposed abortion.
The early feminists understood that, much like today, women resorted to abortion because they were abandoned or pressured by boyfriends, husbands and parents, and lacked financial resources to have the baby on their own. They knew that women had virtually no rights within the family or the political sphere. But they did not believe abortion was the answer.
Abortion was commonplace in the 1800s. Sarah Norton, the first woman to successfully argue admission to Cornell University in New York state, wrote, "Child murderers practice their profession without let or hindrance, and open infant butcheries unquestioned. Perhaps there will come a time when an unmarried woman will not be despised because of her motherhood, and when the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with."
Without known exception, the early American feminists condemned abortion in the strongest possible terms. In Susan B. Anthony's newspaper, The Revolution, abortion was described as "child murder," "infanticide" and "foeticide."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in 1848 organized the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, classified abortion as a form of infanticide and said, "When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." Stanton would raise a flag in front of her home announcing the birth of her children. Women should celebrate their life-giving capacity.
Anti-abortion laws enacted in America during the latter half of the 19th century were the result of advocacy efforts by feminists who worked in an uneasy alliance with the male-dominated medical profession and the mainstream media. Ironically, the anti-abortion laws that early feminists worked so hard to enact to protect women and children were the very ones destroyed by the Roe v. Wade decision 100 years later.
Q: How has feminism, in the wide sense of the word, changed over the years?
Foster: The goals of the 1970s women's movement, led by the National Organization for Women [NOW], with respect to abortion, would have outraged the early feminists.
What Elizabeth Cady Stanton had called a "disgusting and degrading crime" has been heralded by Eleanor Smeal, former president of NOW and current president of the Fund for a Feminist Majority, as a "most fundamental right." NOW hailed the legalization of abortion as the "emancipation of women."
Betty Friedan, credited with reawakening feminism in the 1960s with her landmark book, "The Feminine Mystique," did not even mention abortion in the book's early edition. It was not until 1966 that NOW included abortion in its list of goals. Even then abortion was a low priority.
It was a man, abortion proponent Larry Lader, who credits himself with guiding a reluctant Friedan, the first president of NOW, to make abortion a serious issue for the organization. Lader had been working to repeal the abortion laws based on population-growth concerns, but state legislators were horrified by his ideas. Immigration and improved longevity were fueling America's population growth—not reproduction, which in fact had declined dramatically.
Lader teamed up with a gynecologist, Bernard Nathanson, to co-found the National Alliance to Repeal Abortion Laws, the forerunner of today's National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League [NARAL]. Lader suggested to the NOW leadership that all feminist demands—equal education, jobs, pay, etc.—hinged on a woman's ability to control both her own body and procreation.
After all, Lader argued, employers did not want to pay for maternity benefits or lose productivity when a mother took time off to care for a newborn or sick child. Lader successfully convinced the NOW leadership that legalized abortion was the key to equality in the workplace.
Dr. Nathanson, who later became a pro-life activist, states in his 1979 book, "Aborting America," that the two were able to convince Friedan that abortion was a civil rights issue, and claimed that tens of thousands of women died each year from abortion. Nathanson later admitted that in order to gain Friedan's support, they had simply made up the numbers—a major point in their argument.
Lader's and Nathanson's strategy was highly effective. NOW has made the preservation of legal abortion its No. 1 priority. Its literature repeatedly states that access to abortion is "the most fundamental right of women, without which all other rights are meaningless." With this drastic change, a highly visible faction of the women's movement abandoned the vision of the early feminists: a world where women would be accepted and respected as women.
Q: Where do you fit in with the bulk of feminists today?
Foster: While we agree on many things—fighting sexual assault, domestic violence, and workplace discrimination, etc.—we are at odds with those who believe that abortion is a "right" or "necessary evil" to achieve equality in the workplace.
The basic tenets of feminism are nonviolence, nondiscrimination and justice for all. Abortion violates all three. Abortion is discrimination based on age, size, location, and sometimes gender, disability or parentage. As pro-life feminists, our values are woman-centered and inclusive of both parents and child.
Abortion has hurt women in that it has diverted feminist attention from other issues, particularly those that help mothers, such as affordable child care, comprehensive health care and a living wage.
Abortion is a reflection that we have not met the needs of women. Women deserve better than abortion.
We support nonviolent choices, practical resources and support for pregnant and parenting women.
Abortion advocates pit women against our own children. Babies are not obstacles to success! We should refuse to choose between giving up our education and career plans and sacrificing our children. Feminists for Life is committed to finding holistic solutions that address the root causes that contribute to abortion. FFL believes that women have a right to be women in the workplace and school. Women shouldn't have to pass as men.
As FFL's honorary chair, two-time Emmy winner and New York Times best-selling author Patricia Heaton has said, "Women facing an unplanned pregnancy also deserve unplanned joy."
The U.S. Senate's vote in March for a ban on partial-birth abortion may signal a growing pro-life trend in the country.
Recently, Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life of America, shared her thoughts with ZENIT on pro-life feminism and on trends in the abortion controversy. Her lecture, "The Feminist Case Against Abortion," was included in a 2001 book entitled, "Women's Rights."
Q: Your name, Feminists for Life, strikes some as contradictory. What do you see as the connection between feminism and being pro-life?
Foster: We are often asked: "How dare you call yourself a feminist?" We proudly continue a legacy of pro-life feminism born more than 200 years ago when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." After decrying the sexual exploitation of women, Wollstonecraft condemned those who would "either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born." Shortly thereafter, abortion became illegal in Great Britain.
The now-revered feminists of the 19th century were also strongly opposed to abortion because of their belief in the worth of all humans. Like many women in developing countries today, the early American feminists opposed abortion.
The early feminists understood that, much like today, women resorted to abortion because they were abandoned or pressured by boyfriends, husbands and parents, and lacked financial resources to have the baby on their own. They knew that women had virtually no rights within the family or the political sphere. But they did not believe abortion was the answer.
Abortion was commonplace in the 1800s. Sarah Norton, the first woman to successfully argue admission to Cornell University in New York state, wrote, "Child murderers practice their profession without let or hindrance, and open infant butcheries unquestioned. Perhaps there will come a time when an unmarried woman will not be despised because of her motherhood, and when the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with."
Without known exception, the early American feminists condemned abortion in the strongest possible terms. In Susan B. Anthony's newspaper, The Revolution, abortion was described as "child murder," "infanticide" and "foeticide."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in 1848 organized the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, classified abortion as a form of infanticide and said, "When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." Stanton would raise a flag in front of her home announcing the birth of her children. Women should celebrate their life-giving capacity.
Anti-abortion laws enacted in America during the latter half of the 19th century were the result of advocacy efforts by feminists who worked in an uneasy alliance with the male-dominated medical profession and the mainstream media. Ironically, the anti-abortion laws that early feminists worked so hard to enact to protect women and children were the very ones destroyed by the Roe v. Wade decision 100 years later.
Q: How has feminism, in the wide sense of the word, changed over the years?
Foster: The goals of the 1970s women's movement, led by the National Organization for Women [NOW], with respect to abortion, would have outraged the early feminists.
What Elizabeth Cady Stanton had called a "disgusting and degrading crime" has been heralded by Eleanor Smeal, former president of NOW and current president of the Fund for a Feminist Majority, as a "most fundamental right." NOW hailed the legalization of abortion as the "emancipation of women."
Betty Friedan, credited with reawakening feminism in the 1960s with her landmark book, "The Feminine Mystique," did not even mention abortion in the book's early edition. It was not until 1966 that NOW included abortion in its list of goals. Even then abortion was a low priority.
It was a man, abortion proponent Larry Lader, who credits himself with guiding a reluctant Friedan, the first president of NOW, to make abortion a serious issue for the organization. Lader had been working to repeal the abortion laws based on population-growth concerns, but state legislators were horrified by his ideas. Immigration and improved longevity were fueling America's population growth—not reproduction, which in fact had declined dramatically.
Lader teamed up with a gynecologist, Bernard Nathanson, to co-found the National Alliance to Repeal Abortion Laws, the forerunner of today's National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League [NARAL]. Lader suggested to the NOW leadership that all feminist demands—equal education, jobs, pay, etc.—hinged on a woman's ability to control both her own body and procreation.
After all, Lader argued, employers did not want to pay for maternity benefits or lose productivity when a mother took time off to care for a newborn or sick child. Lader successfully convinced the NOW leadership that legalized abortion was the key to equality in the workplace.
Dr. Nathanson, who later became a pro-life activist, states in his 1979 book, "Aborting America," that the two were able to convince Friedan that abortion was a civil rights issue, and claimed that tens of thousands of women died each year from abortion. Nathanson later admitted that in order to gain Friedan's support, they had simply made up the numbers—a major point in their argument.
Lader's and Nathanson's strategy was highly effective. NOW has made the preservation of legal abortion its No. 1 priority. Its literature repeatedly states that access to abortion is "the most fundamental right of women, without which all other rights are meaningless." With this drastic change, a highly visible faction of the women's movement abandoned the vision of the early feminists: a world where women would be accepted and respected as women.
Q: Where do you fit in with the bulk of feminists today?
Foster: While we agree on many things—fighting sexual assault, domestic violence, and workplace discrimination, etc.—we are at odds with those who believe that abortion is a "right" or "necessary evil" to achieve equality in the workplace.
The basic tenets of feminism are nonviolence, nondiscrimination and justice for all. Abortion violates all three. Abortion is discrimination based on age, size, location, and sometimes gender, disability or parentage. As pro-life feminists, our values are woman-centered and inclusive of both parents and child.
Abortion has hurt women in that it has diverted feminist attention from other issues, particularly those that help mothers, such as affordable child care, comprehensive health care and a living wage.
Abortion is a reflection that we have not met the needs of women. Women deserve better than abortion.
We support nonviolent choices, practical resources and support for pregnant and parenting women.
Abortion advocates pit women against our own children. Babies are not obstacles to success! We should refuse to choose between giving up our education and career plans and sacrificing our children. Feminists for Life is committed to finding holistic solutions that address the root causes that contribute to abortion. FFL believes that women have a right to be women in the workplace and school. Women shouldn't have to pass as men.
As FFL's honorary chair, two-time Emmy winner and New York Times best-selling author Patricia Heaton has said, "Women facing an unplanned pregnancy also deserve unplanned joy."
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