Cost of my commute

Andrew Sullivan has been posting commentary about riding a bike versus driving to work. I looked at the responses in his latest post on the topic, and felt an urge to state something plain about one commentator:

What about the opportunity costs of the extra time a bike commuter spends to get to work?  My 15-mile car commute takes 25-30 minutes.  To ride that same distance, it would take me at the very least 1.5-2 hours, each way. My round trip commute could go from one to four hours.  All those extra hours are ones I could have spent working - or you know, doing anything besides commuting.

This is a problem of mixed apples-and-oranges. The commentator obviously lives at a greater distance to work than would be useful to bike the whole way. Placing a single response to this issue is nonsensical. It's like me making the argument that I could cycle from Ann Arbor to Detroit every day, but that would create a huge opportunity cost for me.

Well, duh. In my example, I have multiple options: drive (if I owned a car), take AmTrak, or carpool. Note that none of these options actually change the distance I need to commute to make bike commuting competitive, but at least I'm not mixing apples and oranges. If I wanted to only have a barrel of apples (i.e., compare the costs and benefits of cycling against driving), I need to put things into a perspective that makes sense: by either moving the location of my job or the location of my domicile (i.e., live closer to where I work). This option isn't available to many people who have already made the decision to subsidize their living standard with a higher travel cost (i.e, people who wanted to live in a larger house way outside of the city compared to living in a smaller apartment in the city), and since it's not available to these people, they shouldn't be commenting as if their situation is equivalent. It just plain isn't.

Now the other comment was:

I'm all for being green and fit. Unfortunately though, the whole concept of biking to work is nonsense. I've worked with about 1000 people in my life and I have known 1 person who regularly biked to work. I can't bike to work because biking results in my body sweating, thus offsetting the purpose of my morning shower. So next time we calculate the cost of biking, can we factor in the cost of smelling like sweat all day and getting fired because no one wants to sit within 15 feet of you?

My response to this is that one could find a place to take a shower near to where one works. If this isn't possible, then you are in a situation in which you are comparing apples with kumquats. It's hot and humid today in Ann Arbor (likely going to be another 90F/90%humidity day), and I biked my 4 miles this morning, headed to the gym to take a shower, and then came to the office. (No, I didn't take a shower before leaving home; that would have been pointless in the overall picture.) I am a person who sweats quite liberally at any provocation (cycling in the Michigan winters creates the potential problem of my sweat freezing when I stop), but I haven't had problems with "smelling like sweat all day and getting fired" because I have access to shower facilities. If you don't have access to shower facilities, this is a separate issue than the costs of biking versus driving in general, since it is a variable that is independent of either. I could easily make an analogous argument that I can't drive to work in in Tokyo because I can't find a place to park near where I work, and the extra time it takes for me to walk from the parking lot to work will make me late, "so can we factor in the cost of walking from the distant parking lot and getting fired because I will likely be late to work?"

When couched in these latter terms, I would imagine that the reasons why the argument is a non-generalizable one will be more clear: the availability of showers (or the willingness to take one outside of one's home and closer to one's work) is not a general problem that people have. Therefore, it's not a comparable cost of biking and driving in general.

So the next time someone says that they are "all for biking, but..." examine the premises of their arguments. Sometimes (often in my experience) they are comparing apples with non-apples, and as tasty as these non-apple fruit may be, their tastiness doesn't make them an equivalent fruit for comparison.

Google is like kratom

Well... using Google Correlate, it is anyway. If you go to the site, you can type in any search query, and (if it is popular enough to have enough of a hit history with Google), you will get a list of other searches that have a high correlative search history with yours.

Typing in "Google" came back with "kratom" with a correlation value of 0.9807.

What is kratom? It's a "trendy" medicinal herb. So, I guess that Google is as correlatively as trendy as a medicinal herb. (Or is it the other way around?)

Moving Beyond the Automobile

In a series of ten short videos, StreetFilms has put together a collection of public work projects in cities that help move their populaces away from relying on cars. (True, most of the filming takes place in NYC, but although NYC is a common theme in StreetFilms' videos, there are plenty of other cities that are investigated as well.)

Examinations of the urban environment is an important (and ought to be integral) part of what it means to investigate "the environment." StreetFilms' various series on sustainable transportation and re-claiming the streets speak to a portion of that realization.

Enjoy:

Part 1: Transit-Oriented Development

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 2: Bycling

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 3: Car Sharing

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 4: Bus Rapid Transit

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 5: Congestion Pricing

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 6: Highway Removal

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 7: Traffic Calming

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 8: "Road Diet"

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 9: The Right Price for Parking

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 10: Parking Reform

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

One thing that you can do to show (during the summer) how much you don't rely on your car (if you one one in the first place) is to go to 2MileChallenge, join a team, and log your biking miles and challenge others to do the same!

Sitting at the Corner Brewery

It was already warm when I work up this morning, and although waking up at 10 am is, in some quarters, considered "late", I did just have a work day at the forest, and (although not sweating-bullets hard work) it was warm and humid enough to be exhausting, and so (coupled with the lack of good sleep leading up to last night), I was able to tuck into 11 hours of sleep with no problem.

What to do, what to do, what to do? Ran through my mind.

There was the outside possibility that a community member who helped out at yesterday's clean-up would come by to help use the two-man cross-cut saw to chop out the large Scots Pine that had been downed on the other side of the lake for a few weeks' time now.... However, I did also need to seriously knuckle down on writing a paper for an upcoming conference... and -- come to think of it -- I needed to seriously get cracking on figuring out what sorts of questions to be asking people in my interviews for this summer... and I really wanted to get out of the forest, out of Ann Arbor, and (in some way) out of my skin.

Well, Ypsilanti was a good solution to most of the problems. Well... at least the physical, positional problems. So, I packed up my bike and headed out of the already bird-calling, insect chir-chir-chirrr-ing forest and onto the (somewhat) open road toward the border-to-border trail that basically follows the Huron River as it flows in from Livingston County to the north and out to Wayne County to the east. The 10-mile (ish) section between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti is one that is well-traveled (possibly the most traversed part of the whole thing).

This time, to change things up a little bit, I decided to stay on Dixboro Road instead of following the BtoB along behind St. Joe's Hospital, and soon I found myself approaching Washtenaw Ave (a bane of cycling and walking, having been expanded with the sole purpose of pushing cars down an ever-widening (now six-lane beast) of a roadway, and damn the people who don't want to drive).

Wooops! Gotta turn around now.... Hrm.... Clark Road? It seems to ring a bell. I'll take that one.... Oh, yeah... the EMU stadium. That looks familiar. And the BtoB is really tempting now that there's a bastard of a Ford Focus riding my tail as if I didn't have a right to the roadway. Read the law, you bastard!

Eventually, I made it to the Corner Brewery, at which I was hoping for a little bit of quiet repast in addition to my mug of locally brewed magic. However, the latter was not to be: there was a pub crawl in session. Oh well, at least I've got Ypsilanti Wireless and a fresh 1/2 liter of Mackinac Fudge Stout to help me through before I go out and try to find a coffee shop with WiFi and a plug-in. I'm thinking Bombadill's on Michigan Ave.

UPDATE: Well, Bombadill's is apparently no more. Long live B-24's!

Obama as a TCK

I grew up as a kind of Third Culture Kid. True, my father's culture is "American", and I did grow up until the age of 8 in the US, and true, my mother's culture is Japanese, and I lived the following 7 years in that country. However, in neither case was it as an "American" or "Japanese" family. In that way, the culture inside my house was the culture of neither parent (although a strange synergistic hybrid of the two).

However, going to school in Japan with international students, as I did in Taiwan and Hungary, really did expand my horizons. I was introduced to the concept of TCKs by a friend of mine after I had started graduate school (I never knew that there was a term for this differently socialized group of people), but once I learned it, certain things did start to make sense.

When Obama won the Democratic ticket in 2008, I was very happy that a mixed-race, TCK candidate had the chance of being the president. As a mixed-race TCK, I felt the ineffable strengths that such a worldview could bring. Predictably (perhaps depressingly so), very few people in the popular press seem to have actually delved into the points about Barack Obama's cultural heritage and TCK upbringing. Recently, though, I came across some collected snippets of commentary on this point, posted over at The Daily Dish:

You are indeed right regarding Cornel West. He is a an articulate, well-read, pseudo-intellectual who plays the part of the black Yoda well, but is ironically very provincial. His world is literally black and white which limits his analytic powers and makes him ineffective as a true intellectual and impotent as a true force for change. Contrast this with Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama, is what we call, a TCK—A Third Culture Kid. TCK’s grow up as the children of missionaries, or as military brats, or as the children of businessmen. It means that you grew up during your early developmental years in a culture outside of your parents’ home culture.

And  in a continuation, some detractors of the TCK viewpoint (written, it seems, by people who didn't grow up that way):

Travel the world and try to transcend your culture all you want, but you won't ever succeed.  Not really.  As Alasdair Macintyre put it, we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives.  There will always be a part of us that it is the product of the time and place and family in which we first came of age, perhaps especially when we are reacting to that experience and trying to "transcend" it.  And even if by some miracle we actually succeeded in that project, then whatever else we may have gained, we will also have lost the ability to be truly a part of any culture from the inside. 

Myself, I have known many TCKs. Some have gone to do amazing things. Some have gone to do average things. Some, less so. However, they all share that interesting view of the world: a world that is somehow more united and common than our peers who grew up in once place, to one culture have seen the world. Not a different world; the same world, just seen and experienced more broadly (if not deeply).

A daze of Saginaw Forest

A meal of morels (and things bought at the store)

While I love mushrooms, I love even more wild mushrooms, and recently I was able to sit down with some friends (who had been out all day hunting mushrooms) for a repast of morels... and items purchased at a local store.

I was able to join in on the last leg of the morel hunt, which took place in town (yes, they do grow here, but they can be hard to find). With my mycologist friend (BC) moving out of town, he was less reluctant to bring along some friends (PE, who was interested in learning how to hunt for mushrooms, and me, who was less interested in the hunting, and more interested in the company). BC and PE had already been to a few sites that day and, on their swing through town, picked me up for their last search site. (We stopped to pick up some additional fare: beer and complementary comestibles.)

After about an hour at our last site (sorry folks, no comment), we only had two morels to show for it, and they were both found by BC. Still, these two would add to the small haul that BC and PE had managed to get earlier in the day.

We headed back to BC's house. Together with other friends and housemates, we set to making a wonderful dinner for seven. The cutting preparation of the morels required a bit of work to ensure that bugs and worms (which often crawl up the fruiting body to live and enjoy the tasty morel, too) were removed before cooking. (As much as I don't mind a little extra protein, I felt that this step is warranted when one wants to have a nice meal.)

The final meal (chips with freshly made guacamole, grilled grass-fed beef steaks, organic pork chops, scalloped potatoes, chopped bacon and cabbage, peas cooked in butter, and (of course) the morels), was a wonderful combination of very earthy flavors, and melded flavors so very simply and very well.


The conversation softened as people tucked into their plates, BC playing the part of the host and making sure that all got enough food before sitting down himself. After about a minute of silent eating (well, silent eating interrupted with exclamations of how good everything tasted), the conversation started to meander lazily along many streams, flowing like a river lazily reaching its delta: slowly pushing through dense stands of personal experience, returning to the main channel of conversation, breaking off to surround and build memory sandbar, slowing down to near-stillness of pregnant pauses of conversation.

The evening ended, as evenings eventually must, and we all left, saying our good-byes, promising to help BC with his packing, loading, and moving come the start of the week. It was, in all, a great meal for a great friend.

At the AUT Bar

I'm sitting in the AUT Bar, having finished a nice repast while sitting next to two couples that don't really know what an "indoor voice" is. I've learned that one of them is trying to finish her dissertation (and another person at the table is telling her to make a schedule and stick to it; again and again she's saying this to her). Two others at the table are (apparently) nuclear/particle physicists (or engineers). The older of the two men is French and quiet. The younger is definitely not French and definitely not quiet. They spent most of the time that I was seated talking about this, that, and the other; merging conversations with as much skill as ... well, stereotypical physicists (or engineers).

However, the food was brilliant -- as usual. The weekend brunch is in celebration of three simultaneous things: the 25th anniversary of the AUT Bar, the recent Cinco de Mayo celebrations (with the bar being decked out with red, white and green; sunbursts and globes; different color palette on the tables; and paper cut-outs of sombreros and cacti), and Mother's Day (which is actually today, while the others are -- likely -- not). In celebration of their 25th Anniversary, I decided to get their Chile Relleno with eggs... y fue excelente y delicioso! (It it weren't for the discussions of dissertation-writing schedules and particle physics, it would have been like being back in one of the taquerias in Mexico City. ... Well, facing the full bar was a little different than the taqueria.)

In town on a Sunday

Yup, it's another Sunday of some memorialization during which I find myself in town. A couple of weeks ago, it was Easter, now it's Mother's Day. Soon it will be Memorial Day, and then Father's Day. Now don't get me wrong: I really have no problem with the days themselves; I enjoy Easter celebrations (well, most of them), I really do love my Mother and Father, and I really don't have anything against remembering the servicemen and servicewomen that have died in service to the US.

However, I really don't like the implication of the day. Living in Saginaw Forest, I get to 'enjoy' the (usually) significantly greater number of people who are out in the forest. *Sigh* I really don't mind that people are there, either, but I do mind when they decide to flout the rules. Well, I really don't like it when people flout the rules at any time, but I really don't like it when I get the response of, "But it's [X]'s Day. Can't I [break this rule]?" To me, this makes no sense at all. Would the people really be okay with encountering a burglar in their home on [X]'s Day saying, "Why can't I break the burglary law, it's [X}'s Day!"

Sure, no one is immediately being harmed by having a dog off of leash, however, for me, it's both a cumulative effect of people seeing other people with dogs off-leash then feeling that they can also do it along with the feeling that people really don't have much respect for the property.

So, instead of confronting people on a day that they are more happy than other days, I just avoid them by coming into town. After all, I don't want to be confrontational, either. Nor do I wish to remain ensconced in my house.

Help day in Stinchfield Woods

Today was a help-day out at Stinchfield Woods. I decided to ride the 15 miles to Stinchfield Woods (mainly because I don't have a car, of course), and it turned out that the day was a really good one for removing invasive species: sunny and breezy for much of the afternoon.


The final chop up (well the second half of what we pulled out of the area we worked).

After about 4 hours of doing some hard work, we decided to scratch the final hour -- partly because of impending rain, partly because the tarp was completely filled with Japanese barberry, and partly (mainly perhaps) because we were dog-tired. Therefore, we went up to the caretakers' cabin and had some hamburgers and hotdogs (and lots and lots of water).


Don't we all look really tired? :D

I raced back (along with another helper) most of the way back to Saginaw Forest, mainly because we (well, me, anyway) were trying to beat the threatening rain.

In the end, it was a great day of physical exertion. The only thing that I hope is that I didn't get too much poison ivy.

UPDATE: I just calculated my average speed to and from Stinchfield Woods to be 17mph. A personal best for a distance greater than 10 miles. Maybe I will have to change out my handlebars for something that gives me better aerodynamics.

Feeling tired

These past few weeks - for some reason - have been rather fatiguing for me. There is the now-normal fatigue of cycling every day (well, "sprinting on my bike" would be a better description of how I like to ride), however, there is more to it than that: there is a mental fatigue that I am starting to have; a sort of malaise that is settling on me.

I've felt this way before, of course, and I know what it is. (Or at least I would like to think that I know what it is.) It's a feeling of settling, of being sedentary. Some people seem to revel in the point of staying in one place. However, the feeling of being settled is itself unsettling to me. Perhaps it is that I grew up moving all over the place. Perhaps I would have felt this way regardless of my upbringing.

A part of me yearns to take a trip to Chicago for the remainder of the weekend. Or maybe to Seville, Spain. I don't know. Just somewhere that isn't "here." Somewhere that isn't anywhere related to "here." A place, you know, that is just far enough away that I am not thinking that I need to return to "here"; to settle "here"; to just be "here".

Sometimes, I can trick myself by meeting new people; hanging out with them; absorbing myself in their lives. You know, traveling away from "here" in another way. I've been doing this my whole life, and meeting new people isn't such a chore for me most of the time (especially when it is done in English - Spanish is more difficult for me).

The rain doesn't help. The threat of rain helps even less. Today it was the latter together with the fulfillment of the former. Staying cooped up in the forest on such a day - when I am feeling more "stuck" than usual - isn't mentally healthy. And I think that this mental malaise is one of the reasons why I have been more fatigued than normal these days.

(Okay, so there are other things that I have thrown myself into - including another committee - but I doubt that any of these things are actually the source of my problems. Indeed, they may be a symptom of them; a desire to "branch out" to "get away" from my regular, slowly settling life.)

Grey days are, perhaps, good days to think about these things a little more deeply than one would normally contemplate. Still, Toronto also sounds like a lovely place to escape to/visit for a while.

Ann Arbor time lapse

Found this time-lapse video of Ann Arbor:

Ann Arbor from Seth McCubbin on Vimeo.

Long ride

In total, the ride was roughly 48 miles long.


Heading out from the campus


Yummy prune-filled cookie


"Fried cinnamon" pastry


Custard creme


Heading along Whitmore Lake Road


Buzzard tree


The trip -- which I'm counting as starting and finishing at my house -- went to the central campus, headed to Dexter along Huron River Drive (stopped at the Dexter Bakery for a little bit), headed north along Mast Road, turned right along Strawberry Lake Road until reaching Whitmore Lake, and then took Main Street/Whitmore Lake Road back to Ann Arbor, cut through Bandermer Park back to the central campus, and then back home.

Spring morning

Waking up today,
I catch the first morning song.
Birds sing in the spring.

Strange fauna in the forest

Sometimes, I have stumbled across some strange animals in the forest. "Strange" not in that the animal itself is strange, but rather "strange" in that they are not expected to be found in the forest (or at least a forest in Southeastern Michigan).

Last summer, there were feral cats, preceded in the winter by a Russian duck. Today, it was a peacock.

Going for a bike trip...

Up until now, the longest bike trip that I've made was 34 miles. Today, I'm going for 40 miles...

Wooden xylophone in the forest, operated by gravity

Only in Japan?



From Copyranter:

(via the New York Times) “We did not add any artificial music at all,” said Morihiro Harano, creative director at Japanese ad agency Drill, Inc. I find that nearly impossible to believe. The video is for the Touch Wood SH-08C, a phone with an encasement made from discarded wood (Was the xylophone also made from discarded wood?) It will be released by NTT Docomo in Japan later this year. The commercial was filmed in Kama City in Kyushu, Japan.

Yep: slower on studded tires

I just spent a whole lot of time working out whether I actually did ride my bike slower with my studded tires during the winter than on my road tires during the rest of the year. (Note: I ride only one bike, but I change the tires for the winter.)

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: Examining the GPS-gathered data from mid-January 2011 until the end of March 2011, I was able to make two datasets. From January 2011 until mid-February 2011, I was riding on studded tires, and since mid-March, I was riding on road tires.

The total distance traveled from mid-January until mid-February was almost identical to the total distance traveled from mid-March until the end of March. (Yes, I didn't ride as often whilst snow and ice covered the ground; best to be safe than sorry.) The average speed during Jan/Feb was 8.9 mph. However, the average speed during mid-to-end-March was 10.1 mph; 1.2 mph difference.

3.77 miles / 14mins 49sec = 15.3 mph

Going at this speed, I was able to make it to the ELI three minutes faster than the bike estimate on Google Maps (and at about the same time as it took the driver that I kept catching up with). I also passed two other cyclists (safely, in the bike lane).

Okay, so my total time for the 3.99 miles was 17 minutes and 15 seconds (13.9 mph), which is still pretty good for a commuter bike with two boxy panniers... and having to wait for a few stops.

Still, I'm happy.

Sometimes, rebuttals take time, while at other times, they almost write themselves.

In a recent post at Treehugger.com (entitled "What If Every Environmentalist is Actually Wrong?"), I saw some pretty blatant denialist rants.... and so I (of course) had to reply.

From a "ghendric":

In the 1970's global cooling was all the rage and we were going to throw ourselves into an ice age because we just wouldn't stop polluting.. Jump forward 40 yrs... Global warming is now the debate and we are all going to burn in a sudden flash of heat and then get put out by the rising water from all that melted ice from the polar poles.. You know, I've been around for a good 5 decades now and I know a scam when i see one. The truth of the matter is, it's really all about control. Those in high places think that we can't govern ourselves and that we are too ignorant to think that we can solve this on our own. Instead of offering solutions to "fix climate change", we get rules and regulations that prevent us from doing the right thing. All these rules and regulations do is weaken our country as a whole and makes us vulnerable. America is in a steady decline now because of these things. If they really wanted to fix the climate, they would do something about it instead making Al Gore filthy rich by buying his carbon credits. Buying carbon credits will not change the climate. All it does is make people poorer and Al Gore rich. Want to do the right thing? Expose Al Gore for the fraud he is. Give us real solutions.

To which I replied (spending time on each strange point raised, but not spending enough time on editing):

The "1970s were all about global cooling" is a canard. Anyone who has read anything objective about the politics of this topic can see through this point. You are either oblivious to it's outright falsehood or are consciously complicit in its spread.

"We are all going to burn in a sudden flash of heat..." is an acutely obvious straw man argument. No one credible has made this outrageous caricaturization of what global warming is. (Before you --- or anyone else --- says it, Al Gore didn't make this claim in his slide-show film. If you believe that he did, your memory has been affected by your personal biases. Go back and watch it again.)

Attacks against one specific person (Al Gore in in this case) is ad hominem and utterly fails to actually talk to the actual science of global warming. While I have no personal like or disdain for the former vice president, I really don't understand how vilifying him (specifically and repeatedly) actually helps do anything other than to create a (false) target for attack. Ad hominem attacks of this nature do nothing positive, advance no positive proposition, and appear to show a lack of insight of the situation by the person making the argument.

Randomly introducing a topic that was never discussed in the actual piece (which also happens to be framed in a red-herring manner) --- I'm talking about your sudden dropping of carbon credits into your comments --- but happen to have a tangential association with a solution that you then inveigh against without actually substantiating the basis for your annoyance. Beyond insinuating that this is "all about control" (by whom and for whom you never say, and I doubt that Al Gore --- as much as you appear to hate him --- is not the one seeking this control), you fail to back up your assertions (let alone provide an iota of evidence that you know what you are talking about when it comes to carbon credits).

You say that you've been around "for a good 5 decades now", but have you learned over that period of time how to actually make a genuine, intellectually honest and well-reasoned argument, or are you having an off day? I only ask because the evidence above seems to indicate that, while you have managed to cultivate good diction, in my opinion this is the only erudite facet of your entire comment.

(Note: this last paragraph, unlike ghendric's comments of Al Gore isn't an ad hominem attack, since I use evidence presented by ghendric to show how his --- I am assuming that ghendric is male --- comments demonstrably rely on false argumentation, are not each developed fully, and have been falsified repeatedly elsewhere. As opposed to ghendric's comments about Al Gore and carbon credits --- if one can make ad hominem attacks against non-human entities that ghendric appears to have reified --- which are --- to restate the above in slightly different terms --- based on intellectually dishonest, knee-jerk, multiply-debunked arguments that are maintained only through non-genuine argumentation of various forms of false logic.)

Following this, there was some more back-and-forth between ghendric and other commenters, with ghendric falling back on the "I'm older than you, so I'm right" argumentation that I find so confusing. If age were the determining factor of who was right, then my argumentation that I'm much older than his 10-year-old self who saw how global cooling was "all the rage" in the 1970s ought to be the only piece of "evidence" I need, especially since he later says, "I don't have to present any scientific evidence. I was there junior.. I know what happened." Yes, ghendric may have been there, but ghendric was 10 years old, while I am much older now (when I am looking at the evidence for global warming) than when he was looking at the evidence for global cooling, and (using his own logic), I don't have to present scientific evidence (or even rational reasoning, as I did) to be right.

Another commenter, Brian Ladwig, wrote the following one-sentence-per-paragraph post:

This cracks me up. There is no legitimate science behind climate change claims at ALL, PERIOD!!

There can be no legitimate scientific claims regarding climate change PERIOD!!

Why you ask? Because we do not have enough data, nor can we ever have enough data.

We have roughly 150 years or so of real pertinent climate data. The earth has exist for 4.5 BILLION years.

This means the data that we have to work with is ~.000000003% of the data that could exist had climate been recorded since day 1.

The ignorance of the "green" movement is unbelievable.

If global warming is true then why does Mars have atmosphere of 95% CO2 yet it does not warm noticeably faster than the earth?

Most green movement people do not even realize the REAL definition of a greenhouse gas. CO2 cannot be a greenhouse gas because it is a natural part of our environment and atmosphere.

The problem is the chicken little effect.

The brutal truth is, we are NOT crusading to save our environment. The planet was here billions of years before humans and will be here billions afterwards. Human existence is but a blink of an eye in the sands of time.

The fact of the matter is the GREEN movement is doing much more damage to humans than pollution ever has or ever will by destroying economies, dictating political importance and and creating division among human beings.

I am doing my part though, I only buy items packaged in disposable plastic packaging, I only buy bottled water, and I make sure I never own a vehicle that gets more than 20 MPG.

I leave every single light I have in or outside my house on 24/7 I keep my AC on 365 days a year set to 65 with the Windows open and I make sure absolutely NOTHING goes into a recycle bin.

Why is it that none of the green movement people ever talk about the fact that volcanic eruptions are the largest producers of CO2 on the planet.

Mt. St. Helens by all reasonable estimates released about 25% as much CO2 in a single eruption as humans have since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Let's talk facts here and not supposition based on ~0.000000003% of the actual data needed to determine what is going on.

"Where to begin with all of these?" was my first thought. However, I quickly realized that, whereas Brian just made axiomatic claims with no supporting evidence nor lines of argumentation, I could just re-word his post to make a similarly axiomatic "counter-argument", thusly:

This type of comment cracks me up. There is legitimate science behind climate change claims, PERIOD!!

There are legitimate scientific claims regarding climate change, PERIOD!!

Why you ask? Because we do have sufficient data, and we are continuing to accumulate more data.

We have roughly 150 years or so of real pertinent climate data. The earth has existed for 4.5 BILLION years, but has never had the impact of human activity until this final ~.000000003% of the existence of the earth.

The ignorance of the "skeptic" movement (read: "denialist") is unbelievable.

Since global warming is true, Mars (with its atmosphere of 95% CO2) is much warmer than it ought to be, considering its distance from the earth.

Most denialist movement people do not even realize the REAL definition of a greenhouse gas. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and is also a natural atmospheric constituent molecule.

The problem is the ostrich-in-the-sand effect.

The brutal truth is, we are NOT crusading to save our environment. The planet was here billions of years before humans and will be here billions afterwards. Human existence is but a blink of an eye in the sands of time, but could be a very short blink if we don't learn to adapt.

The fact of the matter is the DENIALIST movement is doing much more damage to humans than pollution ever has or ever will by destroying economies, dictating political importance and and creating division among human beings.

I am doing my part though, I only buy items with minimal packaging, don't buy bottled beverages, and I make sure I minimize my automobile use.

I turn off my lights when I'm not in the room, I don't use air conditioning, but leave the windows open (because I don't want to spend money heedlessly) and I make sure that as much as possible goes into a recycle bin.

Why is it that the skeptic movement people only ever want to talk about the fact that volcanic eruptions are the largest producers of CO2 on the planet, forgetting that there is a difference between constant and dispersed CO2 generation by people and temporally and spatially concentrated CO2 generation by volcanoes?

For example, Mt. St. Helens by all reasonable estimates released about 25% as much CO2 in a single eruption as humans have since the beginning of the industrial revolution, but did so over a much shorter period of time, and has effectively stopped doing so since, while humans continue to emit CO2 (and at an increasing global rate).

Let's talk facts here and not obfuscate and confuse actual data for misunderstandings of scale, source, and effect.

Sometimes, I really like it when people do most of the writing work, and all I have to do is copy-editing.

Finally, some people really make some strange arguments:

The last time we had a spate of "global warming" (CO2 1000ppm) the earth invented... chocolate.

Think long and hard before you think you've got it all down pat. Cooling, warming,... it's all changing all the time. How many peer-reviewed studies on global warming considered the totality of the variations in the input from... the sun?

I really didn't know what to make of this one. Was this commenter mistaking climate for weather? Was this an argument that we don't know what's happening because climate has changed in the past? Was this an argument that humans couldn't possible affect climate, but that it's all because of the sun? ... and what is this about the evolution of chocolate, anyway? Given so many choices, I decided to answer the "it's changing" canard, while also (later) having a go at the "evolution of chocolate" statement:

So... we don't need to worry because humans never caused global warming before, and so we can pretend that the conditions of a pre-human earth are somehow equivalent to today (even though there is plenty of evidence that we are the main reason for the release of CO2 into the atmosphere, a process that was PREVIOUSLY driven by the wobble of the Earth's axis, the arrangement of the continents, and the influence of the sun)?

... or are you saying that since global warming happened at the same time as the evolution of chocolate, more global warming would necessarily create the conditions under which more delectable delights would evolve?

UPDATE: I really wasn't that happy about that paragraph about Mars, so I added more stuff to round out the explanation:

Since global warming exists, Mars (with its atmosphere of 95.32% CO2) is much warmer than it would be, considering its distance from the sun, than if it had an atmospheric CO2 concentration more similar to that of earth's (~0.039%). However, the Martian atmosphere isn't being affected by increases in anthropogenic CO2 (since there are no humans on Mars releasing CO2) nor decreases caused by photosynthesis (since there are no plants on Mars utilizing CO2 to make sugars), and its surface temperatures are therefore affected by purely physical processes analogous to what affected the earth before the past ~.000000003% of earth's existence.