Walter

It is the same as with any other species. To eat, mate and avoid predators.

Volcanoes and meteorites of part of geological and astronomical processes which are billions of years old. We are talking about seven orders of magnitude compared to industrial humans.

What standard? I would say a scientific standard. The Industrial Revolution is 1/32,000,000th of Earth's history. But we teach elementary school children that the modern version of the human species is a major variable in the geology of the planet.

Acme, A scientific perspective is what I was attempting. And there have been references to fiscal restraint in many of the comments. Two family members would easily describe me as insane. National Debt (independent of which party is in power) 1976 0.6 trillion 2014 17 2020 21 plus or minus 2025 24 Administrative costs for charity, 1971, $7000 contributed per poor family per year: 1000 to family 86% 2000 71 3000 57 4000 43 5000 29 6000 14 7000 0

With respect to the government helping people, Still a teenager in the Fall of 1971, I was sitting in a college chemistry lab and picked up a newspaper. I was never a reader of news, but noticed an article about the federal budget on the front page. I was skimming over the article when I got to the part about welfare. Ten percent of the population was living in poverty and ~$45 billion was budgeted to help them. Well, I had to “translate”, so I took out my pencil and quickly did some arithmetic. 200 million times 0.1, divided by 4 for number of families, divided into the ~45 billion. I came up with ~$7000 per family. I immediately knew something was wrong because that Spring a senior chemistry major had been offered a job in industry for $7400 per year. There were a lot of zeros on that page and I immediately concluded that I was off by an order of magnitude. I messed up somewhere with canceling out all those zeros. I repeated the arithmetic several times with no change. I even went to the calculator room (isn’t that funny, a calculator room) and sat down at one of the electromechanical Monroe calculators. These calculators weighed ~30 pounds. Well, no difference in the arithmetic. I knew that $70,000 was unlikely, so I thought about $700 per family per year. That seemed too low but more reasonable since the poor were still poor. After doing the calculations in reverse, I concluded that the $7000 number was indeed correct. Still being afraid I missed something, I took that sheet home for Thanksgiving and went downstairs where the resident mathematician/electrical engineer spent most of his time. Dad glanced at the sheet for about 15 seconds and nodded. All correct. I think a discussion about helping those in poverty should start in 1971, or better yet, 1964. Because we are scientists (analytical chemist for me), we should try to stick to numbers (population, percentages, dollars) and any other pertinent data. Here is one way to look at the above numbers. If each poor family received $1000 per year, there was an administrative cost of 86%. We can ignore dollars per year per poor family and look only at welfare as a percent of gross domestic product in 1971. However, I would still be interested in knowing who ended up with that $6000. Here is an analogy. Think of food as a total dollar amount or percent of income. It might sound acceptable until you discover that my children are fed 300 calories per day and my wife and I eat the remainder.

I should have left out the sentence containing emotion, including my own emotional description of my spending habits as anti-American. It was uncalled for, but the 1970s were emotional times. Do you have any thoughts about my spending habits? I think it is interesting that in the 1960s, we had professionals purchasing homes they had no business purchasing and then going to a small corner store to bounce checks. And that was when there were rules for obtaining home loans. Do you find that information just a little bit interesting? And this was 45 years before the recent real estate collapse. What do you think of the fact that I severely limit my mortgage interest deduction and hurt the bank’s profitability? Do you have any comment on Holt’s 2nd paragraph? The current debt is 28 times what it was in 1976. I could ask you what I recently asked my sister - at what debt level would you and I come to common ground? $20 trillion? $25 trillion? I got no answer. Why is that? There has to be common ground at some dollar figure. However, we can easily agree on a maximum for renting an Ocean City condo. And there, surprise (or not), is the answer. She is paying part of that rent in a private transaction. She is writing a personal check to me which she knows better be good. Her withheld federal tax is somehow an entirely different thing. This might not the best analogy, but I like it. That money withheld by her employer must be a different species, similar to the fundamentalist who sees the human as totally different from the monkey. They have no similarity at all. The tax money, like the monkey, is of a different kind. I did not intend to violate forum rules. I give readers of atheist and science forums a little credit. Searching “Thomas Sowell” and “Walter Williams” takes a few seconds, like searching “Richard Dawkins” or “Christopher Hitchens”. Reading some of their work is what takes time. If you still need links, I will find a couple for you.

It is a perfect analogy. It was about 1962 when I went with my father to cash a check at a local store. The owner told Dad he was no longer cashing checks. Dad asked why and the owner simply said “Magothy Woods”. My father nodded in understanding and it was my first lesson in the consequences of living beyond one’s means. That subdivision was made up of 2-car garages (can you imagine?). Probably half of these new homeowners could not figure out what was going to happen when moving out of their small houses in and around Baltimore. In 1984, my wife and I, being horrible Americans, made a down payment of $25000 on our $75000 house (What the hell?). With our current house, we lowered the down payment to 25% and took out a mortgage which was 36% of the bank’s pre-approval amount. Can you think of anything more anti-American? I could link to a bunch of articles by Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, but would it serve any purpose? Instead, I will leave you with these thoughts. Today we ask whether the noble American experiment in freedom is dissolving into a new tyranny, in which omnipotent government engulfs us all in a smothering embrace with ceaseless murmurs about what is good for us. Seventy million taxpayers in the productive sector of the economy are compelled to support government payments of one sort or another to 80 million recipients. Some 44 percent of the federal budget is allocated for grants to individuals. The federal government in the 1976 fiscal year spent approximately $80 billion more than its revenues, borrowing and printing cheap money to cover the deficit. The value of the dollar has declined 25 percent in the past three years. Our national debt has exceeded $600 billion, and interest payments alone cost us more than $100 million a day. Our children and grandchildren will be paying for today’s extravagance. (1) (1) The Case Against the Reckless Congress, Marjorie Holt (1976).

Two points: 1. There was a debate between a man who believes that a supernatural being created a planet and another man who believes that a mammalian species living on the surface of that planet controls the climate. So, there was a debate between two theologians. How nice. 2. In the 1950s the “scientific” community began to throw out human evolution at the behest of vegetarians, concluding that saturated animal fat was bad for our species. In the 1970s, the United States Government gave its stamp of approval to this belief system, culminating in today’s MyPlate of the USDA, where it is recommended that humans obtain 75% of their calories from plant food. And that same “scientific” community wants to lecture Old Testament literalists. Great. The “scientific” community should look closely at its own belief systems before worrying about those who believe in the Book of Genesis.

Debating carbon dioxide plots, “peer reviewed” literature and academic qualifications reminds me of Dawkins and Hitchens debating proponents of intelligent design (thousands of hours spent discussing how the supernatural world made no natural sense). Since funding for studying the Book of Genesis is private, I never understood how they could spend so much time discussing and writing about that 2000 year old text. As with climatologists, I do not expect creationists to see the light of science anytime soon. Now, if intelligent design was receiving billions of taxpayer dollars, think of how much fun it would be to argue physics, chemistry, geology and evolution with all those creation scientists sitting in universities and government. Think of all the complexity plots, the peer reviewed papers published in the theology intelligent design journals, the PhDs in creation science, all supported by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the public education system, PBS, NPR, National Geographic, Scientific American and the United States Congress. Fun indeed.

Paragraph 1 is really all that has to be stated. We could study human development of the Atlantic coast and make projections about continental drift, of course with the usual qualifiers of might, could, possibly and maybe, thereby making a mockery of science in general and geology in particular.

I think you are wise to be skeptical of anthropogenic global warming. When government and university scientists attempt to frighten you, skepticism is a reasonable response. A degree in chemistry, physics, or geology is not required.