Climate change hoax believers insist humans have had NOTHING TO DO with their environment. So humans have no impact at all on the earth, right? Why are we here? Ineffective ciphers? That's it?

Thank you for your reply Carazaa and Happy Wednesday! :)

Thank you for your reply Durdle. How far in advance will we ever be able to predict earthquakes? As you know we in southern California have been told we are overdue for "the big one". How big  "the  big one" will be I don't know.

Oh golly Sharonna I had not heard that about Nugent. I know he is off his rocker which is appropriate for a rock n roller but a cruel pig murderer too? That seems over the top even for the likes of him. He has been strangely silent through this prez campaign cycle.  I kinda miss him as I missed Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair and humiliating himself. That's the stuff of memories! Thank you for your reply and Happy Wednesday! :)

For me, your three questions don't logically follow one from the other.

I know you well enough to know that you accept the science on global warming. So I must assume that your first question is sarcastic and hence does not seriously ask for an answer.

The second question can only be answered based on faith or lack thereof since there is no logical or empirical answer. Since I consider myself atheist I maintain that there is an explanation (science/evolution) but not a reason (purpose) for why we are here. I believe we must each create our own purpose. We don't actually need a reason for being or living - the body intrinsically wills it. So we function in a mentally and emotionally much healthier way if we accept the body's dictate for life and choose to live in a way that supports good health and happiness. Life's intrinsic purpose is itself, life.

Your third question perplexes me. You ask: "Ineffective cyphers?" It's not grammatically a question - I don't know exactly what the question means, what you are asking. So I try to guess. Cypher has two definitions; a secret or disguised way of writing; a code.; or 0, zero, nought, nil. So if a cypher is ineffective it is possibly one of two things, either it's not secret, not disguised, or it can't be decoded to make sense. In the one the meaning is clear, in the other the meaning is impossible to determine. So perhaps your question is asking whether there is a meaning for life. If so, it follows from the previous question and is related. And my answer is that we much each create our own meaning. Even those who are religious, for other than obeying God's will that we love one another as ourselves, we have no clues as to what meaning, if any, He ever intended.

"That's it?" Again I must guess from context. It suggests an unspoke or implied answer, that whatever reason, purpose or meaning there is in life, it is either non-existent or insufficient and unsatisfying.

Now take all these questions and refer them back to the initial statement and first question - something in them is related to what you believe about the purpose of humans for being on the planet.

Here's my guess - that when God chucked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and gave them dominion over all the animals, plants and life on Earth, that dominion implied not the right to exploit and destroy, but the obligation to be a caretaker - to take responsiblity for the balance and health of life and its ecosystems.

Is this your position, Rosie?

to peaceofmind50

Have you gone to the original sources of science on climate change to read the arguments on both sides?

And have you read the arguments on both sides against the position of the opponent?

And have you double-checked the sources of information and data quoted by the opposition?

My position is this and I have stated it here on Answermug a few times and on Answerbag before that for many years. I believe we are here to help one another, take care of one another and be useful to one another and be kind to one  another. In so doing the planet benefits. To the degree that we achieve that we are fulfilling our purpose. To the degree that we don't we aren't. Very simple.  There are those who believe that life is the result of randomness and there is no purpose other than what we need to impute to it. That is true of everything. Whatever we impute to anything is our reality . We are all on a journey to the same destination. We agree on that. We are all in the same boat like it or not.  If one is logical/resonable/sensible one realizes that success resides in working with one another..not against one another. Thus being helpful/useful/kind makes sense and being the opposite of those doesn't. That is what I think and always have for decades since I began trying to figure out why I am here. If I can be kind and helpful and useful to someone every day my purpose is being fulfilled every day. I could not ask for more than that, Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I think you read much more into my question than was there.  Happy Wednesday hartfire.

No, I'd not heard of Nugent massacring pigs like that either but the incident Sharonna mentions reminds me of accounts of wealthy Arabs doing something similarly vile to herds of wildlife in Africa - machine-gunning them from helicopters and calling it "sport hunting".

You asked a little further back about predicting earthquakes. They are notoriously difficult to predict in both time and intensity, and about the nearest possible is warning of a possible imminent earthquake. Parts of California overlie one of the world's most tectonically active regions, where a large area of the Pacific Ocean's floor is slipping below the continent, with the situation complicated by a lateral shearing movement. Trying to calculate accurately any sort of future slip in such a region must be almost impossible. 

You may remember a few years ago the appalling injustice in Italy when that country's geological service warned of an impending 'quake but estimated it would be less severe than it really was - so the State prosecuted the senior seismologists it thought responsible!

That is grotesque Durdle! Where is the "sport" in that? As you may know I live in southern California and we have a lot of faults (both literally and figuratively), the worst one of which is the San Andreas I believe. So we wait. Thank you for your reply Durdle and Happy Thursday. Can you envision a day when there will be a way to predict them?  What would it take? Pressure builds up for awhile before an earthquake hits to relieve it, right? Is there a tipping point that when reached makes  an earthquake inevitable? Prosecuting seismologists for being wrong seems wrong to me. That would be like prosecuting meteorologists .

No sport at all - just showing off to each other by people with little or no concept of humanity.

You are right - earthquakes are rock-on-rock slips, where the friction is so great it takes a long time for the pressure driving them to build up sufficient stress for the movement to occur. This is the tipping-point, at which the accumulated stress is finally enough to overcome the friction.

The rock behaves a bit like a spring: it is compressed then releases suddenly.

Most of the most violent earthquakes occur deep in the Earth, between the sinking sea-floor slab of Crust against the Continental crust above it. However, faults like the San Andreas are fractures within the continent itself, and there the rock on one side slides past the other. 

Prediction? Well, the world's seismologists and geo-physicists are doing their best to solve that problem, but I don't see a time when earthquakes - and volcanic eruptions - can be predicted very far in advance. So far warnings rely on detecting small tremors and movements increasing towards that tipping-point. 

(The most violent, explosive eruptions as we see around the Pacific and Mediterranean are later stages in the same processes that bring the earthquakes.)    

The Italian matter seems to reflect an aspect of Continental European justice principles sometimes called the Napoleonic Code, that if anything goes wrong it is automatically someone's fault, and the accused has to prove his or her innocence, rather than the prosecution having to prove its accusation. The case against the Italian geologists is rather similar to the more recent one against a German railway signalman whose error sent two trains into ahead-on collision on a single-track railway. In both cases, no-one appears to have asked the right questions, probably because most politicians and lawyers are to quick to find "answers" and scapegoats to avoid asking the right questions in the first place.

I don't know the outcome of the railway case; but both lots of prosecutors seem to have failed to ask one very simple question in each: respectively, can earthquakes be predicted accurately, and were the railway signals interlocked at all, to protect against simple human error? 

We see similar unjust accusations hurled about in the wake of serious problems in the UK: journalists, politicians and senior managers hurl public abuse at hapless low-ranking employees without stopping to analyse why the problem really occurred. If a subsequent inquiry does establish the truth, it is then abused publicly if the truth is not the "right" answer.

And no-one "wins".  

@ Durdle, I seriously admire the way you get right to the essence of things so directly.

Thank you very much, Hartfire!

Thank you once again Durdle for a very thoughtful, thorough and useful analysis. I guess "they" do the best they can and hopefully that "best" will keep getting better and better and better ! :)