I'm not quite sure that Chernobyl is a liberals v. conservatives thing. I don't recall anyone thinking that vastly increased radiation is a good and/or natural thing (although zero radiation may be a bad thing, because the body's repair mechanisms never get triggered, and evolution may be slowed down). Even pro-nuke people fully expected a Chernobyl-type incident, because the Chernobyl-type reactors fail in very bad ways. So the bad guys here were _communists_, not conservatives. Is someone here suggesting that there are nasty Chernobyl-type causes of global warming? Perhaps something going on in Area 51 in Nevada? The problem with global warming is that the Earth is a very complex system involving many negative-feedback loops (the good kind, if you want to keep things more-or-less constant). The Gaia hypothesis says that life itself has modified the Earth's environment to better favor life and buffer it from severe attacks from space in the form of radiation, changes in the Sun's output, asteroids, etc. If we took the arguments of the tree-huggers to their ultimate conclusion, we would get rid of all oceans and all trees and all oxygen to put the Earth back to its "natural" state -- something more akin to Mars/Venus/the Moon. Perhaps Mars was the Sierra Club's/Earth First's original success? It is now becoming clear that "preserving forests from fire" is worse than self-defeating, as well as entirely unnatural. Those of us who live in the West which has been devastated by fires know first-hand how the delusions of these East Coast tree-huggers have been killing off the forests in ways far worse than any logging could possibly have done. Instead of the mild fire every 10-20 years, we now have nuclear winter-type forest fires caused by 100 years of "suppression". It now appears that a proper way to deal with forest fires might be to lay out a geometric grid pattern of some type, color it with 6-8 colors, and then burn the part of the forest of that color each 6-8 years _on purpose_. If properly laid out, the burns of previous years would be natural firebreaks, and by burning on a shorter schedule, it wouldn't be possible to build up enough fuel to get the temperatures so hot as to kill all the larger trees -- e.g., the sequoias. Such smaller, cooler burns also recover much faster -- usually within 1 year. If you want to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide produced by such burns, then perhaps the best thing to do would be to carefully log them first, so there is less to burn. The one thing you won't be able to do using any technology available for the next 100 years is to stop forest fires entirely. We've proved that conclusively -- they still occur, they still put just as much CO2 into the atmosphere, but they are completely uncontrolled. *** This is not a human activity. These fires have been going on for hundreds of millions of years. Get over it. *** At 10:06 AM 1/19/2004, John Conway wrote:
I well remember being in England about 20 years ago when the whole of Western Europe was suddenly very much concerned at the rapid rise in radioactivity that we later learned was the result of an accident at Chernobyl in Russia (but now Ukraine once again).