There's a chemical abundant in our society today that doesn't get enough attention. It's called Dihydrogen Monoxide. Here's a fact sheet about its dangers from this awareness web site. Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment. Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:- Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
- Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
- Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
- DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
- Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
- Contributes to soil erosion.
- Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
- Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
- Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
- Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
- Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks.
- Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S.
- Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
That's alarming, and yet this substance is used globally, unchecked. In fact, many corporations make money from its use.This scandalous chemical... well, it's common to you. In fact, you need it to live. It's water. Yep - good ol' H2O. Di (two) hydrogen Mon (one) oxide. Two hydrogen, one oxygen. Water. Yes, the web site given above is a spoof. But my goodness, what a lot of heavy breathing. How easy it is to use the proper buzzwords - corporations, death, contamination, etc - and bring people to a stupid cause without using their heads and without asking the right questions. Take a look at this Penn and Teller video, in which a young woman in their employ goes to an environmental rally and gets hundreds of the people there to sign a petition against Dihydrogen Monoxide. Now, me personally, I don't have an opinion about global warming. I really don't. I don't have enough facts, and despite Al Gore's presentation in his movie, there are enough folks presenting just as many facts discounting his presentation. Gore repeatedly labels carbon dioxide as "global warming pollution" when, in reality, it is no more pollution than is oxygen. CO2 is plant food, an ingredient essential for photosynthesis without which Earth would be a lifeless, frozen ice ball. The hypothesis that human release of CO2 is a major contributor to global warming is just that - an unproven hypothesis, against which evidence is increasingly mounting.In fact, the correlation between CO2 and temperature that Gore speaks about so confidently is simply non-existent over all meaningful time scales. U of O climate researcher Professor Jan Veizer demonstrated that, over geologic time, the two are not linked at all. Over the intermediate time scales Gore focuses on, the ice cores show that CO2 increases don't precede, and therefore don't cause, warming. Rather, they follow temperature rise - by as much as 800 years. Even in the past century, the correlation is poor; the planet actually cooled between 1940 and 1980, when human emissions of CO2 were rising at the fastest rate in our history. So again, don't know. But what would be great is if we got some irrefutable facts on the table, rather than half-facts, as the chart Gore gives in his movie does. He shows a period of 650,000 years and says that a rise in CO2 is tied inextricably to a rise in temperature, his argument being that "greenhouse gasses" will bring about global warming. But if you break that chart down and look at the years in smaller increments, as the scientist quoted in the above article explains, temperature rise always precedes CO2 increase. Take a look... I got this chart from this guy, who puts the facts on the table. Kudos to him. Gore's movie may have many things right. Don't know. Environmentalists might be right about global warming and other ecological maladies facing us. Don't know. But a bit of healthy skepticism and fact-checking is certainly in order before we hop on the groupthink train and let ourselves be alarmed about things we don't know. Too many people, on all sides of the political spectrum, approach crap from "authorities" uncritically. As a result, folks might actually, you know, petition against water - catastrophic substance though it is. |
