Radar Map of Buried Mars Layers Confirms Climate Cycles 114
Matt_dk writes "A radar instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has essentially looked below the surface of the Red Planet's north-polar ice cap, and found data to confirm theoretical models of Martian climate swings during the past few million years. The new, three-dimensional map using 358 radar observations provides a cross-sectional view of the north-polar layered deposits. 'The radar has been giving us spectacular results,' said Jeffrey Plaut of JPL, a member of the science team for the Shallow Radar instrument. 'We have mapped continuous underground layers in three dimensions across a vast area.'"
Old news (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Unacceptable--this threatens Gore's bottom line (Score:4, Insightful)
actually, this is evidence that climatologists' theoretical models work.
I'm not interested unlesss it confirms my views (Score:4, Insightful)
Swinging back our way (Score:2)
I can't wait until Mars warms up and gets some moisture. I'm already flipping through astronomy stores for telescopes that will let me watch the penguins from here.
Re:Swinging back our way (Score:4, Funny)
Mars is as warm as it's going to get. There are no pirates there, so it can't get any warmer by losing pirates.
Gratuitous Global Warming Comment (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Gratuitous Global Warming Comment (Score:5, Informative)
No true believers are required.
Unlike the Earth (which has a big Moon to anchor things), Mars has huge variations [imcce.fr] in insolation due to its obliquity and eccentricity cycles. These oscillations drive large variations in climate, which causes the cool layering [arizona.edu] in the Martian Polar Caps - the so called North Polar Layered Deposits [arizona.edu]. There are lots [arizona.edu] of cool pictures [arizona.edu] of these layers.
While it is true that both the Earth and Mars would exhibit climate changes if the solar luminosity changed, so far I have not heard of any evidence requiring this from Mars. Mars's internal and orbital dynamics are quite enough to keep the climate modelers busy.
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And does that explain the warming noticed on Jupiter, Titan, Pluto and various asteroids to name a few?
Not saying there is no anthropogenic impact on climate -- I'm just saying it's total impact may be over stated and contributing to an already occurring phenomenon.
I certainly HOPE we have the ability to effect climate as much as claim. Living in a hot, jungle world or a cold ice world have little appeal to me. And since those climates have occurred in our past, we can assume they will most likely recur a
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There are several hypotheses regarding the warming observed on Mars and Pluto [newscientist.com].
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And?
What I'm hearing you say is that there are non-solar theories to explain these warming trends on these planets, et al.
Triton (weird mix up) is not thought to be warming due to "changes in it's surface reflectivity", but possibly due to it's rotation cycle (it's "summer" there).
Mars, as stated, is theorized to be, at least in part, due to it's rotational anomalies. We also have slight variations in earths obliquity -- and precession. What are the effects of sum
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I read it as "Beware gee-libe answers to complex phenomena" as well. Too much C/Make in my past, too.
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Or you can, you know, do math.
Apply the inverse sqr law to the rise in temperature and how it would impact the temperature change on ifferent planets.
Also not if it was the sun it would be happening to ALL bodies in the solar system, and it is not.
Next.
Yes, we are experience and increased global changed due to the millions of tons of CO2 we spew into the air every day.
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Lets assume you are correct. Who's to say a warmer earth is bad? It wasn't long ago we were told we were heading in to a new ice age. Climate cycles actually suggest we are (were) heading down that path. Wouldn't we WANT to warm the earth?
Ice age aside, wouldn't an increased crop growth durations help battle famine? Who's to say the effects will have a negative impact? Lets study the impact rather than demand we do stuff that will destroy not just the developed worlds economy, but potentially starve mi
Re:Gratuitous Global Warming Comment (Score:5, Informative)
First, you are aware that the solar output (Solar Constant) has been measured since the 1970's ? There is no need to look at distant worlds to see if it is changing - it varies around at about the 0.1 % level [nasa.gov].
Second, I would not put any weight on observations of any body we have not observed for more than one orbit - and that includes Pluto and (for climate) Titan. These are not simple bodies.
The general cause of Pluto's warming is well known - a highly elliptical orbit, and it's near (just past) perigee, where it outgases Methane into the atmosphere. That's one of the motivations behind Pluto Express (to get there while there is still a bigger atmosphere). It is staying warm past perigee, but we have no idea if that is normal or not. Similarly, Titan is passing through the equinox (just as we are here on Earth), and that is causing seasonal change. We know that's happening; we have no idea if what we are seeing is normal or not.
Jupiter is so different from the Earth or Mars that I wouldn't use it as an analogy for anything terrestrial, good or bad. (For example, it generates more heat internally than it gets from the Sun.) Having said that, I had not heard of any warming reported there, so a link would be welcomed.
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...and it's near (just past) perigee ...
Minor quibble: if you're talking about orbital distance from the sun, I think you may actually mean perihelion [google.com] or periapsis [google.com].
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Indeed. perigee is for Earth orbits.
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First, you are aware that the solar output (Solar Constant) has been measured since the 1970's ? There is no need to look at distant worlds to see if it is changing - it varies around at about the 0.1 % level.
Well 0.1% can vary quite a bit too... I mean just looking at percentages the bigger something is the more it will vary by.
For Example
0.1% of 1000 = 1
0.1% of 1,000,000 = 10,000
The former is pretty small change, the latter is a potentially huge change.
Doesn't Speak to Climate Change Here on Earth (Score:3, Insightful)
The existence of natural climate change on Mars does not rule out anthropogenic climate change on Earth. The shifts in temperature on Mars happened over periods of hundreds of thousands of years. The climate change we're observing on earth has happened in less than 100 years. There's a huge difference between the two phenomena.
Natural Climate Change on *Earth* ... (Score:2)
... doesn't even particularly speak to whether or not there can also be anthropogenic climate change on Earth. Natural mechanisms don't preclude human influence.
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Climate changes have been happening on Earth for far longer than 100 years...
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You're full of shit.
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The existence of natural climate change on Mars does not rule out anthropogenic climate change on Earth.
More importantly, The existence of natural climate change on Earth does not rule out anthropogenic climate change on Earth, even if certain people keep claiming just that.
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Sure. [www.ipcc.ch]
Interesting. That's not a citation, merely a pointer to an organisation whose mandate it is to report on climate change. From your link:
The preparation of the AR5 pursues the overall mandate of the Panel, the main activity of which is to prepare at regular intervals of five to seven years comprehensive assessment reports about climate change.
If this were mandate by Bush & Co., /.ers would be all over it, pointing out, and rightfully so, that an organisation whose mandate it is to report on something necessarily has a vested interest in it, because if the underlying item being reported on went away or proved fraudulent, then the organisation would also go away.
That said, the URL you point to doesn't actual
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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090903-arctic-warming-ice-age.html [nationalgeographic.com]
On the graph, can you see the slow decline in temperatures until about 1900, when temperatures suddenly switched to rising rapidly?
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A citation at least. One that can be debated as to its correctness or applicability. Being a single location, especially at one end of the planet, it's hard to correlate it to the rest of the planet.
More global citations may include here [longrangeweather.com] or here [wikipedia.org], both of which throw some concern on taking your citation as the ultimate word.
Basically, for a theory to hold as correct and significant, it must surpass the noise in its environment. Here, anthropogenic sources of global climate change need to surpass the noise
wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Um, this is the arctic. When you melt that ice, the sea level will remain unchanged.
false. There is a density difference between salt water and 'regular' frozen water. The fact that you don't even know this basic 101 level science really disqualifies you from having any real interpretation of the facts.
Get some sea wter, put it o a glace add some ice cubes and mark the line. See where it is after it melts.
"But, again, we need to talk about significance."
as well as every glacier on the planet.
It doesn't take
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There is a density difference between salt water and 'regular' frozen water.
Fair enough.
Get some sea wter [sic], put it o [sic] a glace add some ice cubes and mark the line. See where it is after it melts.
Seeing as pure water has a density of 1.000 g/mL while the salt water has a density of approximately 1.025 g/mL (according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] - Stephen Colbert may have put in wrong info there, I don't know), if you have 50mL (51.25g) of salt water, add 1mL (1g) of non-salted ice, it'll displace its weight, 1g, in salt water (0.976mL) until melted at which point it's now 1mL of water, or a gain of ~2.4% vs the ice (no, that's not entirely accurate, but is close enough). I'd have to see much bigger nu
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That first graph utterly contradicts all other sources I've seen. I highly doubt its accuracy.
As to the second graph, the scale is so compressed that it's very difficult to see that the current warming trend over the past several decades is an order of magnitude faster than past warming. A warming of a few degrees Celsius over 200 years would ap
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and tell me, does every year a lot of ice/snow melt from mountains/flat plains, near rivers and ski fields and melts and flows to the rivers?
even the size of the ice shelf changes by X size each winter/summer periods, do we see water levels increasing each summer?
and no north hemi water doesnt flow fast to the south hemi.
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More global citations may include here [longrangeweather.com]
They draw a graph (from the gut it seems), with volcanic events all over, often when the graph crosses the Zero line in either direction, and they conclude that volcanoes (together with "decresed solar radiation" for which they have no data) are responsible for long-time cooling?
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Of course the IPCC counts. It's a compilation of all the scientific data. It's a good report that has been signed off on by all the major countries, including countries whose best interest is in there not being abrupt climate change due to mans CO2 releases.
I suspect if I link the study you wouldn't except that becasue it doesn't actually ahve the evidence, just a bunch of measurements.
Quite frankly, you you are still dening it, your mind will never change until after you ahve taken your last breath of brea
Too many humans, too many farms. (Score:1)
Things arent that dire fool.
The planet has been in 100x worse conditions in the past and rebounded.
You know the real problem ? yes its man made, but its NOT climate change.
Its OVER FARMING, using too much water from water ground tables and from rivers leaving just a trickle. Massive amounts of water is wasted growing rice in dry areas, and growing STUPID cotton where canabis is 100x better - (stupid twit govts)
So dude, what happens when you over use water, less evaporates and less turns to clouds where less
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Re: (Score:1, Troll)
"It probably won't be more than 20 years before it's obvious to everyone"
That sums up most of the climataphobes case. Some conjecture based on short term observations. Go build another model, alright?
NOTE: I built a lot of models as a kid, but that doesn't qualify me as a marine engineer, an automotive engineer, or even an aviation engineer. Building climate models doesn't qualify anyone to do anything more than to build models.
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FYI most of the fish with Mercury warnings are Ocean going top level predators (Tuna, Swordfish, Whale etc).
The vast majority of Mercury in the Ocean comes from underwater volcanoes.
In other words Tuna and Whale has always had a fair amount of Mercury in it.
There are local areas with Mercury issues, but those fish aren't sold commercially.
And I'm guessing you are wrong about CO2 sequestration not catching the Mercury.
Anything that catches more then a tiny fraction of CO2 will need to cool the exh
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Is that what that metalic smell taste is? I hate that from fresh market fish.
Well its probably more amonia bleechy smell, its hard to narrow down, but its not
yummy.
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The ammonia taste is common with shark it occurs very quickly with dogfish for example if you don't skin them shortly after they die.
maybe your fresh fish isn't as fresh as you'd like it to be. buy it to cook it later the same day ideally.
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Define "accurate". Also note if there is any change in accuracy over those 250+ years. Also note if there is any change in scope in the same time period (how many locations recording temperatures, which continents, how often temperatures are recorded). Also note in your definition whether any recording stations have substantial environment changes, such as moving from one side of a city to another (especially from up-wind to down-wind), or such as encroaching civilisation resulting in massive amounts of
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30% yeah ? and this pidly tiny increase in temp which could be caused by massive deforrestation or even the sun ?
Bring it on, we can double the c02 again, who cares....
Tell me why Goldman Sachs is the big pusher for c02 trading, they dont care, but they will make billions in profits. in in their interest, in billions to make sure the false pretence is alive.
After all, its their DUTY to share holder to make sure they keep making billions.
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Technically we're considered to be in an ice age now [wikipedia.org]. Ice ages [wikipedia.org] consist of glacial and interglacial periods (marked by advance and retreat of ice sheets and glaciers). What ended 10000 years ago was the most recent glacial period. We may well be seeing the end of the current ice age (so this "interglacial" might more properly be called a "postglacial" period?).
Yes, I realize that in colloquial usage, "ice age" refers to the glacial periods only.
This was confirmed in 2002 (Score:5, Interesting)
While these results are cool, the obliquity cycle was confirmed in 2002, in a paper in Nature, Orbital forcing of the martian polar layered deposits [nature.com] by Jacques Laskar et al., They used pictures of the layering at the edge of the polar caps, not radar, but its basically the same idea, and they showed good correlation with recent obliquity cycles.
Again, it's cool to see these layers throughout the caps, but I don't think that anyone has doubted the connection with the obliquity / insolation cycles for a while.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I have not the slightest doubt that Nathaniel Putzig and company know all about these earlier results - but, once you get the PR people involved, they always want to say, first, confirmed, etc.
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How dare you bring an actual scientific response to google! You should, instead, include some of the more responsable slashdot responses:
1. Did it locate the marsian death camps.
2. In soviet mars, the climate cycles you.
3. Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
4. Profit
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you forgot:
-1(offtopic): first post!
0: But does it run linux?
and...
3.5: ???
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"Confirm" is perhaps the wrong word. Each new discovery adds to the strength or the likelihood of a hypothesis, which is never 100% in this business. It's not Boolean.
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I agree - most of this is PR, which can be ignored.
To me, the interesting thing is that these layers is that they do not represent a very long history. From Laskar et al. (2002) [nature.com]
For the best fit between the radiance profile and the simulated insolation parameters, we obtain an average deposition rate of 0.05 cm yr-1 for the top 250 m of deposits on the ice cap of the north pole of Mars.
Now, 5 x 10^-4 meters / year means that the top 250 meters represents ~ 500,000 years, and the entire 2 km thick cap represe
News from the Council (Score:2, Funny)
The Council of Elders has declared tomorrow a day of commemoration. K'breel, Speaker for the Council, spake thus:
"By Gfa'rdmn, a little over half a year ago, our forces celebrated victory [slashdot.org] over the plumb-bob-waving monstrosity from the North, having slowly chilled it to death. The Invader from the Plains sits enmired [spaceflightnow.com] in our sandpit. The Twin by the Crater has begun to stir, but it stood paralyzed by fear for sixty days [marsdaily.com] by the mere sight of the spent husk of a Kinetic Bombardment Force component."
"So th
Just one question (Score:1)
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Its the dry season. Rainy season ended a couple million years ago.
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Its the dry season. Rainy season ended a couple million years ago.
Depends on where you are. Most of the current climate models have the eastern part of North America getting wetter as the temperature rises, while the western part gets drier. The American South just got a week-long dose of that pattern, and there have been lots of news stories about the growing drought in most of the Southwest.
Yes, it has all happened before, and it'll happen again. OTOH, we are reaching a level of understanding that sugg
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woosh?
I was referring to mars. The martians know its the dry season because it has not rained in a few million years.
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Yeah; all them Martians should move to California. They'd have more water than they've ever seen.
Hmmm ... Maybe they have. Maybe that's why we don't find them on Mars.
But I wonder how they survive the summer heat? It gets well above the melting point of ice in California in the summer.
Notes on Mars (Score:1)
The polar ice cap is 1 million cubic kilometers of water ice. Martian surface gravity is .375 g. Escape velocity is just over 5 kilometers per second. Summer temps are up to 20C. At 1.5 A.U., solar power is about 1/2 that of Earth per square measure. Mars has two moons ripe for mining.
Nobody owns it yet.
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Antarctica has wintertime temps below -89C, there is no existent infrastructure. But it doesn't have a location for a base with a planetary escape velocity of 186MPH starting from a base less than .4 G's.
Water is liquified oxygen, with a little hydrogen mixed in. Ice makes a nice airtight structure, and it's opaque to solar wind.
Mars is also right next to the asteroid belt. It's a natural base for the people who will build our interstellar ships.
The moon has water too apparently and getting free of it
So that's where they come from (Score:3, Funny)
Radar Map of Buried Mars Lawyers Confirms Climate Cycles
Cue the morons (Score:2)
Jumping in and blithering about how this disproves global warming.
Guys, we have had climate cycles and ice ages here on Earth as well. They're normal. Global warming is not the same thing.
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A re-education officer will be along shortly to your location.
Re:Global Warming (Score:5, Informative)
The newspeak term for that now is "global climate change".
A re-education officer will be along shortly to your location.
Actually, that term was widely held in contempt by the scientific community until it was noted that the term "global warming" actually confuses the issue because climate change doesn't evenly modify the temperature of our climate. In fact, some areas of the globe have cooled of late, but that has little bearing on the global mean temperatures, nor on the localized warming in key areas such as the Arctic. So, much as you may not like the political origins of the term, there's a reason that the media AND the scientific community is using it so widely, now.
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"global warming" actually confuses the issue because climate change doesn't evenly modify the temperature of our climate. In fact, some areas of the globe have cooled of late
That's a stupid thing to say. Globally the temperature effectively rises, that's the main trait of the change being talked about. But a number of cretins out there can't see that "global" doesn't imply "uniform". That it gets colder in some places is irrelevant.
By the way, in France it was always called "climate warming" (le rechauf [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Back when I was at school those who pointed out how closely the shapes of the continents match either side of the Atlantic were considered dumbasses, because obviously big things like continents couldn't possibly move. That was the scientific concensus, until some of the results started coming in from the International Geophysical Year. (1957...I'm dating myself here aren't I)
Anthropomorphic Global Warming/Global Climate Change may or may not be happening but concensus does not mean shit in science. Evidenc
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The reason why consensus forms in the first place is usually because of evidence. It doesn't always end up being right, but for every consensus overturned by a daring rebel, there are probably 100 that boringly end up being correct after all. Because scientists didn't come to a consensus for the hell of it, they came to one because the evidence was persuasive to most of the people working on the problem.
(And the objection wasn't simply "obviously big things can't move". It was because nobody, including t
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Translation : Sometimes people are wrong. Therefore let's dismiss anything we don't like as potentially wrong.
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global mean temperatures
I wish someone would tell me how you compute the mean temperature of a composite substance like the atmosphere.
Global atmospheric heat content is meaningful. Global mean temperature is not. Unless someone would care to explain how you actually compute it in a physically meaningful way?
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This sounds similar to the arguments presented in a 2007 paper [uoguelph.ca] that's widely [realclimate.org] considered to be some kind of joke [blogspot.com].
Perhaps you mean that different substances have different heat capacities. That's only a problem if you want to d
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I was actually thinking of that guy in Colorado (Peilke?) who has long argued that global atmospheric heat content is what we should be talking about. A quick skim doesn't convince me the Essex et al paper is a joke, and an equally quick skim of the replies to it don't convince me the responders have even understood the fundamental physical basis for Essex et al's argument.
You are correct that heat is only one form of internal energy, although physicists have a slightly different take on the nature of heat
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Looked around for Pielke's work mentioning heat content and found this [climatesci.org]. Is that a good reference? I agree that internal energy of the Earth is a more robust and useful variable than temperature, but I'd go one step further. That is, a much more useful variable would be the internal energy of the atmosphere and ocean combined. That would eliminate the spurious
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No matter WHAT we do, people are going to die...
You cut and paste the rest.
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Sounds more like oldspeak to me.
Regards Luke
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Right. I'm not at all worried about Martians keeping quiet about global warming. Instead, the problem is when Earth's global warming deniers look upon climate change on Mars as evidence that anthropogenic global warming on Earth is false.
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Or trap some children. Think of the carbon.
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Oh the outcry is there, alright, it's just that most Martians can't hear it over the stereos in their SUVs!
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Cue the global warming deniers in 3, 2, 1...
It looks like the Warmists have beat them to the punch.
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Tim S.
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stop cutting down forrests humans (Score:1)
You humans make me sick. Cutting down forrests for palm oils or other crap like cows.
Cows should be taxed $50000/cow.
Govts should offer a $1k tax refund for each tree in the backyard that is more than 10ft tall.
Stop buying wooden furniture unless its local woodchip from regrowth forrests.