Think Science .

While the active material in CFLs is mercury which has already been shown to be the most dangerous pollutant on the globe, the active material in LEDs is arsenic.

I will grant that arsenic is much easier to contain/recycle than mercury, but LED bulbs have their own problems… Top of the list is that the energy output required to produce them actually exceeds the energy saved by using them.

The “green energy” people do have it right… We need to concentrate on cleaner, more efficient, and renewable energy sources. Even putting pollution aside, the Earth has enough oil reserves to last about another 60 years or so… and then we’re pretty much out. We have coal reserves to last about 100 years or so, but that’s got it’s own set of problems.

Of course the “conservatives” are intentionally blind as well with their focus on “nuclear” power because the uranium reserves are even more limited than oil. We have enough uranium to last about 50 years or so.

Solar, Wind, Hydroelectric, and whatever new technology we come up with in the future isn’t just “nice”, it’s necessity. At least for those of you planning on being around in 60 years.

First off, the next Ice Age is predicted to begin at around 2100AD, and that has been the prediction for about 50+ years. Things are moving right along schedule.

As far as stuff like the “unprecedented water run-off” goes, I’m sure you can figure out why that’s pretty much a crock. Basically, if we only been measuring the glacier run-off for about 50 years or so we doesn’t have an adequit baseline to begin with. I’ve always found it amusing that most of the “Global Warming” nuts state you can’t look at global climate “short term” because the “slight cooling trend” we are experiencing now is a short-term anomoly. but try to get then to go before 1860 and they balk. All their models collapse unless you concentrate solely on the last 150 years.

Probably because it’s so misunderstood. Darwin, who is creditted with the theory, got a lot wrong… and there are some who use the adjustments to his theories as reason to throw out the entire concept.

Theologically, there are two main problems with evolution:

1. Timeframe

Human civilization has only been around for about 10,000 years. For this reason, most religions date the age of the Earth (and pretty much the entire universe) at below that number (6000 years is the number given by Abrahamic religions.) Since evolution uses millions of years, it is in direct contradiction to almost all religions.

2. Dominance of Man

AKA, species narcissism. Almost all religions (and even philosophies that are not religious in nature) seek to place Man at the pinacle of species… in other words, people like to think of themselves as the most important thing in the universe. Evolution shows that not only is Man not the pinacle of life on Earth (or anywhere else), Man hasn’t even been around long enough to have any real significant impact.

Heck, even those “crazy leftest” like to give Man more importance than he has. The one thing Chernobyl has conclusively shown is that Nature will do just fine no matter what man does. The nuclear disaster in Chernobyl wiped out everything within miles of the plant… and today (20 years later) not only has the land recovered, it is actually doing better than it was previously. This shows that even Man’s worst nightmare (Nuclear Holocaust which wipes out all mankind) will have very little impact overall… and that only for a very short time.

Abiogenesis simply that the life here on earth once came into existence from non-living (and replicating) things. Theists who criticize Abiogenesis, should, by the way, know that creationism too is a type of Abiogenesis. God created life from non-life. Abiogenesis is a fact, regardless of how we think it happened. There are many theories and we’re still trying to crack the code. The theory which I find convincing (well, yeah I haven’t read many either) is given by a Scottish Chemist, Cairns Smith. Although I haven’t read his book, R. Dawkins describes his theory at quite a length. A fan site explains the theory very nicely.

[http://originoflife.net/]

For anyone interested, Cairns Smith was written a book “Seven clues to the Origins of Life”. The book is presented in a Sherlock Holmes kind of a mystery. For people who are seriously in this field, There’s a book “Genetic Takeover” by the same author.

Consider a large library. Let us assume that the books are neatly arranged in the beginning. Now, you open the library and people start coming in, take books, read, return, and they do not, in most cases, return it to the exact section from which they took it.

It is immediately obvious that, assuming no one from the staff comes and puts the books in orderly condition again, the number of possible combination’s in which the library will be messed up is always far far more than the number of possible combination’s in which it will be neat, like before.

This, to put it simply, the second law of Thermodynamics. Any system (here, library) which is isolated from external energy (here, staff members don’t re-arrange the books) will never decrease in entropy (here, the disorder of the books), it’s entropy will either remain the same or increase (since the total number of combination’s which result in disorder are always far more than the total number of combination’s which result in orderliness).

This makes many people (mostly creationists) think that the theory of evolution is false since any system (here, earth) kept on its own will always tend to increase in its entropy and, therefore, life cannot evolve. (Life is information neatly stored, opposite of high entropy)

But, the Earth is not an Isolated system. Earth continuously receives energy from the sun. Apart from that, unlike what most creationists think, Evolution via natural selection is not a random process. Infact, Natural Selection is the complete opposite of randomness.