Flat "What". (Video link NSFW)

[Logan Darklighter]

What...
What?
I mean... what?!?!
WHAT. THE. FLYING FURRY FUCK!?!?
I... I don't even know what to SAY that could possibly convey my loathing for this...
I guess... politics is the place to put this. I think? I mean - I guess I'm curious to see if I'm unusual in my reaction to this. But I don't want people browsing general to stumble into it accidentally and need brain bleach without a healthy warning.
Did this advertisement even air? If so, what the HELL were they thinking? This appears to be British, so anybody from over there see it?
Maybe there's another ad campaign that was more stupid, self-defeating and utterly tasteless before this. But for the life of me, if there ever was one, the gore and the stupidity of this one has driven it utterly from my mind.

[Dartz]

Save the planet or you'll explode. I for one welcome our new warmer world. Never mind that regardless of human influence, the climate quite happily will change itself anyway. My own personal belief is that it's better to deal with the consequences of climate change, rather than try fight against it.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Black Aeronaut]

Well, Dartz, it's also a pretty sound idea to not dump fuel on the fire. All our carbon emissions may not have directly caused Global Warming, but they certainly cannot be helping, either.

[Bob Schroeck]

I'd add that long before I ever heard of "Global Warming" and long before it became a political issue, I'd come across (in the late 1970s and early 1980s) serious speculation that the "Little Ice Age" of the 1700s-1800s had been in fact the beginning of a new, full Ice Age, which Mankind had inadvertently headed off with the pollution of the Industrial Revolution. But no one at that time had seen their way to making the next obvious deduction from that reasoning. When I first heard of Global Warming as a coming disaster, I flashed back to those speculations and said to myself, "well, that makes perfect sense, why didn't anyone think of that sooner?"
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Black Aeronaut]

*Slides yet another counter-token from the "Global Warming is a Hoax" to "Global Warming is Real".*
WARNING: Rant!  Sorry but I feel this needs to be said.  Move it over to it's own thread if you feel it deserves it.
Really, there is sufficient evidence. I wonder why people keep on arguing against it. Maybe because corporations don't want to spend any money on upgrades... or more like the Big Shareholders want to keep on lining their pockets and damn the consequences. Much like the root causes of the current recession. And people say that big business doesn't need to be regulated. Funny thing is most of the people that say that are, again, the Big Shareholders.
I mean, really, it's not gonna hurt America to seriously go green.  Pollution levels will drop (which is a good thing even if Global Warming is not an issue), jobs will be created, people will start buying things, and the economy will prosper.  And let's not forget the simple fact that when pollution levels drop that Americans will become healthier which is less strain on the Health system ergo improving the economy by the simple fact that healthy Americans = productive Americans = paid Americans = Americans buying stuff.
How many more reasons does Corporate America really need?
And before someone launches into tirades about how Corporate America is looking into green solutions... let me enlighten you.  A Salaryman once took an old-ass POS Pontiac Fiero, put an ass-load of batteries and an electric motor into the thing.  The result was a zero-emission daily driver with a range of seventy-five miles.  Perfect for getting to and from work with side-trips to run errands.  If some J-Random-Nutter can do it, then the American Car Companies can do it even better and put a reasonable price tag on it.  No need for special infrastructure or any other BS.  Just a simple battery charger at home does the job just fine.  Sure, the electric bills go up and so does demand for power... but that's a far better option.
As for power... I'm all about the Nuclear option.  And don't bull-shit me about how nukes have their hazards.  We all are aware of those hazards and they can be managed very effectively, thank you very much.
Behold the amazing story of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant of Niigata Prefecture, Japan.  This power plant has a whopping seven reactors, all of which are active.  The plant has been rattled by a few major earthquakes, but the most notable was in 2007 when a shake-up exceeded the designed limits.  Fortunately, the reactors held up superbly, with only a few miniscule radiation leaks in the subsystems.  By miniscule, I mean that the measured releases of radiation were all literally fractions of what the human body produces.  The worst thing that happened was not radiation-leak related: a transformer for Reactor Three caught fire and it took a few hours to put it out.  Afterwards, a series of inspections and modifications to the reactors took place to ensure no future earthquakes would cause any leakages.  All inspections came back positive and it was agreed that the operators of the plant were doing everything in their power to ensure that this would not happen again.  That is by reinforcing the reactors to such a degree that even some of the inspectors thought it a bit excessive.
Nuclear power is safe as long as it is managed properly.  There are no emissions and most spent fuel can be reprocessed.  That which can't... well, what came from the earth shall be returned to the earth.  Preferably deep underground where there are no water tables to be irradiated.
(BTW: Did you know that once upon a time before human-like critters roamed the Earth there was a place in Africa that was a natural boiling-water reactor?  No kidding.  It's even featured in APOD.  Fission is a natural occurrence, so environmentalists should quit bitching.  Even my own mother who is a big-time naturalist took a round-turn on nuclear energy when she heard about this.)
Transmission can be done with super-conductive power lines.  Don't cry foul - it's feasible.  Expensive, yes, but so was the Interstate Highway Project.  And honestly I think America needs another major infrastructure upgrade - the benefits for the economy alone in the long run are huge.  Bonus: get a two-for-one deal by using liquid hydrogen as your coolant - transmit energy in two high-efficiency forms!
None of these things are revolutionary in and of themselves.  Battery powered daily-drivers: the province of do-it-yourselfers.  Nuclear energy: so old-hat that we weren't even the first ones doing it.  Industrial Cryogenics and Superconductivity: now commonplace.
Why the hell can we not get our act together and do something good with this stuff?
Stupid Big Shareholders.

[Dartz]

I amn't disagreeing with anthropogenic global warming. Whether it's anthro' or not, I don't think even matters. In fact, I think Global Warming masks a more serious issue. I think we should be more concerned with our use of the planet's resources.. and that reducing our use of these resources will naturally reduce our carbon output anyway, while leaving us in a better position to actually handle the consequences of living in a warmer world.

I mean, what do most people do when their kettle packs in? They throw it out and buy a brand new one. So, that's a brand new kettle, with all the inherent manufacturing processing going into it, even if it's a new 'green' model. Mining of the materials. Shipping of materials to refiners. Shipping refined stuff to the factory. Rendering and recycling of old kettles into new materials. Shipping all that lot to the people making your new kettle. Making the actual kettle. Shipping it to your house. All for a 5% Co2 saving when you run the thing. And then it breaks a day outside warranty.

Or you fix it. 9/10 it's usually a gammy switch or thermostat, especially if you live in a hard water area. An easy fix if you know what you're doing. You'd be surprised how long you can keep things going. In that case, at best it's just the time it takes you to clean the gak off it, at worst a brand new part which you can pick up from an electronics shop and some quick soldering. And if that don't work, then you buy a brand new kettle because it's obviously very broke.

The thing is... it's all fine and good reducing Co2 emission and the like... but how much perfectly viable stuff is being thrown on the tip in the race to be the owner of the latest greenest thing. How many perfectly functional cars have been scrapped in favour of a brand-new Prius? I own a 26 year old motorcycle. It burns a little oil. It broke it's clutch and gearbox during the unusually cold winter last year, and the brakes and starter motor are shot. I plan to repair it when I get the money because just keeping the thing going, I feel is greener than buying a new one with all the associated manufacturing emissions and the like. That, and it's comfy as a sofa and is big enough to carry me.

It goes the same for cars. Renault Laguna needed a brand new CV-Joint. It cost more than the car was worth of replace it. People would've said I'dve been better off buying a brand new car, or a second hand one, scrapping the Renault. Instead, I repaired it. I think that approach is the greener one... Keep things going as long as possible, rather than replace them as soon as they 'break' . I think we'd save far more resources if people just hung onto things a little longer, and if we're saving resources, we're also saving Carbon, right? Modern consumer culture and planned obsolescence is doing far more harm.... but people don't seem to notice it because everything new they buy has the 'Greener better' label fitted. Then it breaks a year later, just in time to buy a brand new one. The landfills are full of things that anyone reasonably competent with tools can repair, but nobody does anymore.

There's also a few weird ones. Ever since we switched over to CFL bulbs.... I've notice that we're running the central heating a lot more in winter. So, we're burning more oil to heat our house. (We use oil so we don't get caught out by gas prices, and because it can be hoarded. Great until you accidentally stick a motorcycle's side-strand through the feedline to the boiler, and 500 litres of kerosene flood out onto the shed floor. I went around smelling of kerosene and avoiding smokers for a week after clearing that up).

But well, each to their own.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Ayiekie]

I'd add that long before I ever heard of "Global Warming" and long before it became a political issue, I'd come across (in the late 1970s and early 1980s) serious speculation that the "Little Ice Age" of the 1700s-1800s had been in fact the beginning of a new, full Ice Age, which Mankind had inadvertently headed off with the pollution of the Industrial Revolution. But no one at that time had seen their way to making the next obvious deduction from that reasoning. When I first heard of Global Warming as a coming disaster, I flashed back to those speculations and said to myself, "well, that makes perfect sense, why didn't anyone think of that sooner?"

Technically we are still in an ice age, merely an interglacial period of it. The earth's been a lot warmer than this in not-so-distant geological time.
And, uh, plenty of people thought of this. Man-made global warming has been a scientific theory in currency since the early 20th century. The problem is that the evidence wasn't rock-solid until some decades afterwards (though it's been the general consensus in science for a lot longer than people think), and that it's taken many decades after that to convince the general public of it over the screaming, kicking objections of corporations with a financial stake in not believing it.

[Bob Schroeck]

It's not just corporations, Ayiekie. The idea that mankind can inflict catastrophic changes upon the ecosystem flies in the face of the core belief systems of many fundamentalists (not just Christians, though it's mostly Christians who make the noise), who can't imagine that the World What's Built By God could be knocked that far out of whack by the actions of insignificant mortals. If it's happening at all, which they won't admit to because that's an attack on the "unchanging world without end" implicitly and explicitly invoked in their belief system, it must be something else causing it. Probably God, for his own ineffable reasons, or Satan, just for the Evulz.

And at the risk of upsetting Logan, I speculate that for conservatives and reactionaries (independent of religion), it's something similar. The idea that the very nature of the world is changing in ways that might be unstoppable, and that these changes are in large part caused by industry, is so alien to the philosophical and economic axioms on which their credos are based that they don't want to believe it.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Logan Darklighter]

I just checked in on this thread for only the second time since I posted it. And it seems to have taken a direction I hadn't expected it to. I didn't expect a discussion about global warming because that's actually not really what I made the post about. I was posting it because I was deeply shocked that ANY group - doesn't matter if it's a group I disagree with or not - would "go there" and use that kind of imagery. That they could possibly have thought it was a good idea and wouldn't hurt their cause. It's interesting that no-one is actually talking about that aspect of it, and instead went right past it to the AGW debate.
I'm not offended by you guys doing that, BTW. Just kind of bemused/amused. ("I think we left the antecedant back at the station!")
I don't really want to muster the mental organization to come up with a complete post debating the merits for/against AGW etc right NOW. Instead I'm going to go boot up City of Heroes and go have some mindless fun bashing bad guys. But I do expect to come back at some point soon and do so. And I may have some surprises for you.
Just as a toss out though - what would be the problem with the world being warmer anyway? As has been noted - it's been MUCH warmer in the past within recorded human history. And it's fluctuated back and forth before then and since. England used to have vineyards a few hundred years ago during one of those warm periods. (And in the other direction, in the early 1800s there was the Maunder minimum and the "Year without a Summer", so yeah - back and forth). If the world does get significantly warmer though, we'd simply adapt. More growing area in Canada and Russia for starters, etc. Warmer times have been GOOD for humanity. The Roman Empire prospered during one of those warm periods. And climate change was a major factor in its decline.

[Ayiekie]

It would be a problem because it would be happening far more quickly than the environment is prepared to cope with even if it weren't already in as bad a disarray as it is from human society. Massively accelerated pace of extinctions, with all the present and future problems that will cause.

Oh yes, and the minimum billion people who are going to die due to drowning and starvation. Humanity won't die out or civilisation collapse, but it will not be good for the vast majority of them. Tundra will not magically become productive farmland just because it unfreezes, either - it will be marginal at best. Meanwhile, enormous amounts of currently productive and marginal farmland will become permanently useless (hi, Australia), and desertification will accelerate. Even the few countries who get a net benefit to their own resources (Canada and Russia are certainly happy about a functional Northwest Passage) will lose out because the entire world will be so much poorer, more than negating their own gains due to economic interconnectivity.

I disagree about the religious perspective you offered, Bob, but it's probably too big a digression for the thread.
Edit: And on that note, as a more direct response to the ad, I basically agree with "What". I'm not offended, but I can't see what the point is. It's tasteless, but more damningly, it doesn't even convey anything. I figured at first they were making a crack about 10% of people dying to cut carbon emissions, but that wasn't the point either. Plus it was so repetitive that the shock value was lost completely after the first one. All in all, pretty piss-poor, but not really offensive - if anything, it seems more like an anti-environmentalist ad ("We're all creepy groupthinkers who will kill the heretics who don't care enough!") than a pro one.

[Bob Schroeck]

Allow me to apologize for contributing to the digression. Based on the warning and the first few responses, I chose not to watch the video in the link, concluding it was even more offensive than it seems to be from later comments, and deciding I didn't want to watch the kind of thing my imagination came up with. As a result I had no proper background to even comment in this thread.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Black Aeronaut]

My apologies as well. While the military has stopped blocking video sites on general principal, the Internet Explorer on most machines on my ship are so wildly out of date as to not be funny.
Edit: What Ayiekie said about Global Warming.  While a warming trend in and of itself would not be a bad thing, it's happening too damn fast.  It usually happens at such a pace that migration patterns of most critters can adjust as sea level changes occur without serious repercussions.  Granted, serious catastrophic natural disasters of biblical proportions have occurred before (the flooding of the Mediterranean Basin for example which resulted in the Mediterranean Sea) it is patently unwise to add fuel to that sort of fire.  It'd be almost like continuing to up the criticality levels of a nuclear reactor until the damn thing starts chain-reacting uncontrollably all in the name of getting more power.

[Logan Darklighter]

Guys - no need to apologize for topic drift! I was just commenting on it because I kinda thought it was funny! ^_^
(rolls eyes. Makes mental note to end more sentences with smileys in the future.) 
(Edit: On the video link - It's offensive, but comparisons have been made between it and the "Mr. Creasote" segment of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. I sort of agree, at least inasmuch as I think that if you can handle that, you can handle this. But The Monty Python segment worked (A mint? It's wafer thin!), and this... didn't.)