$5,000,000,000,000: The cost each year of vanishing rainforest

Al Gore can fix it all. NOT !

Yeah, but that takes time and investment. Who has that?

we could collect 100 people who are willing to go there and live in the trees.. and hopefully they don't cut them down with us in em or arrest us

We could plant cannibis, marijuana only takes a year to grow, and we could make paper, lumber materials, clothes, and other things. Think of it in time, if a tree takes thirty years to mature- we could have a hemp harvest every year instead of killing off hundreds of plant species

That would be above the intelligent~stupid line. No soup for you. Back of the bus you jerk. Come up with something that solves the problem 70%, then you can win the title.

Not quite, s_peak, not quite. The extra CO2 makes the trees that remain output more oxygen. The rain forests have been chopped down viciously since the 1970's or so yet we STILL HAVE OXYGEN. Since we still have enough oxygen, nobody really believes anything's much wrong; but 7 billion people are surviving on a small garden plot.

Hospitals know what's wrong because the poison ivy/poison oak chemicals have gotten much more potent and can kill children and smaller people. Wear a mask if you run a weedeater. Manual labor = breathing more deeply. You don't want that stuff in soft lung tissue. Drop ya dead in short order.

Ah hahaha it's funny cos it's so true. 'Putting a price' on rainforest destruction isn't much different than the carbon tax proposal that caught so much flak. It's like saying "Hey, if you've got the cash you can destroy the ecosystem all you want!"

It won't do you much good if you can't breathe....

Technically we're the most perfect thing nature could come up with. We were created by nature to do exactly what we do, like any animal in our place would, thrive. If you can not thrive you go extinct just like the other 99.9% of species that have ever lived on Earth that are now permanently extinct. We're only doing what nature 'made us' to do. And we just happen to do it better than any other animal ever has. We can adapt to any climate polar or tropical, we can even adapt to live in oxygenless climates (space).

But in the end all it takes is an asteroid to hit the Earth and kill 60 - 90% of the species on Earth and all our ecosaving techniques go to zero in a day. But life will go on, long after we exist no matter what. Even if humans extinct every single animal on the planet including ourselves. There are literally millions of bacteria species in just a cubic inch of soil, and I might add those species go as far down into the soil as the DEEPEST hole ever drilled on Earth by humans. The bottom of the hole was found to have living microbes in it just as densely packed into a cubic inch as the top soil was, thriving without sunlight. Microbes on Earth now will take over and becomes 'new species' of animals someday in the far future after we go extinct. Life will always continue on Earth, there has been worst catastrophes than humans on ancient Earth and none of them killed life.

You don't know much about animals if you think we're the sickest.

The very fact that you can RECOGNIZE the faults in your own species proves that we have a lot of potential for being good. If we were really "sick," we wouldn't even care.

Compare that to lions or hyenas who kill off children from other parents to minimize competition. Compare that to a wasp which lays its eggs in a caterpillar who will grow and feed off the creature before hatching, bursting out of its skin and then eating it alive. Just compare us to our closest relative the chimpanzee, who tears off the testicles of competing males and even eats his fellow monkey companions.

And if you're talking about self-destructive behavior, realize that it isn't because animals "live in balance with nature" that they aren't self-destructive. They aren't self-destructive because they barely have the resources to survive as it is. When there's an abundance of them, they devour it immediately and proceed to overpopulate and then immediately and horrifically depopulate themselves.

Human beings have a lot of potential, you're not giving them enough credit for essentially being overclocked apes.