An Inconvenient Truth gets pulled from classroom

[Dfresh]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/4500796.html

Evangelist are dumb.

[5stringJeff]

The school district in question, about half an hour from where I live, was barred from showing the film unless they showed the other side of the global warming debate.


Unfortunately, the film was unable to be shipped due to the ice storms that our area has had this past month. Global warming advocates were unable for comment, since the sanding trucks couldn't get up the hill to their homes.

[stephanie]

When did Al Bore become a scientist or a meteorologist???

And why do they believe his crap should be shown in our schools as if, it's the gospel truth...:eek:

[avatar4321]

Yeah, its so incredibly dumb to not want our children mislead by propaganda. Heaven forbid we want them to learn actual science instead of politicized junk science.

[neener]

Link to "Actual Science" disproving global warming??

[Gaffer]

Real science says there is global warming, due to natural climatic changes and cycles. There's a lot more out there to cause warming and cooling than man. Solar and volcanic activity being the most prominent.

Gore junk science is just more garbage to scare people into believing what he wants them too.

[neener]

LOL.

Okay.

Link to "actual science" saying man isn't contributing to global warming.

[manu1959]

man is not the cause of global warming....show me a link proving that man is the cause.

[Insein]

LOL.

Okay.

Link to "actual science" saying man isn't contributing to global warming.

How about, Link to "actual science" proving man is the cause of global warming? How do i prove a negative?

[Grumplestillskin]

When did Al Bore become a scientist or a meteorologist???

And why do they believe his crap should be shown in our schools as if, it's the gospel truth...:eek:

See the movie, then be our guest - rebut the film point by point...

[Grumplestillskin]

Yeah, its so incredibly dumb to not want our children mislead by propaganda. Heaven forbid we want them to learn actual science instead of politicized junk science.

Which part is junk science?

That's for you too Gaffer....

[neener]

Okay, here's a starter for you.


The earth is warming. Temperatures at the Earth's surface increased by an estimated 1.4°F (0.8°C) between 1900 and 2005. The past decade was the hottest of the past 150 years and perhaps the past millennium. The hottest 22 years on record have occurred since 1980, and 2005 was the hottest on record.

The growing scientific consensus is that this warming is largely the result of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities including industrial processes, fossil fuel combustion, and changes in land use, such as deforestation. Projections of future warming suggest a global increase of 2.5ºF (1.4ºC) to 10.4ºF (5.8ºC) by 2100, with warming in the United States expected to be even higher. In addition to warming, increases in sea level and changes in precipitation, including more frequent floods and droughts, are likely. These changes, over time, are referred to broadly as "climate change".

Unaddressed, climate change will have significant impacts across the United States and around the world. For instance, sea-level rise will add to stresses coastal communities are already facing, including erosion, storms, and pressures from development. In the arid and semi-arid western United States, relatively modest changes in precipitation can have large impacts on already limited water supplies. Terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal ecosystems of the United States are particularly sensitive to climate change, threatening biodiversity and ecosystem goods and services such as fisheries and recreation. Even human health may be threatened as heat waves, extreme weather, and vector-borne diseases become more prevalent.

While some of the effects of climate change may be positive, such as longer growing seasons in the northern United States and Canada that increase productivity of agriculture and forests, these positive impacts are unlikely to be sustained as the globe continues to warm. Furthermore, even while the nation as a whole benefits, certain regions or sectors, such as the southern United States, may suffer. Similarly, many developing countries are even more vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change and less able to adapt. As nations continue to grow more interdependent, the United States may not be immune from impacts experienced elsewhere.

Most projections of future impacts do not address what could happen if warming continues beyond 2100, which is inevitable if steps to reduce emissions are not taken, or if the rate of change accelerates. Furthermore, the longer warming persists and the greater its magnitude, the greater the risk of climate “surprises” such as abrupt or catastrophic changes in the global climate.

Even if we are able to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, some further warming is unavoidable. We must plan and take action now to adapt to the changes we will face as our climate changes.

This section of our site provides a basic primer on climate change, including facts and figures about global warming, a report on the science of climate change, frequently asked questions, a glossary of terms, and other online resources.

For more detailed information on a variety of climate change issues, including the economics of global warming, environmental impacts, potential solutions, policy implications and international issues, please see the Global Warming In Depth section of this site.


http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming-basics/basic_science/

[neener]

Also, I'm sure if there is an actual scientific debate about what is causing global warming, it shouldn't be too hard for you nonbelievers to find a scientific article stating man isn't the cause.

Or, it could be, just maybe, that the only debate is political in nature and you'll bring me a press release from Exxon-Mobile on why liberals hate trees for producing CO2. ;)

[neener]

And Here's an interactive learning tool for all of you from that bastian of liberal bias, NASA.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Laboratory/PlanetEarthScience/GlobalWarming/GW_IntroMovie.html

I promise learning doesn't hurt. :)

[neener]

From the above cited NASA videos, the transcripts of the films that deal directly w/ human activities contributing to global warming.

The Section Titled: Human Activities and Carbon Dioxide

Everyday human activities release stored carbon from the solid earth into the atmosphere. You will be able to explain how human activities release stored carbon into the atmosphere.

Carbon is found in all living things and is also found in sediment, rocks, the ocean and the air we breathe.

Carbon is exchanged between the oceans, solid earth, biosphere and atmosphere through various natural processes.

The largest exchanges occur between the biosphere and atmosphere through photosynthesis and decomposition.

Living plants grow by absorbing carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. When plants die, bacteria decompose them and return carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

For thousands of years, the processes that added and subtracted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere were in balance.

Since the Industrial Revolution, however, human society has become increasingly dependent upon machines that release carbon to the atmosphere.

Fossil fuels such as coal, gasoline, oil and natural gas contain high concentrations of carbon that have been stored in the solid earth for hundreds of millions of years.

When we burn fossil fuels for heat, transportation, and electricity, large quantities of carbon that would otherwise remain stored in the solid earth are released into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.

In summary, the dependence of human society on fossil fuels leads to a build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.


The Section Titled: Modern Atmospheric Concentrations of Carbon Dioxide

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing. This movie will help you describe how the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has changed over the last 100 years.

At the start of the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million by volume.

As industrialization spread, the consumption of fossil fuel, that is oil, gas and coal, rapidly increased. By the late 1940¹s the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration had risen to 300 parts per million.

After World War II, automobiles became the favored mode of transportation in the United States and industrialization grew rapidly across the globe.

Today, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen to 360 parts per million.

This increase is alarming because the rate at which carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere continues to steadily increase.

Human activities currently release about 6.5 billion tons of carbon into the air per year.

Each year, as all nations intensify industrial development, this amount grows.

The atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is now higher than it has been in the last 100 thousand years.

At current rates, atmospheric carbon dioxide is expected to reach twice the pre- industrial level, 560 parts per million, within the next 100 years.

In summary, the pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had been consistently less than 300 parts per million for the past 100 thousand years.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the level has risen to 360 parts per million and is expected to reach 560 parts per million within the next 100 years.


:read: Need more?

[stephanie]

So what is it THAT MAN IS SUPPOSE to do about fixing it???

Throw money at it, and that will make it go away..

They should go bitch at the Countries that are more causing it the the United States....

CHINA....for starters...And all the third world countries..
All this is, is an extortion attempt on the more wealthy countries...
And of course to line the pockets of Environmentalist and to lead you into Socialism...
:dunno:

[avatar4321]

Which part is junk science?

That's for you too Gaffer....

What part isnt?

[stephanie]

I never thought I'd see the day, when people would so willingly say...

Tax me tax me tax me, tax me till it hurts...:uhoh:

[Grumplestillskin]

They should go bitch at the Countries that are more causing it the the United States....

CHINA....for starters...And all the third world countries..
All this is, is an extortion attempt on the more wealthy countries...
And of course to line the pockets of Environmentalist and to lead you into Socialism...
:dunno:

This is just plain ignorance Steph. The US causes 25% of all green house gases. China isn't in that league - yet. Neither are third world countries. They rarely have any primary industries, which are the main cause of the gases...

Who is extorting the wealthy countries. What do they want?

Yeah, socialists are doing Steph! It's a conspiracy theory

[Grumplestillskin]

What part isnt?

I asked first. Which part is? Take your time. If you can't refute any of the science, just say so...no harm, no foul (although you might want to think about what you say next time)

[stephanie]

This is just plain ignorance Steph. The US causes 25% of all green house gases. China isn't in that league - yet. Neither are third world countries. They rarely have any primary industries, which are the main cause of the gases...

Well, now that you've got calling me ignorant outta the way..

What is the plan for fixing the problem...

More taxes...
More regulations
More of our businesses moving out of the country...
:dunno:

[Grumplestillskin]

Well, now that you've got calling me ignorant outta the way..

What is the plan for fixing the problem...

More taxes...
More regulations
More of our businesses moving out of the country...
:dunno:

I didn't mean it in a nasty way, and if you took it that way I apologise. More regulations probably. Dunno about taxes. I wouldn't blame businesses moving down to green house gases, more like cheaper labour forces in third world countries. Put that down to that great conservative cause - capitalism...

[stephanie]

I didn't mean it in a nasty way, and if you took it that way I apologise. More regulations probably. Dunno about taxes. I wouldn't blame businesses moving down to green house gases, more like cheaper labour forces in third world countries. Put that down to that great conservative cause - capitalism...

Capitalism is what made this country what it is today...
I don't understand when people speak of capitalism as if it's the GREAT SATAN..

And when a government starts putting regulation after regulation on a person or a business.......Then yes, we're starting to dive into Socialism...:no:

Sure, some regulations are needed and all well and good..
I'm all for doing what we can to help with our earth...
Recycling
We already drive better cars from just 50yrs ago.
Our industry has cut down a lot on emissions from their factories...
But when it is a detriment to us in the United States of making a living, that's where I draw the line...
Especially when they don't REALLY KNOW, how much is normal warming, and how much is man made...
But when the earth is also going through it's own cycles, there's not much we can do about that...

So, you'll just have to excuse me, if I'm not swallowing this BIG HYPE GOING ON NOW, about the sky is falling....
We've adapted for many yrs. of changes with the climate, and I'm sure we will again, if need be...

[Insein]

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4403


Hurricanes and Global Warming: Interview with Meteorologist Dr. William Gray
by James K. Glassman (September 12, 2005)

Meteorologist Dr. William Gray may be the world’s most famous hurricane expert. More than two decades ago, as professor of atmospheric science and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University, he pioneered the science of hurricane forecasting. Each December, six months before the start of hurricane season, the now 75-year-old Gray and his team issue a long-range prediction of the number of major tropical storms that will arise in the Atlantic Ocean basin, as well as the number of hurricanes (with sustained winds of 74 miles per hour or more) and intense hurricanes (with winds of at least 111 mph). This year, Gray expects more activity, with 15 named storms, including 8 hurricanes. Four of them, he says, will be intense.

James Glassman: Dr. Gray, in the September issue of Discover Magazine, there’s a remarkable interview with you. You’re called the world’s most famous hurricane…

Dr. William Gray: Well that – you have to talk to my critics about that. I don’t think they would agree with you.

Glassman: Well you certainly…

Gray: I’ve been around a long time, yes. I’ve been around studying hurricanes over 50 years now, I’m an old guy. Yes.

Glassman: Well, you’re in the hurricane forecasting business among other things?

Gray: Well, we’re in the seasonal hurricane forecasting business, and monthly. We don’t do the short range, you know, one to two day crucial forecasts. That can only be done by one group at the National Hurricane Center. But we certainly do a lot of forecasting for different parts of the globe and the hurricane from a seasonal, monthly point of view. Yes.

Glassman: And from a seasonal, monthly point of view, you had been predicting a growing number of hurricanes. Now, my question is in the wake of Katrina and some of the statements that we’ve heard immediately afterwards by advocates of the global warming theory – is global warming behind this increase in hurricanes?

Gray: I am very confident that it’s not. I mean we have had global warming. That’s not a question. The globe has warmed the last 30 years, and the last 10 years in particular. And we’ve had, at least the last 10 years, we’ve had a pick up in the Atlantic basin major storms. But in the earlier period, if we go back from 1970 through the middle ‘90s, that 25 year period – even though the globe was warming slightly, the number of major storms was down, quite a bit down.

Now, another feature of this is that the Atlantic operates differently. The other global storm basins, the Atlantic only has about 12 percent of the global storms. And in the other basins, the last 10 years – even though the Atlantic major storm activity has gone up greatly the last 10 years. In the other global basins, it’s slightly gone down. You know, both frequency and strength of storms have not changed in these other basins. If anything, they’ve slightly gone down. So if this was a global warming thing, you would think, “Well gee, all of the basins should be responding much the same.”

Glassman: You’re familiar with what your colleagues believe. Do you think many hurricane experts would take a different point of view, and would say, “Oh, it’s global warming that’s causing hurricanes?”

Gray: No. All my colleagues that have been around a long time – I think if you go to ask the last four or five directors of the national hurricane center – we all don’t think this is human-induced global warming. And, the people that say that it is are usually those that know very little about hurricanes. I mean, there’s almost an equation you can write the degree to which you believe global warming is causing major hurricanes to increase is inversely proportional to your knowledge about these storms.

Now there’s a few modelers around who know something about storms, but they would like to have the possibility open that global warming will make for more and intense storms because there’s a lot of money to be made on this. You know, when governments step in and are saying this – particularly when the Clinton administration was in – and our Vice President Gore was involved with things there, they were pushing this a lot. You know, most of meteorological research is funded by the federal government. And boy, if you want to get federal funding, you better not come out and say human-induced global warming is a hoax because you stand the chance of not getting funded.

Glassman: We thank you very, very much for this interview. Thank you, Dr. Gray.

Gray: Well thank you for asking me.

I am convinced myself that in 15 or 20 years, we’re going to look back on this and see how grossly exaggerated it all was. The humans are not that powerful. These greenhouse gases, although they are building up, they cannot cause the type of warming these models say – two to five degrees centigrade with a doubling of the greenhouse gases.

Glassman: Well thank you very much for giving us your time.

[darin]

GAWD Liberals can be IDIOTS.

Liberal: "THIS IS FACT!"

Conservative: "No it's not...it's not backed up by science"

Liberal: "Well, until it's been proven that it's NOT true, I'll keep SHOUTING it IS True. It's YOUR job to prove WHATEVER I want to CLAIM IS NOT TRUE!!


Nobody proves what ISNT true...they attempt to prove what they THINK is true - when they cannot, what they think defaults to 'not true'

See: Gay Gene, Man-Made Global Warming, Britney Spears is an "artist".

[neener]

So what is it THAT MAN IS SUPPOSE to do about fixing it???

Throw money at it, and that will make it go away..

Um...we are supposed to reduce CO2 emissions. Through the use of TECHNOLOGY. And you know how we improve technology? By funding research. It's how most of the breakthroughs of the past century have occured.


They should go bitch at the Countries that are more causing it the the United States....

CHINA....for starters...And all the third world countries..
All this is, is an extortion attempt on the more wealthy countries...

Um...we are the #1 producer of CO2 emissions, alongside Australia, who is the only other major industrialized country not participating in the Kyoto agreement.

Looky here:
http://www.nef.org.uk/Images/co2tonne.gif
http://www.nef.org.uk/energyadvice/co2emissionsctry.htm
Try that link if you're at all interested in reading why CO2 emissions differ so much.



And of course to line the pockets of Environmentalist and to lead you into Socialism...
:dunno:

:uhoh: Yeah, that's it. Instead, let's continue to line the pockets of OPEC with our oil dependency.

And could you please explain how stabilizing climate change leads to socialism?

[Nienna]

Walls, meanwhile, said she is struggling to find authoritative articles to counter the Gore documentary.

"The only thing I have found so far is an article in Newsweek called 'The Cooling World,' " the teacher said.

It was written 32 years ago.

Hmmm. Where was she looking?

[neener]

Capitalism is what made this country what it is today...
I don't understand when people speak of capitalism as if it's the GREAT SATAN..

And when a government starts putting regulation after regulation on a person or a business.......Then yes, we're starting to dive into Socialism...:no:

Sure, some regulations are needed and all well and good..
I'm all for doing what we can to help with our earth...
Recycling
We already drive better cars from just 50yrs ago.
Our industry has cut down a lot on emissions from their factories...


And it is CAPITALISM and market forces that are changing the way companies do business. It sure ain't the Bush admin's strict environmental regulations.

Companies at the forefront:


ABB
Air Products
Alcan
Alcoa Inc.
American Electric Power
Bank of America
Baxter International Inc.
The Boeing Company
BP
California Portland Cement
CH2M HILL
Cummins Inc.
Deutsche Telekom
DTE Energy
Duke Energy
DuPont
Entergy
Exelon
GE
Georgia-Pacific
Hewlett-Packard Company
Holcim (US) Inc.
IBM
Intel
Interface Inc.
John Hancock Financial Services
Lockheed Martin
Marsh, Inc.
Novartis
Ontario Power Generation
PG&E Corporation
Rio Tinto
Rohm and Haas
Royal Dutch/Shell
SC Johnson
Sunoco
Toyota
TransAlta
United Technologies
Weyerhaeuser
Whirlpool Corporation
Wisconsin Energy Corporation


http://www.pewclimate.org/companies_leading_the_way_belc/company_profiles/index.cfm
^^Click that link to read about what each of those companies are doing. You might also want to look at which ones are Fortune 500 companies. They are starting the ball rolling, but there are many other things that can be done, but it does mean holding companies responsible for ALL of their costs, and not just the ones they are willing to cop to. If you can't be profitable well, then capitalism says you leave the market. ;)

[Gaffer]

If al gore has anything to do with it its politically motivated. That's the first thing that points to junk science. Next the left likes to use words like "mainstream scientists" and "most scientists" never specific science like climatologist, the geologies. A mainstream scientist could be anybody with a PHD. Like the weather channel lady who has no degree in weather or climate.

Greenie science has as much credibility as creationist science.

[neener]

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4403

Find anything else? Or just this hurricane expert that says that global warming isn't the cause of hurricanes? I thought we were discussing the cause of global warming, not the effects. And the gem about federal funding! Wow. I guess all those other scientists around the globe are being funded by our government as well.

Any science that shows the normal warming of the earth compared to what is happening now? That would be a good way to prove that the warming we are experiencing is natural.

[neener]

Hmmm. Where was she looking?

Have one to share?

[Nienna]

Have one to share?

I'll look around. ;)

[Hagbard Celine]

What if the Earth is warming naturally back to pre-Ice Age temperatures (When dinos roamed and there were shallow seas everywhere) and human activity is contributing to or speeding it up? I never see this point of view discussed, it's always either it's happening or it's not happening. We know it's happening, but maybe instead of arguing about why it's happening, we should just sit back and let it happen. :dunno:

How's everybody doing? It's been a while :)

[neener]

Those damn liberals over at Fox News are at it again, propagating that ridiculous notion of catastrophic effects of global warming!! :laugh:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,247859,00.html?sPage=fnc.science/naturalscience

WASHINGTON — Later this week in Paris, climate scientists will issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures.

But that may be the sugarcoated version.

Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report.

Many top U.S. scientists reject these rosier numbers. Those calculations don't include the recent, and dramatic, melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations:

They "don't take into account the gorillas — Greenland and Antarctica," said Ohio State University earth sciences professor Lonnie Thompson, a polar ice specialist. "I think there are unpleasant surprises as we move into the 21st century."
Michael MacCracken, who until 2001 coordinated the official U.S. government reviews of the international climate report on global warming, has fired off a letter of protest over the omission.

The melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are a fairly recent development that has taken scientists by surprise. They don't know how to predict its effects in their computer models. But many fear it will mean the world's coastlines are swamped much earlier than most predict.

Others believe the ice melt is temporary and won't play such a dramatic role.

That debate may be the central one as scientists and bureaucrats from around the world gather in Paris to finish the first of four major global warming reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel was created by the United Nations in 1988.

After four days of secret word-by-word editing, the final report will be issued Friday.

The early versions of the report predict that by 2100 the sea level will rise anywhere between 5 and 23 inches.

That's far lower than the 20 to 55 inches forecast by 2100 in a study published in the peer-review journal Science this month.

Other climate experts, including NASA's James Hansen, predict sea level rise that can be measured by feet more than inches.

The report is also expected to include some kind of proviso that says things could be much worse if ice sheets continue to melt.

The prediction being considered this week by the IPCC is "obviously not the full story because ice sheet decay is something we cannot model right now, but we know it's happening," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate panel lead author from Germany who made the larger prediction of up to 55 inches of sea level rise. "A document like that tends to underestimate the risk," he said.

"This will dominate their discussion because there's so much contentiousness about it," said Bob Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a multinational research effort. "If the IPCC comes out with significantly less than one meter (about 39 inches of sea level rise), there will be people in the science community saying we don't think that's a fair reflection of what we know."

In the past, the climate change panel didn't figure there would be large melt of ice in west Antarctica and Greenland this century and didn't factor it into the predictions.

Those forecasts were based only on the sea level rise from melting glaciers (which are different from ice sheets) and the physical expansion of water as it warms.

But in 2002, Antarctica's 1,255-square-mile Larsen B ice shelf broke off and disappeared in just 35 days. And recent NASA data shows that Greenland is losing 53 cubic miles of ice each year — twice the rate it was losing in 1996.

Even so, there are questions about how permanent the melting in Greenland and especially Antarctica are, said panel lead author Kevin Trenberth, chief of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

While he said the melting ice sheets "raise a warning flag," Trenberth said he wonders if "some of this might just be temporary."

University of Alabama at Huntsville professor John Christy said Greenland didn't melt much within the past thousand years, when it was warmer than now.

Christy, a reviewer of the panel work, is a prominent so-called skeptic. He acknowledges that global warming is real and man-made, but he believes it is not as worrisome as advertised.

Those scientists who say sea level will rise even more are battling a consensus-building structure that routinely issues scientifically cautious global warming reports, scientists say.

The IPCC reports have to be unanimous, approved by 154 governments — including the United States and oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia — and already published peer-reviewed research done before mid-2006.

Rahmstorf, a physics and oceanography professor at Potsdam University in Germany, says, "In a way, it is one of the strengths of the IPCC to be very conservative and cautious and not overstate any climate change risk."

[CockySOB]

For the record, my home is currently some 530 ft above sea level. Even if all the ice on the planet melted, I'd still be some 200-300 ft above sea level.

But I bet NOLA is royally screwed.....

[darin]

Neener - you aren't REPLYING...you are FILIBUSTERING.

[Grumplestillskin]

Darin - you're offering nothing but opinion...;)

[darin]

Darin - you're offering nothing but opinion...;)

I never denied it. :)

:D

(but I'm right - he's trying to FLOOD the thread with links knowing NOBODY or very few are going to answer ALL of them)

:D

[Grumplestillskin]

(but I'm right - he's trying to FLOOD the thread with links knowing NOBODY or very few are going to answer ALL of them)

:D

I noticed that re neocons. They ask for evidence. It is provided. Then they cry foul because they're too lazy to try and attempt similar (actually doing research and posting links - except to religious sites of course that again, only offer opinion)...I would say what he has posted his hardly a flood...Go on Darin, look at just ONE of the links and try and counter its premise with your own research.....just one....take your time..

[darin]

I noticed that re neocons. They ask for evidence. It is provided. Then they cry foul because they're too lazy to try and attempt similar (actually doing research and posting links - except to religious sites of course that again, only offer opinion)...I would say what he has posted his hardly a flood...Go on Darin, look at just ONE of the links and try and counter its premise with your own research.....just one....take your time..

What have you noticed about people like me? Moderate Conservatives?


I'm saying - Neener doesn't WANT dialog - he wants to FLOOD the post with his words in hope nobody challenges him. If he was honestly wanting debate he'd slow down so ppl cna catch up.

[neener]

What have you noticed about people like me? Moderate Conservatives?


I'm saying - Neener doesn't WANT dialog - he wants to FLOOD the post with his words in hope nobody challenges him. If he was honestly wanting debate he'd slow down so ppl cna catch up.


How nice of you to assume that I have a penis. Alas, I do not. I was asked for science proving man is contributing to global warming. I provided it. I came back this morning to a bunch of opinions and one article about hurricanes. If you have something you feel I could learn from, please share it. I'm secure enough in my own skin to challenge my beliefs. That's kinda why I'm here.

I won't post another link until some of my others are rebutted.

[darin]

I won't post another link until some of my others are rebutted.

Good call, man.

[Insein]

What if the Earth is warming naturally back to pre-Ice Age temperatures (When dinos roamed and there were shallow seas everywhere) and human activity is contributing to or speeding it up? I never see this point of view discussed, it's always either it's happening or it's not happening. We know it's happening, but maybe instead of arguing about why it's happening, we should just sit back and let it happen. :dunno:

How's everybody doing? It's been a while :)

Holy crap, i agree with Hagabard.

[Insein]

Find anything else? Or just this hurricane expert that says that global warming isn't the cause of hurricanes? I thought we were discussing the cause of global warming, not the effects. And the gem about federal funding! Wow. I guess all those other scientists around the globe are being funded by our government as well.

Any science that shows the normal warming of the earth compared to what is happening now? That would be a good way to prove that the warming we are experiencing is natural.

You wanted a different point of view. There's one among many. The problem is that their voices are being drowned out and no ACTUAL scientific method is being applied. The true scientific method is to make a hypothesis. Test it. Test it. Test it again. Keep testing till you can establish a general theory. Global Warming experts have guesses as to what is causing it but there are so many variables either excluded or ignored when testing the theories as to the main cause.

What effects does the Sun cause? How much is naturally occuring from animals, plants, etc? How long have we been able to record real temperatures? For only about 80 years. Isn't it possible that humans, in all our greatness, just don't know enough about it to know that we don't know jack about it? We have records of relative temperatures in the middle ages being way higher then now. Europe experienced a massive growth in population. Crops yielded double and triple production during those years. Records say that it was hot in Germany during the fall and spring months. Germany today is more of a temperate to colder climate. We also have records of a severe cooling period occuring during the 1600's and 1700's. Records show that the temperatures were way below normal. Depictions even in the Revolutionary war of Washington crossing a frozen deleware River or being snowed in at Gettysburg. For those that live around here (Philly area), the Deleware River hasnt frozen in my lifetime. So obviously its warmer now then it was then. Conversely it was colder then than it was in the Middle Ages.

So isn't it more likely that the Earth goes through periodic warming and cooling cycles? I mean we as humans have only been able to comprehend this planet as a whole since about 2000 years ago. That is but a spec of time in this planets existence. We've also only been causing massive CO2 levels since about the late 18th early 19th centuries. A nanosecond in this Earth's history. Are we truly the cause of destroying the atmosphere in a mere 200 years when it has been there for over a billion years?

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/What/VolGas/volgas.html
Volcanos emit up to 230 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year according to scientists. Not to mention that volcanos have been around since the formation of this planet. How does this number not affect the whole amount of supposed manmade global warming?

It just leads to the ultimate question, why are people so adament about not having a debate when so many variables are obvious to even the amateurs that look at it? Why are people trying to shut one side up and declare the Global Warming is Man Made and thats that? There are obviously so many unanswered questions in this field of study. So why declare the debate over and start throwing money at it?

[Gaffer]

Insein hit the nail on the head.

[KitchenKitten99]

...


Unfortunately, the film was unable to be shipped due to the ice storms that our area has had this past month. Global warming advocates were unable for comment, since the sanding trucks couldn't get up the hill to their homes.


you always give me a good giggle... :thumb:

[neener]

So isn't it more likely that the Earth goes through periodic warming and cooling cycles? I mean we as humans have only been able to comprehend this planet as a whole since about 2000 years ago. That is but a spec of time in this planets existence. We've also only been causing massive CO2 levels since about the late 18th early 19th centuries. A nanosecond in this Earth's history. Are we truly the cause of destroying the atmosphere in a mere 200 years when it has been there for over a billion years?

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/What/VolGas/volgas.html
Volcanos emit up to 230 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year according to scientists. Not to mention that volcanos have been around since the formation of this planet. How does this number not affect the whole amount of supposed manmade global warming?

It just leads to the ultimate question, why are people so adament about not having a debate when so many variables are obvious to even the amateurs that look at it? Why are people trying to shut one side up and declare the Global Warming is Man Made and thats that? There are obviously so many unanswered questions in this field of study. So why declare the debate over and start throwing money at it?


I think I need to clarify my position. I am by no means stating that the earth does not go through natural warming and cooling periods. I am not stating that the warming trend we are experiencing now is completely unrelated to natural changes in the Earth's temperature, or natural events like volcano eruptions. My opinion is, based on the research I have seen, is the record levels of CO2 that we, as a species, have dumped into the atmosphere is accelerating the warming of the earth.

To me, this means we should exercise some restraint in our consumption levels. We can do this in many ways. We can have our CAFE standards meet those of the rest of the world, and stop lagging behind, claiming innovation is too expensive, when it seems, based on Ford & GM's earnings, that not going after innovative technologies is too expensive. We can go for more clean, renewable energy sources. Here in Idaho we get a majority of our power from hydroelectric dams. Idaho Power is looking to expand its wind generation capabilities, as large sections of the state have 25mph winds most of the year. They are also looking to expand geothermal energy sources. And there is always the awesome power of the sun. Solar fuel cells have become much more efficient over the years. Then there are new and developing technologies concerning CO2 recapture and sequastration (sp?).

Many things are possible now, and I believe that the power of human innovation makes much more possible for the future. I just think it's a cop out to throw up our hands and say that since there are natural sources of CO2, we can dump whatever we want into the atmosphere.

And just to reiterate, I'm not trying to stop any debate on the issue. We're not going to get anywhere if we just stomp our feet and say "my way or the highway". And I don't believe our great country to be founded on an ideal of only one way to view the world. The beauty of democracy is debate and compromise. :)

[Merlin]

I think this is a good a place as any to jump in with my first post on this board. First off, if a link was put up for all the scientist that said global warming was a scam, this computer wouldn't hold it. There are just as many that says it's a scam as there are that says its real. Trees put out more CO2 than all the man made contraptions combined. It is a known fact that there are more trees now than there were 200 years ago. As for Al Gore's book and film, if they would happen to show it at my kid's school, they had better not watch it or read the book. They had better get up and walk out. And I think they are more scared of me than they are the principal. Just anyone saying global warming is man made is so asinine it wants to make one puke.

[neener]

I think this is a good a place as any to jump in with my first post on this board. First off, if a link was put up for all the scientist that said global warming was a scam, this computer wouldn't hold it. There are just as many that says it's a scam as there are that says its real. Trees put out more CO2 than all the man made contraptions combined. It is a known fact that there are more trees now than there were 200 years ago. As for Al Gore's book and film, if they would happen to show it at my kid's school, they had better not watch it or read the book. They had better get up and walk out. And I think they are more scared of me than they are the principal. Just anyone saying global warming is man made is so asinine it wants to make one puke.


I guess my google is broken. I hope it's not too much of a burden for you to provide just one of those links to the skeptic scientists?

[Insein]

I think I need to clarify my position. I am by no means stating that the earth does not go through natural warming and cooling periods. I am not stating that the warming trend we are experiencing now is completely unrelated to natural changes in the Earth's temperature, or natural events like volcano eruptions. My opinion is, based on the research I have seen, is the record levels of CO2 that we, as a species, have dumped into the atmosphere is accelerating the warming of the earth.

To me, this means we should exercise some restraint in our consumption levels. We can do this in many ways. We can have our CAFE standards meet those of the rest of the world, and stop lagging behind, claiming innovation is too expensive, when it seems, based on Ford & GM's earnings, that not going after innovative technologies is too expensive. We can go for more clean, renewable energy sources. Here in Idaho we get a majority of our power from hydroelectric dams. Idaho Power is looking to expand its wind generation capabilities, as large sections of the state have 25mph winds most of the year. They are also looking to expand geothermal energy sources. And there is always the awesome power of the sun. Solar fuel cells have become much more efficient over the years. Then there are new and developing technologies concerning CO2 recapture and sequastration (sp?).

Many things are possible now, and I believe that the power of human innovation makes much more possible for the future. I just think it's a cop out to throw up our hands and say that since there are natural sources of CO2, we can dump whatever we want into the atmosphere.

And just to reiterate, I'm not trying to stop any debate on the issue. We're not going to get anywhere if we just stomp our feet and say "my way or the highway". And I don't believe our great country to be founded on an ideal of only one way to view the world. The beauty of democracy is debate and compromise. :)

I'm all for looking at better ways to make our systems more efficient. I just don't like when scientists say things like the world will end in 20 years unless we get the government to save us all by raising taxes. I'd rather this take its natural course in a debate so that we can determine the BEST possible course to take instead of wasting everyone's money and still having the same problems in 30 years with a new name so that they can steal our money all over again.

[jillian]

I'm all for looking at better ways to make our systems more efficient. I just don't like when scientists say things like the world will end in 20 years unless we get the government to save us all by raising taxes. I'd rather this take its natural course in a debate so that we can determine the BEST possible course to take instead of wasting everyone's money and still having the same problems in 30 years with a new name so that they can steal our money all over again.


I see it differently. Ask yourself, is there any incentive for business to act reasonably in terms of conservation? The answer is no, because it might disrupt profit margins and they don't care about tomorrow unless someone forces them to. That said, it seems to me that alternative energy pursuit is something that might take some seed money from government, but will both short and long term boost the economy because it will create jobs, open up entire new fields and new markets.

The eventual benefit of us acting intelligently, just in case that isn't enough, is that when we lose our dependence on foreign oil, (read: OPEC), then we can tell them to take a hike and cut off their wealth, shut them down and then, no presidents of ours will ever agajn make kissy-face with the Sauds while they're educating their kids to hate in Madrassas.

[Insein]

I see it differently. Ask yourself, is there any incentive for business to act reasonably in terms of conservation? The answer is no, because it might disrupt profit margins and they don't care about tomorrow unless someone forces them to. That said, it seems to me that alternative energy pursuit is something that might take some seed money from government, but will both short and long term boost the economy because it will create jobs, open up entire new fields and new markets.

The eventual benefit of us acting intelligently, just in case that isn't enough, is that when we lose our dependence on foreign oil, (read: OPEC), then we can tell them to take a hike and cut off their wealth, shut them down and then, no presidents of ours will ever agajn make kissy-face with the Sauds while they're educating their kids to hate in Madrassas.

See I look at it differently. Right now industry uses the cheapest resources available to them in order to make the lowest good possible to ship to market. If someone wanted to make money, they could create a way to make these alternative fuels cheaper then the current methods and thus, businesses will then buy their resource over the current one.

The downside of government mandates in areas like this is rising costs passed on to the consumer. This then leads to reduced sales and ultimately fewer jobs even with the new ones manufactured by the government. More people out of work and goods costing more will lead to worse situations for many Americans. Thats why a government intervention is a bad idea.

We need government to offer incentives to businesses to use alternative methods and not declare punishments when they don't. Because their punishment means the government gets more money and the consumer pays the price either way.

[red states rule]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/4500796.html

Evangelist are dumb.

The classroom is to teach facts, not science fiction

[neener]

See I look at it differently. Right now industry uses the cheapest resources available to them in order to make the lowest good possible to ship to market. If someone wanted to make money, they could create a way to make these alternative fuels cheaper then the current methods and thus, businesses will then buy their resource over the current one.

The downside of government mandates in areas like this is rising costs passed on to the consumer. This then leads to reduced sales and ultimately fewer jobs even with the new ones manufactured by the government. More people out of work and goods costing more will lead to worse situations for many Americans. Thats why a government intervention is a bad idea.

We need government to offer incentives to businesses to use alternative methods and not declare punishments when they don't. Because their punishment means the government gets more money and the consumer pays the price either way.

So how do you feel about the tax cuts that are given to the big oil companies? Should we (taxpayers) continue to subsidize these companies? I can understand supporting both sides of this issue. But I think if we are to truly limit government intervention and let the market forces take control, we have to remove those tax breaks and level the field. Let the market see which fuel sources are the cheapest.

[MtnBiker]

What global government body is going to police any restrictions on emissions?

What reassurance is there that such a governing body will be effective?









*edit, spelling*

[neener]

What global government body is going to police any restrictions on admissions?

What reassurance is there that such a governing body will be effective?

Admissions? Admissions to what? :dunno: Why would a gov't need to restrict admissions?


A global governing body can only be effective if all participating parties adhere to and uphold shared rules. Obviously this wouldn't apply to the UN.

[MtnBiker]

Admissions? Admissions to what? :dunno: Why would a gov't need to restrict admissions?


A global governing body can only be effective if all participating parties adhere to and uphold shared rules. Obviously this wouldn't apply to the UN.

Opps, emissions not admissions.

If it will not apply to the UN then which global government body?

[neener]

Opps, emissions not admissions.

If it will not apply to the UN then which global government body?


No such body exists. Perhaps someday it will, but at this point in time, with all the tensions in the world, it won't happen. I know most of the liberal side is screaming for a global solution, but that's unrealistic.

What I'm in favor of is that old conservative principle of self responsibility. We as individuals do what we can to reduce our negative impact. The plus to this is most things we can do also save us money. And then as consumers, we educate ourselves and purchase items from corporations/companies that are taking personal responsibility for their impact (environmental) whenever possible. I'm willing to pay a little more for a product if it comes from a clean process, I understand if others are not.

[MtnBiker]

No such body exists. Perhaps someday it will, but at this point in time, with all the tensions in the world, it won't happen. I know most of the liberal side is screaming for a global solution, but that's unrealistic.

What I'm in favor of is that old conservative principle of self responsibility. We as individuals do what we can to reduce our negative impact. The plus to this is most things we can do also save us money. And then as consumers, we educate ourselves and purchase items from corporations/companies that are taking personal responsibility for their impact (environmental) whenever possible. I'm willing to pay a little more for a product if it comes from a clean process, I understand if others are not.

I can agree with that.

I think it is important to recognize that a big part of the global warming hysteria is to establish a global governing body. Not a NWO conspiracy rather an augmentation of the UN.

[dirt mcgirt]

Admissions? Admissions to what? :dunno: Why would a gov't need to restrict admissions?
Because The Agency for Retards and Morons has exceeded their membership capacity ever since you and The Slayer were let in.


What global government body is going to police any restrictions on emissions?
Many of the Western nations hold their governments accountable for reducing man made emissions. A candidate's or leader's adherence to Kyoto is an issue for many voters during election time.

[MtnBiker]

Many of the Western nations hold their governments accountable for reducing man made emissions. A candidate's or leader's adherence to Kyoto is an issue for many voters during election time.

Like Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

[dirt mcgirt]

Like Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
No like Tony Blair and Andrea Merkel. Europe is very green. Blair got blasted at home for not persuading Bush to be more green.

[MtnBiker]

So the people of Iran and Venuzula do not care about global warming and do not put pressure on their elected officals to follow such treaties? What is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad going to tell the UN when they want to check his country for emmissions?

[dirt mcgirt]

So the people of Iran and Venuzula do not care about global warming and do not put pressure on their elected officals to follow such treaties? What is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad going to tell the UN when they want to check his country for emmissions?
I don't know how much global warming plays into their elections. But I do know that they report emissions levels to the UN. The US is at a level almost 200 times more than Iran and Venezuela and from what I can tell both Iran and Venezuela are following the emission levels outlined in Kyoto.

[MtnBiker]

But I do know that they report emissions levels to the UN. The US is at a level almost 200 times more than Iran and Venezuela and from what I can tell both Iran and Venezuela are following the emission levels outlined in Kyoto.

How do you know that?

[dirt mcgirt]

How do you know that?
It's in the UN CO2 report:
http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/mifre/mi_series_results.asp?rowID=749&fID=r15&cgID=

États-Unis d'Amérique: 57992403
Iran (République islamique d'): 382092
Venezuela: 144227

[Grumplestillskin]

So the people of Iran and Venuzula do not care about global warming and do not put pressure on their elected officals to follow such treaties? What is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad going to tell the UN when they want to check his country for emmissions?

Can anybody explain to me, why on more than one occasion, when talking about the "right thing to do", conservatives compare their own POV, or that of Bush's admin, with third world countries or dictatorships? Is this the standard to which they aspire?

[Insein]

So how do you feel about the tax cuts that are given to the big oil companies? Should we (taxpayers) continue to subsidize these companies? I can understand supporting both sides of this issue. But I think if we are to truly limit government intervention and let the market forces take control, we have to remove those tax breaks and level the field. Let the market see which fuel sources are the cheapest.

Absolutely agree. I don't agree with any special tax cuts unless they are incentive based. Like if you can get down to this level of pollution output, you get this tax break. If you can't get down that far, you pay the full amount in taxes. Government intervention into the market usually leads to bad things. Like saving the Big 3 car companies or the airlines. IT doesnt help. It's just like real welfare. You have to let the market decide who succeeds and who fails.

[CockySOB]

So how do you feel about the tax cuts that are given to the big oil companies? Should we (taxpayers) continue to subsidize these companies? I can understand supporting both sides of this issue. But I think if we are to truly limit government intervention and let the market forces take control, we have to remove those tax breaks and level the field. Let the market see which fuel sources are the cheapest.

Works for me.

[Dfresh]

I asked first. Which part is? Take your time. If you can't refute any of the science, just say so...no harm, no foul (although you might want to think about what you say next time)

OK stupid here you go......

http://www.abc4.com/mostpopular/story.aspx?content_id=1ffb1a0d-ea05-4c63-be65-5aab170bf36a

http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=351572&sid=WOR

[stephanie]

OK stupid here you go......

http://www.abc4.com/mostpopular/story.aspx?content_id=1ffb1a0d-ea05-4c63-be65-5aab170bf36a

http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=351572&sid=WOR



Landmark Legal Foundation Nominates Limbaugh Nobel Peace Prize

http://www.radioink.com/HeadlineEntry.asp?hid=136717&pt=todaysnews


:2up::p

[Gaffer]

I don't know how much global warming plays into their elections. But I do know that they report emissions levels to the UN. The US is at a level almost 200 times more than Iran and Venezuela and from what I can tell both Iran and Venezuela are following the emission levels outlined in Kyoto.

well there's a real sampling. Just how industrialized are those countries? Let's see iran contributes what to the world markets? besides oil. Venezuela produces what for the world market? besides oil.

[Dfresh]

http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/about/faq.shtml#warming-1

[Dfresh]

well there's a real sampling. Just how industrialized are those countries? Let's see iran contributes what to the world markets? besides oil. Venezuela produces what for the world market? besides oil.

What about China? BTW, China's car emissions standards are higher then the US.

AL GORE, FMR VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: "If you look at the 10 hottest years ever measured, they've all occurred in the last 14 years. And the hottest of all was 2005."

[dirt mcgirt]

well there's a real sampling. Just how industrialized are those countries? Let's see iran contributes what to the world markets? besides oil. Venezuela produces what for the world market? besides oil.
Totally agreed. But my post was in response to Mtn Biker's. Check out what your post looks like in response to Mtn Biker's:


So the people of Iran and Venuzula do not care about global warming and do not put pressure on their elected officals to follow such treaties? What is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad going to tell the UN when they want to check his country for emmissions?
well there's a real sampling. Just how industrialized are those countries? Let's see iran contributes what to the world markets? besides oil. Venezuela produces what for the world market? besides oil.

^ Hey that works too. :thumb:

[Dfresh]

Yeah, its so incredibly dumb to not want our children mislead by propaganda. Heaven forbid we want them to learn actual science instead of politicized junk science.

Ok Spiderman, why don't you weave a web of retardedness somewhere else?

[MtnBiker]

UN Climate Summary Designed to Dupe, Critics Say
By Kevin Mooney
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
February 02, 2007

(CNSNews.com) - Scientific evidence for human-induced global warming will receive a significant boost Friday when the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases the summary of a key report, according to environmental activists and top Democrats in Congress.

But wait.

Some climate researchers and environmental scientists previously associated with the IPCC claim the public relations summary of the panel's fourth assessment report distorts the actual scientific findings and that the discrepancies are driven by a political agenda.

The IPCC Summary for Policymakers, roughly 20 pages long, is primarily the work of political appointees, not of scientists, according to Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at MIT.

The full text will not be available for another three months, as two further documents making up the fourth assessment report are scheduled to be released in April and May.

Lindzen specialized in the study of clouds and water vapor for IPCC's third assessment report, which was released in 2001.

He told Cybercast News Service the rules for the fourth assessment report specifically require changes to be made to the body that will bring it into line with the summary statement.

"If you were doing that with a business report, the federal trade commission would be down your throat," Lindzen said.

"These people are openly declaring that they are going to commit scientific misconduct that will be paid for by the United Nations," Harvard University physicist Lubos Motl wrote on his website last week.

"If they find an error in the summary, they won't fix it," Motl said. "Instead, they will 'adjust' the technical report so that it looks consistent."

The relevant provision, which appears in an appendix of the IPCC's principles, also attracted the attention of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a global warming skeptic and long-time critic of the IPCC process.

In a statement Inhofe slammed what he termed the "systematic and documented abuse" of the scientific process by the IPCC and called for changes that would mitigate against relevant scientific evidence from being excluded from its reports.

While Inhofe has previously questioned the "alarmist" findings contained in some climate change studies, Democratic colleagues, such as Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, the new chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, have generally taken a different line.

"If we fail to take action on global warming now, we can expect future catastrophic impacts like rising sea levels, more extreme weather events of all kinds, damage to coral reefs and fisheries, and negative impacts on food production and water supplies," Boxer said Tuesday.

"We need to act soon, before we reach a tipping point when irreversible changes to the world we know may occur."

In the U.S. House, meanwhile, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who chairs the Oversight and Government Reform Hearing, said he believes the science on global warming has "grown more compelling" over the past 15 years.

A memorandum prepared by the committee's Democratic majority staff invokes the IPCC report as proof that a strong scientific consensus has emerged on global warming.

This sentiment is shared by public advocacy groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists (USC), which described the last IPCC report as a "landmark review" presenting evidence for an "overwhelming scientific consensus" on global warming.

In recent congressional testimony, Francesca Grifo, a USC senior scientist, claimed the reality of human influence upon climate change has been "repeatedly affirmed by scientific experts."

'Misrepresented'

Nonetheless, at least one scientific expert saw fit to resign from participation in the latest IPCC report, because he says "media sessions" associated with his research on hurricanes and tropical cyclones were being misrepresented.

Christopher Landsea, who is now science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, resigned from the IPCC's fourth assessment team two years ago.

In his resignation letter, Landsea expressed concern over statements by the IPCC to the media, which he said were "far outside current scientific understandings."

Landsea told Cybercast News Service his primary concern was with how lead authors representing the IPCC were interacting with the public and the media.

The hurricane activity Landsea has observed over the past 12 years is not, in his estimation, out of proportion with what was experienced in the mid-20th century during the last active hurricane cycle.

While he believes a "good portion" of the warming that has been detected most recently is manmade, the "sensitivity" to those changes in the areas where hurricanes form has been "very tiny."

Landsea also said the most relevant, up-to-date work done in this area comes from the The International Workshop on Tropical Cyclone, rather than from the IPCC.

According to Sterling Burnett, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, the IPCC draws from experts in fields that don't necessarily have the best perspective to properly assess the factors behind warming and cooling periods.

Bonner Cohen, author of "The Green Wave: Environmentalism and Its Consequences," said in an interview he had similar concerns with what he views as an overly narrow perspective on the science of global warming.

He described geology as the "dog that is barking but being crowded out."

Cohen also said the political summary available on Friday, which precedes the release of the actual scientific data by three months, will overshadow the most important findings in the full report.

"It is safe to assume the summary will have the usual buzzwords, it is going to talk about 'dire consequences' and this is going to be for the media," he said.

But the actual report -- when it comes out later this year -- will be read by less than one percent of the world's journalists and will be treated accordingly in the media, Cohen predicted.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200702/CUL20070202a.html

[red states rule]

From the network that gave us forged documents............


CBS Exclaims 'Global Warming Is For Real And We Are To Blame'
Posted by Michael Rule on February 2, 2007 - 11:00.
"Global warming is for real and we are to blame." This was the sentiment presented on CBS’s "Early Show" on Friday morning while discussing a report released from "leading climate experts." During the segment, CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips classified the climate document as "not so much a report as a call to action." Mr. Phillips’ piece also contained comments from Achim Steiner who claimed that people who "risk inaction" will be judged by history to be "irresponsible." Steiner was identified on screen as head of the UN Environment Project. However, a look into his background reveals him to be somewhat of an environmental activist. And while CBS presented the views of an environmentalist, it continued it’s pattern of ignoring scientists that are skeptical that human activity is the cause of global climate change.

Mr. Phillips, reporting from Paris, highlighted some of the climate report’s alarming conclusions. He noted that the polar ice caps are melting and weather patterns are changing, and the whole process of global warming is "speeding up." Yet there was no mention of opposing scientists. This week The Drudge Report highlighted two new books that demonstrate the global warming is a natural phenomenon and not man made. But did Mr. Phillips see fit to mention this? No, because apparently it does not fit into CBS’s pattern of silencing dissenting science on this subject. (Click here, here, and here for examples.)

Yet while Phillips ignored the skeptics, he aired sound clips form Achim Steiner. Steiner was labeled as being head of the UN Environment Program, but a look at his background reveals him to be an environmental activist. Before joining the UN, Steiner was Director General of the World Conservation Union. Here’s what that organization says about climate change:

"Global climate change is one of the most pressing concerns of the 21st century. Warming temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, increased extreme events and sea level rise are already being observed and will have serious implications for economies, society and the environment. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit future climate change and improving the capacity of the world’s biodiversity and poorest communities to adapt to its inevitable impacts are the two central challenges."

Compare this to the alarming conclusions presented by Mark Phillips:

"It means the ice in the polar ice caps in Greenland and in the mountain glaciers is melting and sea levels are rising. Not only will this continue, but the whole process is speeding up. Weather patterns are changing. More heat waves, more extreme weather from droughts to hurricanes, more intense rain."


Did Mr. Phillips read the released report or did he visit the website of the World Conservation Union. Perhaps, considering Mr. Steiner was a involved with both the report and the World Conservation Union, the entities reflect his personal views. These are matters that Phillips could have explored. Nonetheless, Phillips should have at least presented differing opinions on the subject of global warming rather than continuing CBS’s crusade to indoctrinate viewers on the subject.

The transcript of Mark Phillips’ piece follows:

Russ Mitchell: "In other weather news, the world's leading climate experts issued an alarming report this morning-- global warming is for real and we are to blame. CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips is live in Paris with details. Mark, good morning."


Mark Phillips: "Good morning Russ. Well, when you get this many scientists from this many places together in one place trying to produce a complex document, it's never going to be easy. But the essentials of this report are clear -- the planet is warming up, and it's our fault."

Voiceover: "There has been a lot of last minute give-and-take over wording, but the science of global warming has become clear and its conclusions unavoidable. The best climate scientists on the planet now say it is quote 'uneqivocal' that the earth is getting warmer that and greenhouse gases produced in increasing quantities since the beginning of the industrial revolution are very much to blame."

Achim Steiner, UN Environment Program: "I think ir is critical that we look at this report not only as a milestone but truly as a moment where the focus of attention will shift from whether climate change is linked to human activity, whether the science is sufficient, to what, on earth, are we going to do about it."

Mark Phillips: "So what does it mean? It means the ice in the polar ice caps in Greenland and in the mountain glaciers is melting and sea levels are rising. Not only will this continue, but the whole process is speeding up. Weather patterns are changing. More heat waves, more extreme weather from droughts to hurricanes, more intense rain. In the words of the report, these changes are all virtually certain or very likely or likely. This is the highest octane language that has ever been used."

Achim Steiner: "It shifts from doubting to having to act even if the last element of certainty is not yet there. I think anyone who would continue to risk inaction on the basis of the evidence presented here will one day in the history books be considered irresponsible."

Mark Phillips: "Although the U.S. has lagged politically behind much of the world in accepting global warming, a lot of the science for this report is American, the numbers are crunched using computer models at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And here's the final kicker, whether we continue to spew out greenhouse gases at current rates or whether that rate increases, the process of global warming is speeding up. This isn't so much a report, it's a call to action. Russ."


http://newsbusters.org/node/10569

[Bubbalicious]

National Academy of Sciences: 'High Confidence' That Planet Is Warmest in 400 Years (http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11676)

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/06/23/GR2006062300505.gif

http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/images/posterglacier.jpg




Nah! That's just the dreaded Liberals (http://www.sound-effect.com/sounds1/human/ascream1.wav) trying to trick you into turning your thermostat down.

[Yurt]

I am not up to date on this, but on the way home, michael savage mentioned a "mini ice age" that happened about 1300ad. This was before the IR of course, and the caller could not answer becaue the IR happened around the mid/latter 1700's. So:

the ice retreated, due not to man (e.g., the industrial man) but to nature, how do you explain that?

[Insein]

What about China? BTW, China's car emissions standards are higher then the US.

AL GORE, FMR VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: "If you look at the 10 hottest years ever measured, they've all occurred in the last 14 years. And the hottest of all was 2005."

Ever meausred. We've only been able to measure since about the begining of the 20th century. I don't think thats a very realible statement to base your whole argument on, Al.

[Bubbalicious]

I am not up to date on this, but on the way home, michael savage mentioned a "mini ice age" that happened about 1300ad. This was before the IR of course, and the caller could not answer becaue the IR happened around the mid/latter 1700's. So:

the ice retreated, due not to man (e.g., the industrial man) but to nature, how do you explain that?

I'm not sure. The only Little Ice Age I'd heard of was the one that lasted to about 1850. Theories for what caused that were decreased solar activity and/or increased volcanic activity. What brought us out of the LIA was I guess solar activity increasing and/or volcanic activity decreasing.

But we're not coming out of an ice age right now.

[Grumplestillskin]

OK stupid here you go......

http://www.abc4.com/mostpopular/story.aspx?content_id=1ffb1a0d-ea05-4c63-be65-5aab170bf36a

http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=351572&sid=WOR

WTF? What are you on Junior? My post was aimed at Avatar who was stating that Global Warming advocates are using junk science. From what I can tell, unless you are being totally sarcastic, you and I are on the same wavelength - ie, we are in AGREEMENT.

That being said, what does linking to the two above sites have to do with scientists disproving global warming??? They are about Al Gore being nominated for, or getting, an award???

[Bubbalicious]

We've only been able to measure since about the begining of the 20th century.

I just posted a link from the NAS - they can take measurements going back at least 400 years.

[Insein]

I just posted a link from the NAS - they can take measurements going back at least 400 years.

Accurate measurements.

[stephanie]

I am not up to date on this, but on the way home, Michael savage mentioned a "mini ice age" that happened about 1300ad. This was before the IR of course, and the caller could not answer because the IR happened around the mid/latter 1700's. So:

the ice retreated, due not to man (e.g., the industrial man) but to nature, how do you explain that?

I heard his show today also..

The Democrats and the Environmentalist have this whole thing planned to dupe the people..

But what I'm totally blown away by......Is that some very intelligent people are falling it....Hopefully our Economy Survives this, with all the new taxes and regulations that are going to be heaped on us...:(

[red states rule]

National Academy of Sciences: 'High Confidence' That Planet Is Warmest in 400 Years (http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11676)

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/06/23/GR2006062300505.gif

http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/images/posterglacier.jpg




Nah! That's just the dreaded Liberals (http://www.sound-effect.com/sounds1/human/ascream1.wav) trying to trick you into turning your thermostat down.




Guess what? Antarctica's getting colder, not warmer
New data may affect political debate over global warming.

By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

The Earth's polar regions long have been considered canaries in the coal mine on climate change - the first places to look, many scientists said, to learn whether the planet's temperature is, in fact, rising. Indeed, climate models generally predict that the heating of the atmosphere - precipitated by global warming - will cause the vast layer of ice that covers Antarctica to melt, raising sea levels and changing regional climate patterns by altering ocean currents.
This week, that widely held presumption is being challenged.


Two studies of temperatures and ice-cap movements in Antarctica suggest that the Southern Hemisphere's "canary" isn't going down without a fight - key sections of the ice cap appear to be growing thicker, not thinner, as previously believed. And the continent's average temperature appears to have cooled slightly during the past 35 years, not warmed.

Even as scientists work to make their climate models more accurate in the light of the new data, political opponents of the proposed Kyoto Protocol - which would limit human activity thought to cause atmospheric warming - are likely to pounce upon the results. The studies will likely be seen as vindication of their argument that the Kyoto treaty shouldn't be ratified until more is known about the science of climate change.

"This shows we really don't understand the climate dynamics of Antarctica," says Peter Dornan, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was Dornan's team of scientists whose research highlighted the temperature trend as part of a broader study of cooling's effect on the microscopic plant and animal life in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica.

Decades of Antarctic cooling

Dr. Dornan's study points to an average cooling of 0.7 degrees per decade from 1986 to 2000 at the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-Term Ecological Research Station. Using estimates from British data taken since 1966, the team calculates that the cooling trend has been under way since at least that date.

The report, published in the current issue of the journal Nature, appears to confirm a study published last year in the Journal of Climate by Josephino Comiso, an atmospheric scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Using satellite data for the months of January and July from 1979 to 1999, he reported a drop in the continent's average temperature that amounted to 0.4 degrees per decade.

A mere blip in global warming trend?

Yet Dr. Comiso cautions that his results were uncertain to within 0.6 degrees, a margin that swamps the result itself. That uncertainty, he says, may shrink with new data he's been analyzing.

Dornan holds that any cooling down south comes as cold comfort in the face of climate-change predictions because Antarctica's temperature record "is already included in the global averages that show the climate is warming."

Indeed, David Vaughn, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, notes that if it's real, the continental cooling trend may be a relatively brief departure from a longer-term warming trend. The average temperature trend for all Antarctic stations from 1959 to 1996 point to an average warming of 1.2 degrees C.

He adds that while early climate models pointed to broad-scale warming at both poles, improved models suggest the heating will be uneven at high latitudes and more pronounced in the north than in the south. That effect, he says, is evident in the greater-than-average warming that has occurred in Alaska, northern Siberia, and Greenland.

Modelers also will be poring over results from studies of the west Antarctica Ice Sheet, conducted by Ian Joughin of CalTech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Slawek Tulaczyk at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Better Satellite data

Using satellite-borne radar and ice cores, the scientists calculate that the Ross ice streams are gaining ice, not losing it, as previous studies suggested. The new data, published in yesterday's edition of the journal Science, shift the region's crystalline balance sheet from losses of 20.9 billion tons of ice a year to gains averaging 26.8 billion tons a year.

The difference is due to the more comprehensive nature of satellite information. In the past, scientists have had to place a relatively small number of markers in the ice and traced their movements over time, first by shooting the stars with a sextant, and later using satellites.

Ironically, as the sheet thickens and slows its push to the sea, it could affect the region's climate by allowing the Ross Ice Shelf, which sits over water, to thin and break up. That breakup might not affect sea levels much, since the shelf ice is already in the water. But a breakup would expose some 400,000 square kilometers of the sea surface to solar warming, adding heat to the region's climate system and generating a pulse of fresh water to the oceans that could alter the flow of currents there.

"We're trying to understand the physical controls on an ice stream, which will place tighter constraints on models," says Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center who has spent a great deal of his career gathering west Antarctic ice-flow data the old-fashioned way. "It's wonderful to catch it when it's changing, because it helps us understand the physics more. No one expected us to be blessed with these kinds of results."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0118/p02s01-usgn.html

[Bubbalicious]

Indeed, David Vaughn, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, notes that if it's real, the continental cooling trend may be a relatively brief departure from a longer-term warming trend. The average temperature trend for all Antarctic stations from 1959 to 1996 point to an average warming of 1.2 degrees C.

He adds that while early climate models pointed to broad-scale warming at both poles, improved models suggest the heating will be uneven at high latitudes and more pronounced in the north than in the south. That effect, he says, is evident in the greater-than-average warming that has occurred in Alaska, northern Siberia, and Greenland.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0118/p02s01-usgn.html

ROFL! Did you even bother to read what you posted?

[red states rule]

ROFL! Did you even bother to read what you posted?

Yes I do,. Do you?

Better Satellite data

Using satellite-borne radar and ice cores, the scientists calculate that the Ross ice streams are gaining ice, not losing it, as previous studies suggested. The new data, published in yesterday's edition of the journal Science, shift the region's crystalline balance sheet from losses of 20.9 billion tons of ice a year to gains averaging 26.8 billion tons a year.

[Bubbalicious]

Dornan holds that any cooling down south comes as cold comfort in the face of climate-change predictions because Antarctica's temperature record "is already included in the global averages that show the climate is warming."

LOL!

[red states rule]

LOL!

keep picking out partial phrases and keep ignoring the articles point - global warming is a farce

[Bubbalicious]

keep picking out partial phrases and keep ignoring the articles point - global warming is a farce
The article clearly says global warming's happening - I've cited 2 examples of it saying just that. Keep your head up there.

[Dfresh]

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200702/CUL20070202a.html

Congratulations, you just found the worst website.

Let the truth be told.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0207/2596.html

[red states rule]

The article clearly says global warming's happening - I've cited 2 examples of it saying just that. Keep your head up there.

You can start your cherrypicking again

http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/lav2006forWeb.pdf

[Bubbalicious]

You're talking to me about cherry picking? You just won't stop with the hilarity.
Well if you're going to link to the Lavoisier Group, I can link to this.

Global Warming Skeptics: A Primer (http://www.environmentaldefense.org/article.cfm?ContentID=4870)

Guess who's funding the global warming doubt shops?

Posted on: 12/19/2006
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/content_images/exxonmobilatm.jpgIn 1998, Exxon devised a plan to stall action on global warming. The plan was outlined in an internal memo that promised, "Victory will be achieved when uncertainties in climate science become part of the conventional wisdom" for "average citizens" and "the media." (Read the memo [PDF] (http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/3860_GlobalClimateSciencePlanMemo.pdf).)

The company would recruit and train new scientists who lack a "history of visibility in the climate debate" and develop materials depicting supporters of action to cut greenhouse gas emissions as "out of touch with reality."
While there is no indication that ExxonMobil paid the climate skeptics directly and the scientists may have their own motivations for participating, the company poured millions of dollars into spreading its message worldwide. Here's where some of that money went.
The following information is from Exxon documents and the organizations' web sites. (Specific sources and links are listed below the table.)


<table class="donations" width="510"><tbody><tr><th class="donations" style="width: 45%;">Organization Receiving ExxonMobil Funding</th><th class="donations">2002-2003</th><th class="donations">2004</th><th class="donations">2005</th></tr><tr class="grey"><td class="donations">Competitive Enterprise Institute</td><td class="donations">$870,000</td><td class="donations">$270,000</td><td class="donations">$270,000</td></tr><tr class="white"><td class="donations">American Enterprise Institute</td><td class="donations">$485,000</td><td class="donations">$230,000</td><td class="donations">$240,000</td></tr><tr class="grey"><td class="donations">American Council for Capital Formation </td><td class="donations">$444,523 </td><td class="donations">$255,000 </td><td class="donations">$360,000</td></tr><tr class="white"><td class="donations">Frontiers of Freedom </td><td class="donations">$282,000 </td><td class="donations">$250,000 </td><td class="donations">$140,000</td></tr><tr class="grey"><td class="donations">George C. Marshall Institute </td><td class="donations">$185,000 </td><td class="donations">$170,000 </td><td class="donations">$115,000</td></tr><tr class="white"><td class="donations">National Center for Policy Analysis </td><td class="donations">$105,000 </td><td class="donations">$75,000 </td><td class="donations">$75,000</td></tr><tr class="grey"><td class="donations">Tech Central Station Science Foundation </td><td class="donations">$95,000* </td><td class="donations"> </td><td class="donations">
</td></tr><tr class="white"><td class="donations">Heartland Institute </td><td class="donations">$92,500* </td><td class="donations">$100,000 </td><td class="donations">$119,000</td></tr><tr class="grey"><td class="donations">Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow </td><td class="donations">$72,000* </td><td class="donations">$125,000 </td><td class="donations">$90,000</td></tr><tr class="white"><td class="donations">Fraser Institute </td><td class="donations">$60,000* </td><td class="donations">$60,000 </td><td class="donations">
</td></tr><tr class="grey"><td class="donations">International Policy Network </td><td class="donations">$50,000* </td><td class="donations">$115,000 </td><td class="donations">$130,000</td></tr><tr class="white"><td class="donations">Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide & Global Change </td><td class="donations">$40,000* </td><td class="donations"> </td><td class="donations">$25,000</td></tr><tr class="grey"><td class="donations">American Council on Science and Health </td><td class="donations">$35,000 </td><td class="donations">$15,000 </td><td class="donations">$25,000</td></tr><tr class="white"><td class="donations">Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy</td><td class="donations">$27,500* </td><td class="donations">$75,000 </td><td class="donations">$30,000</td></tr><tr class="grey"><td class="donations">Cato Institute </td><td class="donations">$25,000* </td><td class="donations">$15,000 </td><td class="donations">
</td></tr><tr class="white"><td class="donations">Consumer Alert </td><td class="donations">$25,000 </td><td class="donations">$25,000 </td><td class="donations">
</td></tr><tr class="grey"><td class="donations">Independent Institute </td><td class="donations">$20,000 </td><td class="donations"> </td><td class="donations">$30,000</td></tr><tr class="white"><td class="donations">Advancement of Sound Science </td><td class="donations">$20,000 </td><td class="donations">$10,000 </td><td class="donations">
</td></tr></tbody></table>

*These numbers are for the year 2003 alone.
The information above is from Exxon documents and the organizations' Web sites:Exxon's 2002 contributions [PDF] (http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/files/corporate/public_policy1.pdf), Exxon's 2003 contributions [PDF] (http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/files/corporate/giving_report.pdf), Exxon's 2004 contributions [PDF] (http://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/files/corporate/giving04_publicpolicy.pdf) and Exxon's 2005 contributions [PDF] (http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/Files/Corporate/giving05_policy.pdf).

Find Out More
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/images/bullet_bluearrow.gif They're taking their act on the road: Global warming skeptics shower their climate denials onto the U.K. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/lastword/story/0,13228,1398885,00.html), according to the Guardian (1/27/05)

http://www.environmentaldefense.org/images/bullet_bluearrow.gif For more information on the science of global warming and the politics of combating climate change, go to our Global Warming issue page (http://www.environmentaldefense.org/system/templates/page/issue.cfm?subnav=12)

http://www.environmentaldefense.org/images/bullet_bluearrow.gif You may find further information on ExxonMobil's funding of global warming skeptics by visiting the Exxonsecrets.org (http://www.exxonsecrets.org/) database web site.

http://www.environmentaldefense.org/images/bullet_bluearrow.gif For details on the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act, the most effective bipartisan legislation to reduce America's emissions of greenhouse gases, visit www.undoit.org (http://www.undoit.org/).

[red states rule]

Another Scientist Slams Media’s Global Warming Myth
Posted by Noel Sheppard on February 4, 2007 - 16:11.
Despite the media and Al Gore’s ad nauseum contention that there is actually a scientific consensus for the existence of anthropogenic global warming, the facts speak otherwise. Conveniently, the media never interview folks who disagree with their fantasy, thereby making it easy to promote.

Of course, those interested in the truth know of many outspoken members of the scientific community who are not being bullied by the politics of the situation. Another in a growing list of such skeptics is Israeli astrophysicist Nir Shaviv who has been doing research for years to identify if there is any connection between rising levels of CO2 and rising temperatures. As reported by the National Post, Shaviv’s studies suggest otherwise (h/t Drudge), leading him to actually recant his previous position on this issue:

"Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media.

"In fact, there is much more than meets the eye."

The article continued (emphasis mine throughout):

Dr. Shaviv's digging led him to the surprising discovery that there is no concrete evidence -- only speculation -- that man-made greenhouse gases cause global warming. Even research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-- the United Nations agency that heads the worldwide effort to combat global warming -- is bereft of anything here inspiring confidence. In fact, according to the IPCC's own findings, man's role is so uncertain that there is a strong possibility that we have been cooling, not warming, the Earth. Unfortunately, our tools are too crude to reveal what man's effect has been in the past, let alone predict how much warming or cooling we might cause in the future.

All we have on which to pin the blame on greenhouse gases, says Dr. Shaviv, is "incriminating circumstantial evidence," which explains why climate scientists speak in terms of finding "evidence of fingerprints." Circumstantial evidence might be a fine basis on which to justify reducing greenhouse gases, he adds, "without other 'suspects.' " However, Dr. Shaviv not only believes there are credible "other suspects," he believes that at least one provides a superior explanation for the 20th century's warming.

What is that culprit?

"Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming," he states, particularly because of the evidence that has been accumulating over the past decade of the strong relationship that cosmic- ray flux has on our atmosphere. So much evidence has by now been amassed, in fact, that "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist."

The sun's strong role indicates that greenhouse gases can't have much of an influence on the climate -- that C02 et al. don't dominate through some kind of leveraging effect that makes them especially potent drivers of climate change. The upshot of the Earth not being unduly sensitive to greenhouse gases is that neither increases nor cutbacks in future C02 emissions will matter much in terms of the climate.

Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

Be careful, doctor, for you’re bringing science into the equation. Most of these advocates hate that:

The evidence from astrophysicists and cosmologists in laboratories around the world, on the other hand, could well be significant. In his study of meteorites, published in the prestigious journal, Physical Review Letters, Dr. Shaviv found that the meteorites that Earth collected during its passage through the arms of the Milky Way sustained up to 10% more cosmic ray damage than others. That kind of cosmic ray variation, Dr. Shaviv believes, could alter global temperatures by as much as 15% --sufficient to turn the ice ages on or off and evidence of the extent to which cosmic forces influence Earth's climate.

In another study, directly relevant to today's climate controversy, Dr. Shaviv reconstructed the temperature on Earth over the past 550 million years to find that cosmic ray flux variations explain more than two-thirds of Earth's temperature variance, making it the most dominant climate driver over geological time scales. The study also found that an upper limit can be placed on the relative role of CO2 as a climate driver, meaning that a large fraction of the global warming witnessed over the past century could not be due to CO2 -- instead it is attributable to the increased solar activity.

His conclusions:

CO2 does play a role in climate, Dr. Shaviv believes, but a secondary role, one too small to preoccupy policymakers. Yet Dr. Shaviv also believes fossil fuels should be controlled, not because of their adverse affects on climate but to curb pollution.

"I am therefore in favour of developing cheap alternatives such as solar power, wind, and of course fusion reactors (converting Deuterium into Helium), which we should have in a few decades, but this is an altogether different issue." His conclusion: "I am quite sure Kyoto is not the right way to go."

Don’t expect to see Dr. Shaviv interviewed by Matt and Meredith anytime soon.

http://newsbusters.org/node/10604

[Bubbalicious]

http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl0405.html

American Geophysical Union
http://www.agu.org/agu_logo.gif (http://www.agu.org/)NEWS
http://www.agu.org/marble4.gif <table width="100%"> <tbody><tr> <td>21 January 2004
AGU Release No. 04-05
For Immediate Release</td> <td align="right">Contact: Harvey Leifert
+1 (202) 777-7507
hleifert@agu.org</td> </tr> </tbody></table> <table width="100%"> <tbody><tr> <td> <center> Cosmic Rays Are Not the Cause of Climate Change, Scientists Say </center> </td> </tr> </tbody></table>
WASHINGTON - Eleven Earth and space scientists say that a recent paper attributing most climate change on Earth to cosmic rays is incorrect and based on questionable methodology. Writing in the January 27 issue of Eos, published by the American Geophysical Union, Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and colleagues in Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States challenge the cosmic ray hypothesis.
In July 2003, astrophysicist Nir Shaviv and geologist Jan Veizer wrote in GSA Today that they had established a correlation between cosmic rays and temperature evolution over hundreds of millions of years. They also claimed that current global warming is not primarily caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide. Their findings have been widely reported in international news media.
According to Rahmstorf, Shaviv and Veizer's analyses--and especially their conclusions--are scientifically ill-founded. The data on cosmic rays and temperature so far in the past are extremely uncertain, he says. Further, their reconstruction of ancient cosmic rays is based on only 50 meteorites, and most other experts interpret their significance in a very different way, he says. He adds that two curves presented in the article show an apparent statistical correlation only because the authors adjusted the data, in one case by 40 million years. In short, say the authors of the Eos article, Shaviv and Veizer have not shown that there is any correlation between cosmic rays and climate.
As for the influence of carbon dioxide in climate change, many climatologists were surprised by Shaviv and Veizer's claim that their results disproved that current global warming was caused by human emissions, Rahmstorf says. Even if their analysis were methodologically correct, their work applied to time scales of several million years.
The current climate warming has, however, occurred during just a hundred years, for which completely different mechanisms are relevant, he says. For example, over millions of years, the shifting of continents influences climate, while over hundreds of thousands of years, small changes in Earth's orbit can initiate or terminate ice ages. But for time periods of years, decades, or centuries, these processes are irrelevant. Volcanic eruptions, changes in solar activity, and the concentration of greenhouse gases, as well as internal oscillations of the climate system, are crucial on this scale.
The 11 authors of the Eos article affirm that the strong increase of carbon dioxide and some other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to manmade emissions is most probably the main cause of the global warming of the last few decades. The most important physical processes are well understood, they say, and model calculations as well as data analyses both come to the conclusion that the human contribution to the global warming of the 20th century was dominant.
**********
Notes for journalists:
Journalists (only) may obtain an advance pdf copy of this paper upon request to Kara LeBeau: klebeau@agu.org.
Please provide your name, name of publication, phone, and email address. The paper and this press release are not under embargo.
Title: "Cosmic Rays, Carbon Dioxide, and Climate"
Citation: Rahmstorf, S. et al., Cosmic rays, carbon dioxide, and climate, Eos, Trans. AGU, 85(4), 38, 41, 2004.
Contact information for the authors:
Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam University, Potsdam, Germany: rahmstorf@pik-potsdam.de or +49-331-288-2688
David Archer, Department of Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA: d-archer@uchicago.edu or +1 773-702-0823
Denton S. Ebel, Department of Earth and Planetary Science, American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York, USA: Contact through Robin Lloyd, AMNH Communications Office: lloyd@amnh.org or +1 212-496-3419
Otto Eugster, Department of Space Research and Planetology, Physics Institute, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland: otto.eugster@phim.unibe.ch or +41 31-6314418
Jean Jouzel, Director, Pierre Simon Laplace Institute, University of Versailles, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France: jouzel@lsce.saclay.cea.fr +33 684759682
Douglas Maraun, Institute of Physics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany: maraun@agnld.uni-potsdam.de or +49 331-977-1364
Urs Neu, ProClim-, Swiss Forum for Climate and Global Change, Swiss Academy of Sciences, Bern, Switzerland: neu@sanw.unibe.chor +41 31-328-23-26
Gavin A. Schmidt, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research, New York, New York, USA: gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov or +1 212-678-5627
Jeffrey P. Severinghaus, Geoscience Research Division, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, USA: jseveringhaus@ucsd.edu or +1 858-822-2483
Andrew J. Weaver, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada: weaver@uvic.ca or +1 250-472-4001
Jim Zachos, Director, Center for the study of the Dynamics and Evolution of the Land-Sea Interface, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, USA: jzachos@emerald.ucsc.edu or +1 831-459-4644



next

[red states rule]

Of course since science cannnot help the left, they rely on fake news stories



The Polar Bear Pic They Won't Show You
Posted by Dan Riehl on February 4, 2007 - 12:23.
Images available here.

h/t Instapundit - Ann Althouse calls attention to an image of Polar Bears making the rounds, again - it was allegedly taken by Dan Crosbie in 2004 and is currently number one on Yahoo's photo list. The image I have up at right also involves Dan Crosbie from the same period in 2004 during a scientific trip during which they carried rifles to run off polar bears while planting equipment in the ice - ice that was much thicker than they expected it to be. (pertinent excerpted text at bottom)

But what's this? Scroll down and you'll see the same picture was first published with a credit to another person on the trip and the caption made it clear what was really going on.

Mother polar bear and cub on interesting ice sculpture carved by waves. photo © Amanda Byrd.

Wow! I didn't know Global Warming caused .... waves, too! Update: Apparently Amanda is also something of a poet.

The image has been used in a variety of environmental campaigns over the years, sans the original caption, of course. Here it was used to solicit public comments to Save da' Bears! They've now been, or soon will be listed as an endangered species. It seems the picture makes some people cry. But the Global Warming folks know that, based on this report. Read the bragging over the media manipulation:

One of the credos of journalism is to seek balance in a story, to cover "both sides." But reporters' dogged tendency to do so on the issue of a human role in global warming has had a detrimental impact on the public's understanding of the subject, say many scientists who criticize media coverage of climate change.

In just the last year White said he has noticed a significant shift in media coverage of the subject.

"The reporting is better because I don't see the 'other side' anymore."

And the polar bears make good ammunition - when the caption is inaccurate, of course:

White isn't averse to using elements that people can grasp and relate to, like vanishing sea ice and what that means for polar bear habitat and survival.

"Scientists miss that, " White said. "Many of my colleagues complain that it's all about polar bears -- it is all about polar bears, it's all about seals. You use the ammunition you have."

And they basically admit to exploiting Hurricane Katrina, too.

White also said Hurricane Katrina has been a major influence on the press's new focus. While it's impossible to say conclusively that global warming is to blame for Katrina's strength, White said, the storm was nonetheless a huge catalyst for a growing press interest in warming and rising seas and their effects.

"I've come to appreciate the power of these seminal events," White said. "These are galvanizing events that focus people's attention on the problems."

The text below is from first link above to a trip journal in which the picture originally appeared. Only the ice was so thick they almost gave up and the ammunition they were concerned with was reserved for polar bears, not saving them. The infamous polar bear pic has a home here with three others at Environment Canada.

The ice ends up being almost too good. It is a hard old floe, and takes us a long time to drill with the 2" diameter hand auger. After drilling 4 m, we think that we are almost to the end, but don't have enough extensions. Not willing to give up on this floe, another site is selected, and there we penetrate the ice cover after only about 3.75 m. So the decision is made to go ahead with the deployment there. However, since it is late in the evening by the time we return, the deployment begins on the following day.

Up the next morning at 5:30, on the helicopter deck by 6 AM, and on the ice by 6:15 to deploy the ITP and IMB buoys. Although it was pretty foggy in the morning and visibility was limited, 8 of us were transferred to the ice in three flights (plus gear) for the operations. There were also two slingloads of cargo.

Cutting the 11" diameter hole in the ice was the hardest part of the ITP deployment. Cutting through the 4 m of old hard ice progressed reasonably well until we got past the halfway point. Then water turned the ice shavings into slush, and the auger flutes couldn't remove the material. So the going got very difficult. We tried using four people (instead of the normal two) on the auger, but that still didn't produce results. It helped considerably to set up the tripod and hang the auger from a chainfall, so that we could drill at a controlled rate. When the hole was cut, the anchor weight and wire were smoothly deployed, then the ITP profiler was attached to the wire.

http://newsbusters.org/node/10601

[Bubbalicious]

And of course when you get repeatedly owned and can no longer defend your position, you go back to crying your little eyes out over the existence of liberals.

http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2005/113-2/crybaby.jpg

How predictable.

[red states rule]

truth hurts eh? It is not my fault libs are the root of most problems. If there are not any problems, they create them

[Bubbalicious]

truth hurts eh? It is not my fault libs are the root of most problems. If there are not any problems, they create them

We're the boogeyman. We lurk outside your window. Waiting for you to sleep so we can piss on your begonias.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y80/bunnydonia/smilies/953e85ac.gif

Fear us, if you dare.

[red states rule]

We're the boogeyman. We lurk outside your window. Waiting for you to sleep so we can piss on your begonias.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y80/bunnydonia/smilies/953e85ac.gif

Fear us, if you dare.

Comprehensive 'Annual Revision' to the Employment Numbers Goes Largely Underreported
Posted by Tom Blumer on February 3, 2007 - 09:47.
Yesterday's Employment Situation Summary from the Bureaus of Labor Statistics told us that reports 111,000 net new jobs were added in January. Additionally, significant upward revisions were made to the previously reported job-increase figures from November (up 42,000 to 196,000 from last month’s revised 154,000) and December (up 39,000 to 206,000 from last month’s originally reported 167,000). So with revisions, there were 192,000 more people working (111+42+39) at the end of January than were thought to be working as of the end of December, and 513,000 more (111+196+206) than three months ago.

It gets better.

In that same Employment Situation Summary released yesterday, the BLS reported on its "Annual Revisions to Establishment Survey Data." Doesn't sound like much, but read the fine print:

In accordance with annual practice, the establishment survey data have been revised to reflect comprehensive universe counts of payroll jobs, or benchmarks. These counts are derived principally from unemployment insurance tax records for March 2006. As a result of the benchmark process, all not seasonally adjusted data series were subject to revision from April 2005 forward, the time period since the last benchmark was established.

The total nonfarm employment level for March 2006 was revised upward by 752,000 (754,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis). The previously published level for December 2006 was revised upward by 981,000 (933,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis).

In other words, BLS "found" well over 900,000 more jobs, most of which (averaging about 63,000 per month) were added between April 2005 and March 2006. This was a time during which the "weak job growth" meme still had life in it. BLS's Annual Revision shows that the meme had no validity during that time.

So how does job growth during the Bush years look after incorporating the Annual Revision? Well, even more "Clintonian" than when I last looked at it a month ago:



As you might expect, the coverage of BLS's retroactively added 900,000-plus jobs has been relatively muted. Finding it requires knowing what you're looking for and getting past misleading headlines.

The LA Times (may require free registration) didn't not have the employment news in its home-page business headlines. Times reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske got the Annual Revision news into her second paragraph but only after this off-putting headline and sub-headline -- "Employment still strong despite disappointing month; Unemployment rises slightly to 4.6% from 4.5%. Sluggishness in the housing market could keep a lid on economic growth." If I didn't know better, I wouldn't want to read any further.

The New York Times also gave the employment news no home-page visibility. Jeremy Peters' and Eduardo Porter's headline (may require free registration) -- "Slower Job Growth, At Least for Now." The Times did cover the the Annual Revision and asked a question on a lot of minds, including yours truly's, beginning in the article's fifth paragraph (bold is mine):

But employers may be hiring at a faster clip than is immediately apparent. The Labor Department also acknowledged that employers added nearly one million more jobs from March 2005 through last December than it had previously estimated.

Last year, employment growth exceeded earlier estimates by more than 400,000 jobs. The magnitude of the change suggested that the Labor Department might be seriously underestimating the growth in employment.

“The size of the upward revisions was enormous,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist with MFR. “You put the pieces of the puzzle together, and it sort of tells you that the 111,000 number is not something to focus on.” January’s number will be revised in February and March, and will be subject to an annual adjustment next year.

But if the Times' "expert" said that the January number wasn't something to focus on, why did the article's headline do just that?

Also -- The reporters' stat that 400,000 jobs were retroactively added to 2006 ("last year") is probably technically correct, but I see it as a "clever" way to avoid mentioning the hundreds of thousands of additional jobs retroactively added to 2005, AND to avoid mentioning the 900,000-plus grand total of jobs retroactively added.

The Washington Post's Neil Henderson (may require registration) did not mention the Annual Revision or the 900,000-plus jobs retroactively added at all.

Once again, the Bush jobs machine isn't getting the credit it is due. The BLS needs to take a serious look at why it is taking so long to discover hundreds of thousands of workers.

http://newsbusters.org/node/10589

[Bubbalicious]

Oh I thought this thread was about global warming. I guess you don't want to talk about that anymore, huh :)

You know I can copy/paste some random Olberman editorials and Alternet articles as easily as you can post this Newsmax tripe.

[red states rule]

Oh I thought this thread was about global warming. I guess you don't want to talk about that anymore, huh :)

You know I can copy/paste some random Olberman editorials and Alternet articles as easily as you can post this Newsmax tripe.

It shows the liberal media is leading the charge to scare Americans about a non-existent "problem"

[Bubbalicious]

So stuff your head up your bum and watch Fox.

[red states rule]

So stuff your head up your bum and watch Fox.

I do and remember Fox News is the #1 rated cable news network

[Bubbalicious]

I do and remember Fox News is the #1 rated cable news network

I bet you do.

All cable news is garbage. Fox is the garbagiest.

Oh, how about that global warming, by the way?

[red states rule]

I bet you do.

All cable news is garbage. Fox is the garbagiest.

Oh, how about that global warming, by the way?



Ypu sound very jealous of Fox News. We know CNN and MSNBC are drooling over Fox's ratings

What global warming?

[Bubbalicious]

Ypu sound very jealous of Fox News. We know CNN and MSNBC are drooling over Fox's ratings

What global warming?

I don't watch CNN or MSNBC either. And FOX is for the braindead who want to be told what to think.

This global warming:

National Academy of Sciences: 'High Confidence' That Planet Is Warmest in 400 Years (http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11676)

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/06/23/GR2006062300505.gif

http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/images/posterglacier.jpg




The global warming that that Shaviv guy you sited mistakenly claims to be caused by cosmic rays.

[red states rule]

Expanding Pack Ice in Iceland, Will Media Notice?
Posted by Noel Sheppard on February 4, 2007 - 18:44.
In the midst of the media's global warming panic, an interesting thing is happening in Iceland: the amount of pack ice has increased to levels not seen in decades.

As reported by the Telegraph (h/t Drudge, emphasis mine throughout):

The oceans may be warming and air temperatures rising, but in recent days Iceland has bucked the global climate trend.

Thick pack ice, the like of which has not been seen for decades, stretched into the western fjords as temperatures plummeted and a bitter wind blew in from -Greenland.

The article continued:

Climate change scientists say that with temperatures rising, the pack ice may have melted completely by 2040, leaving the Arctic ocean navigable and the polar bears with nowhere to go.

Last week's return of the pack ice to Iceland initially suggested that those predictions might have been overly pessimistic.

"I have lived here my whole life, but I have never seen so much pack ice before," said Helgi Árnason, a farmer in -Dyrafjördur.

"Forty years ago, large icebergs drifted on to beaches but it was nothing compared with this.

"[Pack ice] used to be Iceland's ancient enemy, but we stay calm so long as the situation doesn't worsen. This is just to remind us where we live."

Think the media will cover this story? Or, will they do a collective Emily Litella "Never mind?"

http://newsbusters.org/node/10606

[Bubbalicious]

Indeed, David Vaughn, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, notes that if it's real, the continental cooling trend may be a relatively brief departure from a longer-term warming trend. The average temperature trend for all Antarctic stations from 1959 to 1996 point to an average warming of 1.2 degrees C.

He adds that while early climate models pointed to broad-scale warming at both poles, improved models suggest the heating will be uneven at high latitudes and more pronounced in the north than in the south. That effect, he says, is evident in the greater-than-average warming that has occurred in Alaska, northern Siberia, and Greenland.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0118/p02s01-usgn.html


look familiar?

[red states rule]

King Tut's Hummer: ABC Says Temp Increase 'Greatest in Thousands of Years'
Posted by Mark Finkelstein on February 2, 2007 - 09:29.
GMA's segment this morning on the big global warming confab in Paris was filled with predictably alarmist rhetoric. But one factoid slipped through the MSM filter that could put a chill on the "it's-all-man's-fault" view of the matter: thousands of years ago, global warming exceeded anything we're currently experiencing.

Oh, and did you know the result of global warming is . . . fewer hurricanes? First, the alarmism. Reporting from Paris, ABC weatherman Sam Champion informed us:

"It's really kind of frightening stuff, the stuff that science fiction books and movies are made of. Melting ice, heat waves and even stronger storms."
"Global warming is with us, and it's going to be with us for centuries."
"It is the definitive report on global warming, and it's frightening."
Champion ran a clip of a panel member with an urbane European accent stating that February 2nd, 2007 "will perhaps be remembered as the day when the question mark was removed from behind the debate on whether climate change had anything to do with human activity on this planet."

Champion: "They're confirming the warming is very likely man-made. . . More than 90% certainty that man's burning of fossil fuels is heating up our planet."

Added Champion: "One result of global warming -- fewer, but even stronger hurricanes." What? Global warming results in fewer hurricanes? How many charts did the MSM treat us to a year or so ago trying to demonstrate that global warming was responsible for more hurricanes? Is this the global-warming lobby trying to explain away the embarrasssing lack of Atlantic hurricanes this season?

Champion then claimed that "among the shocking conclusions of this report, sea levels could rise nearly two feet, swamping areas world-wide by the end of this century." Champion didn't let viewers know that the report actually gave a range: 7-23 inches. Why did he emphasize only the higher end?

Moreover, as he spoke ABC displayed an animation showing islands sliding into the sea with the graphic "2030" on the screen. So what is it? Seven inches by 2100, or islands disappearing in 23 years?

That's when Champion let slip what you might call . . . an inconvenient truth: "the report predicts that the temperature increase this century could be the greatest in thousands of years."

Wait a second! Some time thousands of years ago, temperatures were increasing faster than they are now? Yes. A little Googling bears that out. Have a look at this government paper on the ice age, which includes this statement:

"About 11,500 years ago . . . forests quickly regained the ground that they had lost to cold and aridity. Ice sheets again began melting, though because of their size they took about two thousand more years to disappear completely. The Earth entered several thousand years of conditions warmer and moister than today; the Saharan and Arabian deserts almost completely disappeared under a vegetation cover, and in the northern latitudes forests grew slightly closer to the poles than they do at present. This phase, known as the 'Holocene optimum' occurred between about 9,000 and 5,000 years ago."

Perhaps even more signicantly, the paper paints a picture of mammoth climate changes going back hundreds of thousands of years, repeated cycles of heating and cooling that as recently as 18,000 years ago - a blink in geological terms - had my hometown of Ithaca, NY covered under a huge sheet of ice. Something melted it since then -- and it wasn't man's doing.

We can joke about the Pharoahs' SUVs, but it is obvious that man had no impact on those epochal changes. Is the man's-to-blame movement of today good science, or hubris about the ability of man to influence events?

Pet Peeve: Is their any cheaper shot than the MSMs tendency to show footage, as GMA did here, of the calving of glaciers? While used to suggest dramatic global warming, calving is a phenomenon that has occurred since time immemorial. It's what happens when glaciers reach the sea. In fact, as per this Harvard report, calving occurs when glaciers . . . grow, not shrink!

http://newsbusters.org/node/10566

[Bubbalicious]

World's leading scientists spell out the dangers of climate change (http://alternet.org/blogs/peek/47551/)

(http://alternet.org/blogs/peek/47551/)
Posted by Tara Lohan (http://alternet.org/bloggers//) at 10:31 AM on February 2, 2007.


Tara Lohan: We made our bed, now we are going to have to swim in it.

http://alternet.org/images/icons/icn-mail.gif (http://alternet.org/module/email/?storyID=47551&type=blog)



The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations announced the findings of their study (http://www.ipcc.ch/) about the future of our planet -- CO2 and other heat-trapping gases that have resulted from human activity are the cause of the earth's warming. Of this they are certain. Well, almost.
They are apparently 90 percent certain. And this is good enough to confirm that which has already been confirmed in numerous findings released over the past several years, including the groundbreaking Stern Review (http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/sternreview_index.cfm) from the UK and the work of NASA's Jim Hansen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen).
"The findings are not new to us, but the certainty is. It's a reminder that time is running out to avoid these dangerous events," said Angela Anderson, Vice President for Climate Programs at the National Environmental Trust.
So maybe there are some people out there that don't want to take Al Gore's word for it -- but how about hundreds of the world's leading scientists? Actually, to be exact the report was produced by more than 600 authors from over 40 countries and was reviewed by an additional 620 experts and representatives from 113 countries, making it one of the most extensively peer-reviewed scientific documents.
The report says:

Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to increases in heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere.
Without action to curb global warming pollution it is very likely that heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent and hurricanes are likely to become more intense.What we are looking at, the report details, is a future of rising temperatures, rising seas, contracting snow cover, shrinking sea ice, an increased frequency in extreme heat periods and precipitation, and an increase in the frequency and severity of tropical storms.
At this point there really doesn't seem to be much room for discussion. The majority of folks understand that climate change is real -- let's hope this study is able to finally put that conversation to rest.
What we need now is a radical shift in policy -- and soon.
One of our country's leading environmental thinkers, who sounded the alarm about global warming decades ago, Bill McKibben, is organizing a massive political action (http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/47064/) on April 14. His project, Step It Up 2007 (http://www.stepitup2007.org/), is a great place to start demanding political action.
There are no longer any "ifs" or "whens" in the discussion of global warming. We should be talking about action -- now.

[red states rule]

Sen. James Inhofe Shows Real Data to CNN's Global Warming Alarmist Miles O'Brien
Posted by Justin McCarthy on January 31, 2007 - 17:05.
With NBC and ABC hyping the global climate change news in recent days, CNN jumped on the bandwagon on Wednesday’s American Morning. Miles O’Brien interviewed one of the leading climate change skeptics, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma. After his previous combative interview, O’Brien attempted to disprove Inhofe’s skepticism with sound bites from various climate change believers.

Inhofe slammed O’Brien for cherry picking data to verify his theory exclaiming: "Now you won’t get the [fourth assessment from the IPCC] from scientists probably until May or June. But this summary is all you’re going to look at."

Miles O’Brien then cited the United Nations report with "2,500 of the world’s leading scientists." The Senator shot back about the Oregon Petition, signed by 17,800 scientists, who said that the increase in the earth’s temperature is part of a natural trend.

Senator Inhofe quoted to O’Brien, who once claimed that "skeptical scientists are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry,"a French geophysicist. This geophysicists said, "the cause of global warming is unknown. The proponents of manmade catastrophic global warming are being motivated by money."

The entire transcript is below.

M. O'BRIEN: "And now 'Melting Point.' We begin our special ongoing focus on global warming, and we begin with a shift in the political climate. Just listen to the president in the State of the Union speech last week."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: "America's on the verge of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to live our lives less dependent on oil. And these technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

M. O'BRIEN: "That was a first. And now the White House is promising action on global warming. We wonder what one of the leading contrarians on the issue is thinking, and so we invited him on the program. He joins us now from Capitol Hill, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma. He is the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Senator, good to have you back on the program."

SEN. JAMES INHOFE (R), OKLAHOMA: "Hey, Miles. The last time I was on the program I was the chairman. Not anymore."

M. O'BRIEN: "I know. Things change. Things change in an instant."

INHOFE: "Yes, but they change back, too. Remember that."

M. O'BRIEN: "That is true, too. That is very true. And we're there to watch it every step of the way. Let's talk about the science, first. We've got a big report coming out, this United Nations report, 2,500 of the world's leading scientists. It's being called a smoking gun report with a link between humans and global warming. Let's listen to what one of the leading scientists has to say about it."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMES HANSEN, DIR., GODDARD INST. FOR SPACE STUDIES: "The human link is crystal clear. There's no question, the increase from 280 to 380 parts per million in CO2 is due to the burning of fossil fuels."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

M. O'BRIEN: "That's James Hansen, one of the leading climate scientists. He says it's crystal clear. What do you say?"

INHOFE: "I'd say that that's James Hansen, who is paid $250,000 by the Heinz Foundation. I think he'd say almost anything you ask him to say."

M. O'BRIEN: "He's -- Senator, he's speaking for 2,500 of the world's leading scientists."

INHOFE: "Oh. Then why is he the guy speaking? Let me tell you what you're going to get. You're wrong in this respect, Miles. What you're going to get on Friday is not the fourth assessment of the IPCC. You're going to get the summary for policymakers. Now, you won't get the report from scientists probably until May or June. But this summary is all you're going to look at. You're never going to talk about anything else. And that's -- and let me just read to you to show you that I'm right on this thing. On page four, it says, 'Changes in scientific work to ensure consistency with the summary for policymakers will ensure.' These are politicians, these aren't scientists."

M. O'BRIEN: "No, no, no. They are scientists, sir. It's 2,500..."

(CROSSTALK)

INHOFE: "The policymakers? The policymakers -- that's a summary, Miles."

M. O'BRIEN: "But this report, this summary, which is for policymakers, is drafted by scientists. They're meeting in Paris right now, and these are leading scientists who make these claims and now say there is a certainty of this human connection. Do you still reject that certainty?"

INHOFE: "Oh, definitely. I was on a program yesterday with Art Robinson. He was one of the scientists in the Oregon petition, 17,800 scientists, that said that, yes, we understand that we are going through a warming period, but it's not due to manmade gases. And this is ten years after they came out with their report, and nobody ever talks about that. The recent findings up in Canada, when 60 scientists told the prime minister, Harper, if we had known ten years ago what we know today about science, we would never have asked you to sign on to the Kyoto. So..."

(CROSSTALK)

M. O'BRIEN: "Right. There were many scientists who unwittingly became a part of that. Let's move on, though. Let's talk a little bit about... "

INHOFE: "Well, no. No, we can't move on, because if you're talking about the science, the science is not settled. Let's move on."

M. O'BRIEN: "All right. Let's move on now. Let's talk about the debate a little bit. It's interesting to see how corporations are acting right now. I know you saw this past week, right before the State of the Union Address, some real corporate heavyweights -- General Electric, Alcoa, British Petroleum, Duke Power, one of the -- I think it's the number three or four coal user in the country -- all signing on and publicly stating that they would like to accept, would prefer that there be caps on emissions of these climate-changing gases. Let's listen to what the head of Duke Power had to say about it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JIM ROGERS, CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENT & CEO, DUKE ENERGY: "Our businesses and the national economy can grow, prosper, and compete successfully in a greenhouse gas-constrained world."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

M. O'BRIEN: "It sounds like corporate America is ready to accept caps."

INHOFE: "Hey, let me, let me work into that -- it just takes me a second here -- my favorite quote of all the people who were on the side of saying manmade gas caused global warming was a socialist in France. He's a geophysicist named Claude Allegre (ph).He's a member of both the French and American Academy of Sciences. He says, 'The cause of global warming is unknown. The proponents of manmade catastrophic global warming are being motivated by' -- and listen to this now, Miles -- 'money.' Now, who do you think these guys are in corporate America? I would direct anyone who thinks that this is coming from their heart to read last Friday's Wall Street Journal, where they take each of the corporations you just mentioned and talked about how they can make money if we have to do away with coal gasification. Coal is responsible for over 50 percent of our energy in America. These companies have nuclear, they have hydroelectric, they have wind, they have -- and it's to their financial advantage to do away with it. Now who is paying for this?"

M. O'BRIEN: "Well, let's talk about that. That's an interesting point, because what you often hear -- and I've heard you say it, too -- that in putting these caps on, it would hurt the economy. What you're saying is, there's a good business here. These cooperation's can make some money by accepting these caps and developing new technologies. Why not go that route?"

INHOFE: "Well, if you go that route -- if you do away with 50 percent of our electricity in America, then those individuals who are generating less electricity by using some other means are going to jump in there and try to do it. The cost to the American people, according to the Wharton School of Economics, the Wharton econometrics survey, would be astronomical. And these people all have money that they can make. Sure, if I were on the board of directors of GE, that's making solar equipment and wind turbines, I'd probably say, let's jump on this bandwagon and do away with coal-generated electricity. We'll make a fortune."

M. O'BRIEN: "All right. Let's talk a little bit about what's going on in the halls of Congress right now. Yesterday, the committee -- and now you're the ranking member of it -- sort of took, if you will, the temperature of the Senate, heard from some senators on this issue, and one of them you heard from was Senator John McCain. He spoke to me the day after the State of the Union. Let's listen to what he's saying right now about this."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: "This is one of the serious issues of our -- of, of the history of humanity. We've got to start reducing these greenhouse gas emissions before our planet is inalterably heated. And the consequences of that are catastrophic."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

M. O'BRIEN: "All right. The senator is expressing some sentiment that is, is out there. You've got Democrats in control of both sides of Congress right now. It seems very likely there will be some legislation making its way, maybe by this summer. The question to you, sir, is, if that happens, will you filibuster?"

INHOFE: "You know, I'm not sure about filibustering. I don't know what's going to happen with this. I would say this: The last time we had the McCain bill -- and I love John McCain, but Miles, you have to keep in mind, I've said before -- not on your program -- I belong to the most exclusive club in Washington. That is the United States senators who are not running for president. So I don't have any other agenda other than trying to get to the truth. Now, the truth now is that we have changed the committee structure. It's not me, it's Barbara Boxer who is running the Environment of Public Works Committee. She had the hearing yesterday. I don't know whether you got my part of the hearing or not. I had 12 minutes to speak, and I did. Several other members did also. But, you know, let's look at it and see. The last time the McCain bill was up, we defeated it, 60-38. It wasn't close, 60-38."

M. O'BRIEN: "All right."

INHOFE: "But because of what it would cost the people in America, the people that are watching this today..."

M. O'BRIEN: "You just got through saying there is money to be made in this, so there is an inconsistency there. Finally, sir, you're a very religious man. I know that. And I..."

INHOFE: "A what? I'm sorry?"

M. O'BRIEN: "You're a religious man. And I've noted, I've noted with great interest on that same week that corporate America was coming forward, evangelicals coming forward saying something has to be done."

INHOFE: "Not at all. Not at all true."

M. O'BRIEN: "Listen to a leading evangelical for just a moment."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REV. RICHARD CIZIK, VP FOR GOVT. AFFAIRS, NATIONAL ASSOC. OF EVANGELICALS: "I think it's a fundamental issue here, a defining public policy issue which says for scientists it's the Earth. For evangelicals, it's the creation. And we have a biblical duty as evangelical Christians. That comes straight from the Bible."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

M. O'BRIEN: "What do you say to that, Senator?"

INHOFE: "One of the problems, there's one individual. His name is Richard Cizik..."

M. O'BRIEN: "That was him. That was him."

INHOFE: "I know that. He's the guy that's out there -- and you talk about making money. There's a guy that's on the cutting edge, being sponsored by all these environmentalist groups to try to break into the National Association of Evangelicals. They have rejected him and what he has said. He's speaking on his own, not for evangelicals."

http://newsbusters.org/node/10530

[Bubbalicious]

ExxonMobil's War on Science (http://alternet.org/envirohealth/47371/)
<!-- end: headline --> <!-- start: byline --> By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (http://alternet.org/authors/6212/), HuffingtonPost.com (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/). Posted January 31, 2007 (http://alternet.org/ts/archives/?date%5BF%5D=01&date%5BY%5D=2007&date%5Bd%5D=31&act=Go/).

<!-- end: byline --> <!-- end: headline and byline --> <!-- start: teaser --> With an elaborate network of phony think tanks and slick public relations firms, ExxonMobil has become today's Big Tobacco, defrauding the public and waging a war on science.


In a quarter-page advertorial in Thursday's New York Times, ExxonMobil launched a new greenwashing campaign to salvage its earned reputation as Earth's number one global warming villain.
For over a decade the giant oil company has waged a successful multi-million dollar propaganda campaign to deceive the public about global warming. Using phony think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, scientists-for-hire called biostitutes, slick public relations firms, and their indentured servants in the political process, they have intentionally defrauded the public by promoting the notion that global warming is a hoax or a sketchy theory that requires more study.
The company now asserts that its position on global warming has been "misunderstood," but its decade of mischief is well documented.
Exxon has dished out at least $19 million dollars since the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol (1997) to fund an elaborate network including over 75 industry front groups mobilized in a misleading campaign to cloud the public's understanding of global warming. Their objective has been to counter balance the overwhelming scientific evidence of man-induced climate change with pseudo scientific denials to derail reforms that might effect corporate profits.
In 2005, ExxonMobil paid over $3.5 million to 49 different front groups, according to the company's own records, which are collected each year by ExxonSecrets.org (http://www.exxonsecrets.org/) and the ExxposeExxon coalition. A report (http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.html) released earlier this month by the Union of Concerned Scientists traces the roots of this fraudulent propaganda broadside -- and many of its prime actors -- back to the tobacco industry's tactical war on science.
Exxon has also used vast political contributions to guide the Bush administration's posturing on climate change. ExxonMobil successfully arranged the ousting of the world's top climate scientist Robert Watson as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
An Exxon memo (http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/020403.asp) to President Bush's top staffers obtained by NRDC through the Freedom of Information Act asks bluntly, "Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the U.S.?" The White House's carbon cronies obligingly complied, arranging for Watson's dismissal. He was replaced by a little known scientist from New Delhi who would not be regularly available for Congressional hearings.
A 2002 Exxon memo recently obtained by Greenpeace through FOIA coaches one of the President's top environmental advisers Philip Cooney, chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality on how to "improve" administration research on climate change by emphasizing "significant uncertainties" in the science.
The New York Times later revealed that Cooney, a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute which is generously funded by Exxon, made myriad changes to government climate studies designed to weaken their strong conclusions about the need to act on global warming.
Typically Cooney would insert the words "significant and fundamental" before "uncertainties" in the reports. Cooney, a non scientist, helped suppress or alter several major taxpayer funded scientific studies on global warming including a decade-long study commissioned by this President's father. Cooney resigned two days after the Times broke the story. But don't feel badly. Within a week ExxonMobil announced it had hired him.
Exxon has responded to roars of recent outrage over its anti-social antics by announcing that it has stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute which has collected over $2 million from the oil giant since 1998 to weave lies about climate change -- and 4-5 other groups that Exxon refused to name.
Exxon's new contrition is hardly sincere. The company still continues to fund 40 other groups in its unrelenting campaign of deception. Two weeks ago, the ExxposeExxon coalition -- composed of America's most respected environmental groups, including NRDC, the Sierra Club and U.S. PIRG -- asked Exxon to disclose the names of all the other groups the company funded this year and the nature of the work they are doing for ExxonMobil. Exxon did not respond to the request.
As further evidence of the company's insincerity, Exxon's chief executive and CEO Rex Tillerson, on Friday told world leaders in Davos that oil companies should not be held responsible for global warming. The blame, he argued, rests instead with the very consumers and government officials his company has spent millions of dollars manipulating and defrauding.
America is a decade late in addressing the serious threat from global warming largely due to ExxonMobil's campaign of deliberate deception. ExxonMobil's conduct amounts to a war on civilization. The company can't simply sweep this legacy of fraud and villainy under the rug with a paid op-ed campaign in the New York Times, or with oily statements shifting the blame to consumers. The company needs to cease its campaign of deception completely if it is to genuinely atone for its crimes against humanity.
ExxonMobil might also apply some of its record profits -- estimated at $37 billion last year -- toward meaningful solutions to global warming as other U.S. companies have done.
For starters ExxonMobil might consider joining a coalition of ten major companies -- including industry giants like DuPont, Dow and Alcoa -- and leading environmental groups which last week launched the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (http://www.us-cap.org/), calling for firm limits on carbon dioxide emissions to aggressively combat climate change.

[Bubbalicious]

Bush appointee unable to utter the words "Global Warming" [VIDEO] (http://alternet.org/blogs/video/47423/)


This first video details the hysterical-yet-sad story of John Negroponte, back when he was Bush's Director of National Intelligence, attempting to avoid the wrath of the White House by mentioning the words "Global" and "Warming" back to back.
Apparently, it was something of a game to get him to say them in the same sentence...
***
The second is an excerpt from a Democratic-run hearing on political influence on government climate change scientist. Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a Democrat, asks Dr. Drew Shindell (no slouch he (http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/everydaylife/sa_top50.html)) what he thinks of several edits by Bush's Office of Management and Budget and by the Council on Environmental Quality, run by a lawyer who used to work for the American Petroleum Institute.
Guess what he says...

[Bubbalicious]

Finding Hope in a Post-Oil Society (http://alternet.org/envirohealth/46846/)
<!-- end: headline --> <!-- start: byline --> By James Howard Kunstler (http://alternet.org/authors/7407/), Orion Magazine (http://www.oriononline.org/). Posted January 23, 2007 (http://alternet.org/ts/archives/?date%5BF%5D=01&date%5BY%5D=2007&date%5Bd%5D=23&act=Go/).

<!-- end: byline --> <!-- end: headline and byline --> <!-- start: teaser --> America invested most of its late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future: Suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It's time for us to make other arrangements.


As the American public continues sleepwalking into a future of energy scarcity, climate change, and geopolitical turmoil, we have also continued dreaming. Our collective dream is one of those super-vivid ones people have just before awakening. It is a particularly American dream on a particularly American theme: how to keep all the cars running by some other means than gasoline. We'll run them on ethanol! We'll run them on biodiesel, on synthesized coal liquids, on hydrogen, on methane gas, on electricity, on used French-fry oil...!
The dream goes around in fevered circles as each gasoline replacement is examined and found to be inadequate. But the wish to keep the cars going is so powerful that round and round the dream goes. Ethanol! Biodiesel! Coal liquids...
And a harsh reality indeed awaits us as the full scope of the permanent energy crisis unfolds. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production peaked in December 2005 at just over 85 million barrels a day. Since then, it has trended absolutely flat at around 84 million. Yet world oil consumption rose consistently from 77 million barrels a day in 2001 to above 85 million so far this year. A clear picture emerges: demand now exceeds world supply. Or, put another way, oil production has not increased despite the ardent wish that it would by all involved, and despite the overwhelming incentive of prices having nearly quadrupled since 2001.
There is no question that we are in trouble with oil. The natural gas situation is comparably ominous, with some differences in the technical details -- and by the way, I am referring here to methane gas (CH4), the stuff that fuels kitchen stoves and home furnaces, not cars and trucks. Natural gas doesn't deplete slowly like oil, following a predictable bell-curve pattern; it simply stops coming out of the ground when a particular gas well is played out. You also tend to get your gas from the continent you are on. To import natural gas from overseas, it has to be liquefied, loaded in a special kind of expensive-to-build-and-operate tanker, and then offloaded at a specialized marine terminal.


Half the homes in America are heated with gas furnaces and about 16 percent of our electricity is made with it. Industry uses natural gas as the primary ingredient in fertilizer, plastics, ink, glue, paint, laundry detergent, insect repellent, and many other common household necessities. Synthetic rubber and man-made fibers like nylon could not be made without the chemicals derived from natural gas. In North America, natural gas production peaked in 1973. We are drilling as fast as we can to keep the air conditioners and furnaces running.
What's more, the problems of climate change are amplifying, ramifying, and mutually reinforcing the problems associated with rapidly vanishing oil and gas reserves. This was illustrated vividly in 2005, when slightly higher ocean temperatures sent Hurricanes Katrina and Rita slamming into the U.S. Gulf Coast. Almost a year later, roughly 12 percent of oil production and 9.5 percent of natural gas production in the gulf was still out, probably for good. Many of these production platforms may never be rebuilt, because the amounts of oil and gas left beneath them would not justify the cost. If there is $50 million worth of oil down there, why spend $100 million replacing a wrecked platform to get it?
Climate change will also ramify the formidable problems associated with alternative fuels. As I write, the American grain belt is locked in a fierce summer drought. Corn and soybean crops are withering from Minnesota to Illinois; wheat is burning up in the Dakotas and Kansas. Meanwhile, the costs of agricultural "inputs" -- from diesel fuel to fertilizers made from natural gas to oil-derived pesticides -- have been ramping up steadily since 2003 to the great distress of farmers. Both weather and oil costs are driving our crop yields down, while the industrial mode of farming that has evolved since the Second World War becomes increasingly impractical. We are going to have trouble feeding ourselves in the years ahead, not to mention the many nations who depend for survival on American grain exports. So the idea that we can simply shift millions of acres from food crops to ethanol or biodiesel crops to make fuels for cars represents a staggering misunderstanding of reality.
Still, the widespread wish persists that some combination of alternative fuels will rescue us from this oil and gas predicament and allow us to continue enjoying by some other means what Vice-President Cheney has called the "non-negotiable" American way of life. The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or systems for using them will allow us to continue running America, or even a substantial fraction of it, the way we have been. We are not going to run Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, Monsanto, and the Interstate Highway System on any combination of solar or wind energy, hydrogen, ethanol, tar sands, oil shale, methane hydrates, nuclear power, thermal depolymerization, "zero-point" energy, or anything else you can name. We will desperately use many of these things in many ways, but we are likely to be disappointed in what they can actually do for us.
The key to understanding the challenge we face is admitting that we have to comprehensively make other arrangements for all the normal activities of everyday life. I will return to this theme shortly, but first it is important to try to account for the extraordinary amount of delusional thinking that currently dogs our collective ability to think about these problems.
The widespread wish to just uncouple from oil and gas and plug all our complex systems into other energy sources is an interesting and troubling enough phenomenon in its own right to merit some discussion. Perhaps the leading delusion is the notion that energy and technology are one and the same thing, interchangeable. The popular idea, expressed incessantly in the news media, is that if you run out of energy, you just go out and find some "new technology" to keep things running. We'll learn that this doesn't comport with reality. For example, commercial airplanes are either going to run on cheap liquid hydrocarbon fuels or we're not going to have commercial aviation as we have known it. No other energy source is concentrated enough by weight, affordable enough by volume, and abundant enough in supply to do the necessary work to overcome gravity in a loaded airplane, repeated thousands of times each day by airlines around the world. No other way of delivering that energy source besides refined liquid hydrocarbons will allow that commercial system to operate at the scale we are accustomed to. The only reason this system exists is that until now such fuels have been cheap and abundant. We are not going to replace the existing worldwide fleet of airplanes either, and besides, there is no other type of airplane we have yet devised that can work differently.
There may be other ways of moving things above the ground, for instance balloons, blimps, or zeppelin-type airships. But they will move much more slowly and carry far less cargo and human passengers than the airplanes we've been enjoying for the past sixty years or so. The most likely scenario in the years ahead is that aviation will become an increasingly expensive, elite activity as the oil age dribbles to a close, and then it will not exist at all.
Another major mistake made by those who fail to pay attention is overlooking the unanticipated consequences of new technology, which more often than not add additional layers of problems to existing ones. In the energy sector, one of the most vivid examples is seen in the short history of the world's last truly great oil discovery, the North Sea fields between Norway and the UK. They were found in the '60s, got into production in the late '70s, and were pumping at full blast in the early '90s. Then, around 1999, they peaked and are now in extremely steep decline -- up to 50 percent a year in the case of some UK fields. The fact that they were drilled with the latest and best new technology turns out to mean that they were drained with stunning efficiency. "New technology" only hastened Britain's descent into energy poverty. Now, after a twenty-year-long North Sea bonanza in which it enjoyed an orgy of suburbanization, Great Britain is again a net energy importer. Soon the Brits will have no North Sea oil whatsoever and will find themselves below their energy diet of the grim 1950s.
If you really want to understand the U.S. public's penchant for wishful thinking, consider this: We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period. This dilemma now entails a powerful psychology of previous investment, which is prompting us to defend our misinvestments desperately, or, at least, preventing us from letting go of our assumptions about their future value. Compounding the disaster is the unfortunate fact that the manic construction of ever more futureless suburbs (a.k.a. the "housing bubble") has insidiously replaced manufacturing as the basis of our economy.
Meanwhile, the outsourcing of manufacturing to other nations has spurred the development of a "global economy," which media opinion-leaders such as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (author of The World Is Flat) say is a permanent state of affairs that we had better get used to. It is probably more accurate to say that the global economy is a set of transient economic relations that have come about because of two fundamental (and transient) conditions: a half century of relative peace between great powers and a half century of cheap and abundant fossil-fuel energy. These two mutually dependent conditions are now liable to come to an end as the great powers enter a bitter contest over the world's remaining energy resources, and the world is actually apt to become a lot larger and less flat as these economic relations unravel.
This is approximately the state of the nation right now. It is deeply and tragically ironic that the more information that bombards us, the less we seem to understand. There are cable TV news networks and Internet news sites beyond counting, yet we are unable to process this deluge of information into a coherent public discussion about the fundamental challenges that our civilization faces -- not to mention a sensible agenda for meeting these hardships. Meanwhile, CBS News tells millions of viewers that the tar sands of Alberta will solve all our problems, or (two weeks later) that the coal beds under Montana and Wyoming will sustain business as usual, and CNN tells another several million viewers that we can run everything here on ethanol, just like they do in Brazil.
Of course, the single worst impediment to clear thinking among most individuals and organizations in America today is the obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs. Even the environmental community is guilty of this. The esteemed Rocky Mountain Institute ran a project for a decade to design and develop a "hyper-car" capable of getting supernaturally fabulous mileage, in the belief that this would be an ecological benefit. The short-sightedness of this venture? It only promoted the idea that we could continue to be a car-dependent society; the project barely gave nodding recognition to the value of walkable communities and public transit.
The most arrant case of collective cluelessness now on view is our failure to even begin a public discussion about fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system, which has become so decrepit that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of it. It's the one thing we could do right away that would have a substantial impact on our oil use. The infrastructure is still out there, rusting in the rain, waiting to be fixed. The restoration of it would employ hundreds of thousands of Americans at all levels of meaningful work. The fact that we are hardly even talking about it -- at any point along the political spectrum, left, right, or center -- shows how fundamentally un-serious we are.
This is just not good enough. It is not worthy of our history, our heritage, or the sacrifices that our ancestors made. It is wholly incompatible with anything describable as our collective responsibility to the future.
We have to do better. We have to start right away making those other arrangements. We have to begin the transition to some mode of living that will allow us to carry on the project of civilization -- and I would argue against the notion advanced by Daniel Quinn and others that civilization itself is our enemy and should not be continued. The agenda for facing our problems squarely can, in fact, be described with some precision. We have to make other arrangements for the basic activities of everyday life.
In general, the circumstances we face with energy and climate change will require us to live much more locally, probably profoundly and intensely so. We have to grow more of our food locally, on a smaller scale than we do now, with fewer artificial "inputs," and probably with more human and animal labor. Farming may come closer to the center of our national economic life than it has been within the memory of anyone alive now. These changes are also likely to revive a menu of social and class conflicts that we also thought we had left behind.
We'll have to reorganize retail trade by rebuilding networks of local economic interdependence. The rise of national chain retail business was an emergent, self-organizing response to the conditions of the late twentieth century. Those conditions are now coming to an end, and the Wal-Mart way of doing business will come to an end with them: the twelve-thousand-mile merchandise supply line to Asian factories; the "warehouse on wheels" made up of thousands of tractor-trailer trucks circulating endlessly between the container-ship ports and the big-box store loading docks. The damage to local economies that the "superstores" leave behind is massive. Not only have they destroyed multilayered local networks for making and selling things, they destroyed the middle classes that ran them, and in so doing they destroyed the cultural and economic fabric of the communities themselves. This is a lot to overcome. We will have to resume making some things for ourselves again, and moving them through smaller-scale trade networks. We may have fewer things to buy overall. The retail frenzy of recent decades will subside as we struggle to produce things of value and necessarily consume less.
We'll have to make other arrangements for transporting people and goods. Not only do we desperately need to rebuild the railroad system, but electrifying it -- as virtually all other advanced nations have done -- will bring added advantages, since we will be able to run it on a range of things other than fossil fuels. We should anticipate a revival of maritime trade on the regional scale, with more use of boats on rivers, canals, and waterways within the U.S. Many of our derelict riverfronts and the dying ports of the Great Lakes may come back to life. If we use trucks at all to move things, it will be for the very last leg of the journey. The automobile will be a diminishing presence in our lives and, increasingly, a luxury that will be resented by those who can no longer afford to participate in the "happy motoring" utopia. The interstate highways themselves will require more resources to maintain than we will be able to muster. For many of us, the twenty-first century will be less about incessant mobility than about staying where we are.
We have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently, meaning a return to traditional cities, towns, neighborhoods, and a productive rural landscape that is more than just strictly scenic or recreational. We will probably see a reversal of the two-hundred-year-long trend of people moving from the country and small towns to the big cities. In fact, our big cities will probably contract substantially, even while they re-densify at their centers and along their waterfronts. The work of the New Urbanists will be crucial in rebuilding human habitats that have a future. Their achievement so far has been not so much in building "new towns" like Seaside, Florida, or Kentlands, Maryland, but in retrieving a body of knowledge, principle, and methodology for urban design that had been thrown away in our mad effort to build the drive-in suburbs.
It is harder to predict exactly what may happen with education and medicine, except to say that neither can continue to operate as rackets much longer, and that they, like everything else, will have to become smaller in scale and much more local. Our centralized school districts, utterly dependent on the countless daily trips of fleets of yellow buses and oppressive property taxes, have poor prospects for carrying on successfully in an energy-scarce economy. However, we will be a less affluent nation in the post-oil age, and therefore may be hard-pressed to replace them. A new, more locally based education system may arise instead out of home-schooling, as household classes aggregate into new, small, neighborhood schools. College will cease to be a mass-consumer activity, and may only be available to social elites -- if it continues to exist at all. Meanwhile, we're in for a pretty stark era of triage as the vast resources of the "medical industry" contract. Even without a global energy crisis bearing down on us, the federal Medicaid and Medicare systems would not survive the future as currently funded.
As a matter of fact, you can state categorically that anything organized on a gigantic scale, whether it is a federal government or the Acme Corporation or the University of Michigan, will probably falter in the energy-scarce future. Therefore, don't pin your hopes on multinational corporations, international NGOs, or any other giant organizations or institutions.
Recent events have caused many of us to fear that we are headed toward a Big Brother kind of governmental tyranny. I think we will be lucky if the federal government can answer the phones, let alone regulate anyone's life, in the post-oil era. As power devolves to the local and regional level, the very purpose of our federal arrangements may come into question. The state governments, with their enormous bureaucracies, may not be better off. Further along in this century, the real political action will likely shift down to the local level, as reconstructed neighborly associations allow people to tackle problems locally with local solutions.
It's a daunting agenda, all right. And some of you are probably wondering how you are supposed to remain hopeful in the face of these enormous tasks. Here's the plain truth, folks: Hope is not a consumer product. You have to generate your own hope. You do that by demonstrating to yourself that you are brave enough to face reality and competent enough to deal with the circumstances that it presents. How we will manage to uphold a decent society in the face of extraordinary change will depend on our creativity, our generosity, and our kindness, and I am confident that we can find these resources within our own hearts, and collectively in our communities.

[red states rule]

Bush appointee unable to utter the words "Global Warming" [VIDEO] (http://alternet.org/blogs/video/47423/)


This first video details the hysterical-yet-sad story of John Negroponte, back when he was Bush's Director of National Intelligence, attempting to avoid the wrath of the White House by mentioning the words "Global" and "Warming" back to back.
Apparently, it was something of a game to get him to say them in the same sentence...
***
The second is an excerpt from a Democratic-run hearing on political influence on government climate change scientist. Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a Democrat, asks Dr. Drew Shindell (no slouch he (http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/everydaylife/sa_top50.html)) what he thinks of several edits by Bush's Office of Management and Budget and by the Council on Environmental Quality, run by a lawyer who used to work for the American Petroleum Institute.
Guess what he says...

This is one of the few issues Pres Bush is wrong on

There is no global warming problem

[Bubbalicious]

Memo to the Media: Extreme Weather Is Linked to Global Warming (http://alternet.org/mediaculture/46801/)
<!-- end: headline --> <!-- start: byline --> By Paul Rogat Loeb (http://alternet.org/authors/1796/), AlterNet (http://www.alternet.org/). Posted January 17, 2007 (http://alternet.org/ts/archives/?date%5BF%5D=01&date%5BY%5D=2007&date%5Bd%5D=17&act=Go/).

<!-- end: byline --> <!-- end: headline and byline --> <!-- start: teaser --> Except in the case of Katrina, most major media outlets have treated America's extreme weather events as if they were wholly separate from the broader issue of climate change.


It wasn't Katrina, not even close, but Seattle's storm of the century (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/296213_windpower16.html) was no picnic. It gave me one more a taste of a future where the weather can suddenly turn--and destroy the habitability of our world. The storm hit Seattle mid-December with pounding rain and 70 mile-an-hour winds, reaching 110 miles per hour near the slopes of the Cascade Mountains.
The ground was already soggy from the wettest November in Seattle history, and as the wind and rain uprooted trees, many fell on houses and cars, blocked roads and took down local power lines, cutting off heat and light to over a million residents in the city and surrounding areas. Thirteen people died. Sanitation systems overflowed, dumping tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Puget Sound.
A week later, nearly a hundred thousand people were still living in the cold and the dark. Although my own lights stayed on, the next street was dark, and I could drive ten minutes and pass block after block of blackened houses. Those affected joked at first about sleeping with mittens and down parkas, then grew increasingly testy as gas stations couldn't pump gas, supermarkets were closed and what seemed at first a brief interruption turned into days without the basics of modern human existence.
Now, a month later, the last residences are finally getting back their phone services. And 29,000 people just lost power again from yet another Seattle storm.
The December storm dominated our local news and made national headlines, preceding the blizzard that stranded five thousand travelers at the Denver airport. Both storms fit the predictive model of extreme weather events caused by global climate change, and ours fit the specific predictions for our region.
But other than a single Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/297132_joel25.html), I found no media commentator who raised the link to global climate change. For two weeks our newspapers, radio stations and TV stations talked about little else except the storm. Reporters interviewed victims, judged the performance of local utilities, suggested ways we could have been better prepared.
But by offering no larger context, they lost the chance to get people involved in shaping precisely the kinds of individual and common actions that might help prevent similar storms in the future. We'd encountered a profound teachable moment, then that moment was quickly lost.
This failure to draw broader conclusions was no exception. Last May, New England made national news with the worst storms and floods (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/15/national/main1616958.shtml) since a 1938 hurricane. In June, a 200-year storm (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/28/AR2006062800230.html) flooded the Mid-Atlantic region. In July, in St. Louis, thunderstorms knocked out power to three quarters of a million people (the city's largest power loss ever), and then freezing rain returned in early December, two weeks before the Seattle storm, to leave another half million people without power for up to a week. Missouri and Illinois had record numbers of tornadoes (http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lsx/?n=2006inreview), and western states record levels of forest fires (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/07/07/MNG7JJR8521.DTL). Meanwhile New York City saw balmy winter temperatures in the 60s.
Although you can't absolutely prove a specific exceptional event was triggered by global warming, they all fit the larger predicted pattern. Yet mainstream commentators drew few broader links. As Mark Twain once wrote, "Everybody talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it." Commentators certainly talked about these events, but by failing to place them in any broader context, they made it that much less likely that ordinary citizens will do anything to change a future that risks looking seriously ugly.
America's major media haven't been entirely silent on global warming. You could even say 2006 brought a sea change in their public acknowledgment of its gravity. If you really read the superb Time or Parade magazine cover stories, or even the coverage in Business Week and Fortune, you couldn't fail to be concerned.
Newspapers and TV networks have featured pictures of melting glaciers, drought-parched Australian farms, crumbling Arctic ice shelves, and the submersion of the Indian island of Lohachara, which once had 10,000 inhabitants, by a combination of erosion and rising sea levels Even Fox occasionally acknowledged that the weather seemed different, though the network continued to also dismiss (http://www.foxnews.com/video2/player06.html?010207/123106_cav_media&Your_World&Hot%20Air%253F&acc&Science&-1&News&415&&&new) any notion that this constituted a crisis as "media hype."
Except in the case of Katrina, however, most major media outlets have treated America's extreme weather events as if they were wholly separate from the broader global shifts. They did nothing to help people connect any particular event with any other, or to understand the broader patterns. This fragmentation has extended to our political leaders. The 2005 pledge of Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels to have our city meet or exceed the Kyoto standards has inspired the mayors of 355 other major American cities to begin to follow suit. But so far even Nickels hasn't publicly linked Seattle's storm with its likely root causes.
The storm reminded me of the complex vulnerability of the systems that support us -- how our food, water, electricity and heat all depend on intricate networks of electric, oil, gas, and water lines, on trucking and railroad schedules, on crops grown halfway around the country or around the world, on lifesaving medical technologies like dialysis machines. We're not used to generating our own power or living without it. We expect the water faucets to work, the lights and heat to go on -- and God forbid our DSL service should go down.
When the crisis hit in Seattle, we focused, understandably, on survival, not politics. If our power was out, we took care of our families, huddled by wood stoves or fireplaces, and ate food from our refrigerators before it went bad. We spent as long as we could at cafes or stores whose power was still working, and as the outages continued stayed over with friends or neighbors who had power. But mostly we tried to get through the situation as best we could, and waited for the utility crews to fix things. When the power came back on, normal life resumed and any urgency that might have impelled us to act slipped away.
In a culture where the most important questions too often get buried, even living in the path of a disaster doesn't automatically lead us to connect our immediate crisis with the larger choices that may have helped produce it. We can feel the force of the wind and the rain. When a fifty-year old tree topples or a storm floods our basement, it's tangible.
But the shifts increasing the likelihood and frequency of such disasters are far harder for us to comprehend. We rely on the descriptions of scientists and policy makers, citizen activists and paid Exxon shills. And we rely on the media, which have mostly been too compromised or cautious to lead an honest discussion on the impact of our choices and the alternatives we have. For all its accuracy in depicting the roots of the crisis, even the phrase "global warming" (rather than "climate change") feels odd when describing freak blizzards and off-the-charts rainstorms and hailstorms.
It would be easier if these storms were like earthquakes, beyond our influence or control. Then we could simply hope they don't happen to us and do our best to minimize their potential impact, as we do when retrofitting houses and commercial buildings for earthquake safety.
Global warming brings a more demanding challenge because its most destructive potential can be prevented. Extreme weather events could once be called acts of God. Our actions have changed this, feeding the ferocity and frequency of hurricanes and tornadoes, blizzards, droughts, floods and every imaginable kind of storm. The longer we deny this, the higher the cost.
It's hard for any of us to step back and confront the depth of the challenge this poses. It's easier to close our eyes to the issue, as if we're children banishing monsters from beneath our bed. It's easier to hope someone else will solve it. Many of us also find it hard to act because we doubt we'll have an impact. The issue is so vast, so global, that anything we might do seems insignificant in comparison, just spitting in the ocean.
The picture gets more daunting still as developments like melting Arctic permafrost release still more greenhouse gases into the air. It's easy to just go about our familiar routines. Add in a war-obsessed president and the media-drumbeat of Exxon-funded global warming deniers, and no wonder so many of us wait and do nothing.
But we have to view our actions as being magnified, for good and ill, by the choices of other individuals in our communities, our nation, and the planet. Global warming can't be solved through individual actions alone, but individual choices will inevitably play a part. Individuals can replace old appliances with energy efficient ones, find ways to better insulate their homes, and trade in gas-guzzling cars for ones that get better gas mileage.
Still, not everyone has the money to make these kinds of lifestyle changes. To make them possible for everyone requires common actions, like alternative energy subsidies and tax credits, the mass purchasing by government entities of energy efficient technologies, and the creation of tax and regulatory codes that reward efficiency over waste. It will also take a sustained effort to ensure that key alternatives work financially and are accessible to those majority of Americans who are already just barely getting financially.
For example, in 2005, the Washington State legislature passed a bill that will pay ratepayers for every kilowatt they generate with renewable technologies, and if they use in-state manufactured photovoltaic panels, make solar electricity affordable even here in cloudy Seattle, with our low electric rate from our massive hydro-electric infrastructure. The bill to support these local initiatives passed our state legislature overwhelmingly, precisely because it combined investment in environmental sustainability with the promotion of local jobs.
Public concern about global warming has been increasing. In a June 2005 poll, shortly before Katrina hit us with a disaster of Biblical magnitude, 59 percent of Americans said they believed global warming threatens future generations. Now, the response is over 85 percent.
Support is even coming from unexpected quarters, as when National Association of Evangelicals Vice President Ted Cizak enlisted 86 other prominent evangelical leaders (including the presidents of 39 Christian colleges and bestselling author Rick Warren), to sign a New York Times ad stating, "Our commitment to Jesus Christ compels us to solve the global warming crisis." "I don't think God is going to ask us how he created the earth," Cizak said in an earlier interview, "but he will ask us what we did with what he created."
These are hopeful developments, as is the 58 percent increase last year in global solar investment and an equivalent growth in wind power. They're due not only to the disasters we've encountered, but also to the persistence of scientists and citizen activists in speaking out, including the impact of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. But we still need to move from a general sentiment to action.
Suppose everyone who watched Seattle lose power or New England get flooded demanded that our legislatures and corporations address this as a crisis of the highest order, as urgent as any war we've ever fought. Imagine if each of our major media outlets established a serious global warming beat, reporting consistently on the toll of America's addiction to carbon-based energy and on all those new initiatives that restore a sense that alternatives exist and that we can all play a role in promoting them. What if we really did have discussions in every community and every institution of daily life about how to build the necessary political will to place this crisis at the top of our national priorities?
The lights are back on in Seattle. Normal life has resumed. But the storm should have been a warning to us all that we need to do more than just stock flashlights, water, and extra canned food. In its immediate wake, many had no choice except to focus on survival. Now the more difficult questions emerge about how to prevent future catastrophes. The Seattle storm and comparable near disasters in cities throughout America should serve as wakeup calls. But their ultimate impact will depend on what we're willing to learn from them.

[red states rule]

Global Warming Skeptics Contest Al Gore’s Logic on ‘Hannity and Colmes’
Posted by Noel Sheppard on January 31, 2007 - 12:51.
As global warmingists breathlessly await a new report from the United Nations about the imminent doom of our planet, and Democrats convene highly publicized panels in Congress to discuss how only they can save the world, two well-known skeptics were guests on “Hannity and Colmes” Tuesday.

What ensued could only be improved upon if the discussion was to be required viewing all over the country – especially in public schools – as a rebuttal to Al Gore’s schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Fred Singer of the University of Virginia began:

Well, the climate is warming. That's what the temperature indicators show or the thermometers show this. But the cause of warming, that's another story. It could either be natural, as we think it is, or it could be manmade. And we find that there is really no evidence to support the manmade hypothesis.

Dennis Avery, Singer’s co-author of the new book on the subject “Unstoppable Global Warming,” then gave some historical perspective:


The Romans wrote in the 1st century about growing wine grapes in Britain. Then, during the Dark Ages, it was too cold. During the medieval period, the Britons themselves wrote about growing wine grapes in Britain. And then, for 650 years, during the little ice age, it was too cold.

After 1950, they started trying to grow wine grapes again in Britain. They're now up to two years out of 10, with a little help from some tricky hybrids. So this tells us, a, there's a cycle and, b, the temperatures today aren't yet as warm as they were 650 years ago or 2,000 years ago.

Hannity asked if warming is tied to humans. Singer chimed in:

There has never been a case of human activity causing a global warming. And, of course, sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age. In fact, sea levels have been rising about 400 feet, since about 18,000 years ago.

After Hannity asked about Gore’s contentions, Singer replied:

I don't think he thinks he's lying, but I don't think he understands the problem really well. For example, when he talks about glaciers melting, of course they're melting. You would expect them to melt when the climate is warming. But that doesn't tell you why the climate is warming…He's confusing consequences and the cause. He's making a logical error.

Colmes entered the discussion by asking if the recent increases in CO-2 aren’t “incontrovertible proof that the behaviors man has led to what we're talking about here.” Avery responded:

Not at all. In the 1980s, we dug up long ice cores from both Greenland and the Antarctic. They showed a moderate, natural, 1,500-year cycle. We've had 600 warmings in the last million years. And the ice cores and the sea bed sediment show this. And none of the past has found CO-2 coinciding with temperature change.

In fact, Mr. Gore, in his Antarctic scenario, says temperature and CO- 2 have moved radically and together through the last four ice ages, and that's true. What he doesn't tell us is that the temperatures changed 800 years before the CO-2 levels.

Singer also had an opinion on this CO-2 issue that seems lost on all of the global warmingists:

Well, CO-2, of course, is not a pollutant. It is a naturally occurring gas in the atmosphere. In fact, it's essential to life. It's what all plants use in order to grow. Without CO-2, there would be no life on Earth. So let's get that very clear: It is not a pollutant.

It has increased. And it is undoubtedly the case that the human activities have led to the increase. But that doesn't prove it's the cause of warming. You see, it's just a correlation. And, for example, during much of the last century, the climate was cooling, while CO-2 was rising, so how do you explain that?

The global warmingists don’t explain that, and the media don’t question them about it. In fact, that’s the point.

What follows is a full transcript of this segment.


HANNITY: Scientists from the United Nations' climate panel are gathering in Paris to determine the effects of global warming. Their conclusions will be released later this week. But is the growing panic over global warming based on fact or fiction?

Joining us now from the Hudson Institute, environmental economist Dennis Avery and physicist and professor from the University of Virginia, Fred Singer is with us.

Guys, thank you both for being with us. Are we being told the truth about global warming, Dr. Singer?

FRED SINGER, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA: Well, the climate is warming. That's what the temperature indicators show or the thermometers show this. But the cause of warming, that's another story. It could either be natural, as we think it is, or it could be manmade. And we find that there is really no evidence to support the manmade hypothesis.

HANNITY: Dennis Avery, is that your conclusion?

DENNIS AVERY, "UNSTOPPABLE GLOBAL WARMING": We've got an interesting historic perspective. The Romans wrote in the 1st century about growing wine grapes in Britain. Then, during the Dark Ages, it was too cold. During the medieval period, the Britons themselves wrote about growing wine grapes in Britain. And then, for 650 years, during the little ice age, it was too cold.

After 1950, they started trying to grow wine grapes again in Britain. They're now up to two years out of 10, with a little help from some tricky hybrids. So this tells us, a, there's a cycle and, b, the temperatures today aren't yet as warm as they were 650 years ago or 2,000 years ago.

HANNITY: Professor Singer, I know they're claiming on the left, and Al Gore leading the way, that the polar ice caps and glaciers will melt and sea levels will rise, et cetera, et cetera. They claim that parts of that is actually true, but there are also other ice caps, as I understand it, and scientists are saying, that are actually thickening here.

Has human activity ever been the cause of global warming? Because it's now seemingly, in the political world, becoming conventional wisdom.

SINGER: There has never been a case of human activity causing a global warming. And, of course, sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age. In fact, sea levels have been rising about 400 feet, since about 18,000 years ago.

HANNITY: Can I ask a question? You've heard Vice President Al Gore. I don't know if you've taken the time to go see his movie.

SINGER: Of course.

HANNITY: Is he lying to the American people? Is he politicizing this topic for some type of political agenda?

SINGER: I don't think he thinks he's lying, but I don't think he understands the problem really well. For example, when he talks about glaciers melting, of course they're melting. You would expect them to melt when the climate is warming. But that doesn't tell you why the climate is warming.

COLMES: Hey, Dennis Avery, in terms of politicizing -- yes, go ahead.

SINGER: He's confusing consequences and the cause. He's making a logical error.

COLMES: Let me go to Mr. Avery if I can. According to this new U.N. report that is being criticized by you and others, it does say that, before the industrial revolution, levels of CO-2 were 280 parts per million. Today there are 380 parts per million, an increase of CO-2 in the atmosphere, which they specifically put on the industrial revolution, with those numbers to prove it. Is that not incontrovertible proof that the behaviors man has led to what we're talking about here?

AVERY: Not at all. In the 1980s, we dug up long ice cores from both Greenland and the Antarctic. They showed a moderate, natural, 1,500-year cycle. We've had 600 warmings in the last million years. And the ice cores and the sea bed sediment show this. And none of the past has found CO-2 coinciding with temperature change.

In fact, Mr. Gore, in his Antarctic scenario, says temperature and CO- 2 have moved radically and together through the last four ice ages, and that's true. What he doesn't tell us is that the temperatures changed 800 years before the CO-2 levels.

COLMES: Professor Singer, we are seeing the CO-2 levels, though, rise in conjunction with the industrial revolution. How you can you discount the amount of pollution that's gone into the atmosphere since around 1900, in conjunction with manufacturing and what we have done to the environment? How you can discount that?

SINGER: Well, CO-2, of course, is not a pollutant. It is a naturally occurring gas in the atmosphere. In fact, it's essential to life. It's what all plants use in order to grow. Without CO-2, there would be no life on Earth. So let's get that very clear: It is not a pollutant.

It has increased. And it is undoubtedly the case that the human activities have led to the increase. But that doesn't prove it's the cause of warming. You see, it's just a correlation. And, for example, during much of the last century, the climate was cooling, while CO-2 was rising, so how do you explain that?

HANNITY: Professor Singer, we appreciate your wisdom. Thank you for being with us. Dennis Avery, thank you for being with us. I hope Al Gore is watching.

http://newsbusters.org/node/10525

[Bubbalicious]

Confused about global warming? Thank ExxonMobil (http://alternet.org/blogs/peek/46291/)
Posted by Tara Lohan (http://alternet.org/bloggers//) at 2:40 PM on January 4, 2007.


Tara Lohan: The petro giant was nabbed again in their plot to misinform the American people and muddy the scientific waters.



A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists (http://www.ucsusa.org/) offers the latest evidence about how ExxonMobil has been actively working for years on a disinformation campaign to prevent action on climate change, confuse the public, and stymie scientists.
ExxonMobil is one of the world's largest producers of global warming pollution - if they were a country, ExxonMobil would rank 6th in the world in global warming emissions.
According to the report (http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.html), "Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Change," the company has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.
Apparently the oil industry is taking lessons from the tobacco industry. As UCS reports, ExxonMobil: "raised doubts about even the most indisputable scientific evidence; funded an array of front organizations to create the appearance of a broad platform for a tight-knit group of vocal climate change contrarians who misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific findings; attempted to portray its opposition to action as a positive quest for 'sound science' rather than business self-interest; and used its access to the Bush administration to block federal policies and shape government communications on global warming."
The report is like adding insult to injury. It's only a few days into the new year and already the UK's Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/weather/Story/0,,1982451,00.html) just reported that "global temperatures will rise to their highest levels ever recorded this year, according to scientists at the Met Office. They believe there is a 60% chance that 2007 temperatures will top the previous hottest year, 1998."
In times like these ExxonMobil's misinformation campaign is playing with fire. They may be void of any ethical responsibility, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to follow along. Join a growing grassroots movement to hold them accountable and tell your representatives and senators to reject all the "Big Oil" disinformation campaigns by supporting several critical policies in the new Congress:

Immediately repeal tax breaks for ExxonMobil and other major oil companies and redirect money to renewable energy programs and energy efficiency technologies;
Support a sound, science-based bill that would reduce global warming emissions as quickly as possible to 80 percent below 1990 levels;
Increase fuel economy standards for passenger vehicles, including all trucks, SUVs and buses;
Require utilities to significantly boost their use of clean renewable energy sources.

[red states rule]

The liberal media spreading fear.........


GMA’s Alarmist Nightmare: ‘Will Billions Die From Global Warming?’
Posted by Scott Whitlock on January 31, 2007 - 12:37.
"Good Morning America" weatherman Sam Champion has accomplished the impressive feat of turning the morning show’s meteorology segment into an opinion piece. On Tuesday, he approvingly reported on a new study that blames humans for the effects of global warming. During a follow-up piece on Wednesday’s edition, ABC included one of the most alarming graphics to grace American television screens:

ABC Graphic: "Will Billions Die from Global Warming? New Details on Thirst and Hunger"

Billions? Could that be a slight exaggeration? Co-host Robin Roberts began the segment, which aired at 7:14am on January 31, by reminding Americans just how subjective Mr. Champion is on the subject of global warming:



[ABC Graphic: Global Warming: Global Warning]



Robin Roberts: "This morning, we're hearing new information from those landmark, closed-door sessions on climate change. Five hundred of the world's top scientists meeting in Paris, joining forces to tackle global warming. The report is due out on Friday. Sam has been following the story. You know how passionate he is about global warming. Headline news everywhere. And I think one of the big headlines is that we could feel the effects of global warming sooner rather than later."

[Second ABC Graphic: "Will Billions Die from Global Warming? New Details on Thirst and Hunger"]

Champion: "Yeah. That's what's in this report and why everyone is trying to jump this report that officially comes out Friday, Robin. There are big, new headlines and some of them are coming out of Australia in media reports. Now, they say that those scientists in Paris will estimate that between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will suffer from water shortage problems by 2080. That's not your grandchildren, that's your children. And between 200 million and 600 million more people will be going hungry. That means a very real possibility of food and water shortages much faster than we thought and even in today's 'USA Today' paper they’re talking about, uh, that the 2001 report said fossil fuel pollution by humans, used by humans-- likely. This report will say 99 percent sure."

Roberts: "How could the U.S. be impacted by what you just said?"

Champion: "Well, there are places in the map that we've all looked at in studies that say these are the places you'll see drought and problems. And you're talking about South America and northern India, western China, north-central Africa. In the U.S., It's Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, already suffering from low snow pack and could have water shortages by about 2080."

Roberts: "Of course, global warming, hot topic on Capitol Hill this week and a number of hearings in the House, accusations of a White House cover-up?"

Champion: "And they're saying some reports were edited by some White House staffers. And Rick Piltz's is the big one who, his report and his testimony brought it out. So let's listen to what he had to say."

Congressman Stephen Lynch: "Did you ever get a plausible reason why he would remove that warning to Congress?"

Rick Piltz: "He called it speculative musing."

Lynch: "Speculative musing?"

Piltz: "Speculative musing."


Champion: "And he's a former senior official in climate research in Washington and now has left that post, of course. Now, it is so serious to a lot of people, we'll be watching this report out, in Paris one of the neat things I think you'll see come out of this, is that they'll turn the Eiffel Tower lights out just to announce this report and kind of make that impact dramatic."

It should be noted that no one exhibited any skepticism or questioning about the study’s findings. Furthermore, Rick Piltz, who, according to an approving piece in the liberal American Prospect, is a "political scientist by training," also received no questioning. Finally, Champion commented about the "neat" fact that the Eiffel Tower will go dark five minutes before the unveiling. Click here to see the Greenpeace sign currently hanging from the tower and demonstrating once again the support that the hard-left has given this global warming push.

http://newsbusters.org/node/10523

[Bubbalicious]

Oh but if global warming or climate change isn't happening, then what was it that that Shaviz guy that you cited earlier claims is caused by cosmic rays?

[red states rule]

Oh but if global warming or climate change isn't happening, then what was it that that Shaviz guy claimed was caused by cosmic rays?

It is not a crisis and we are not going to die. However, the liberal media is broadcasting questionable science as facts


Lauer: Global Warming 'Literally Could Be End of World as We Know It'
Posted by Mark Finkelstein on January 31, 2007 - 08:01.
The world could be coming to an end, but not to worry: "the Democrats are now in charge of Congress." That, in a nutshell, was NBC's message on global warming on this morning's "Today."

Here's how Matt Lauer, apparently in the throes of a global-warming panic attack, kicked off the segment:

"Now to a controversy in Washington over what literally could be the end of the world as we know it."

View video here.

The segment focused on allegations, made before a hearing chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman [D-CA] by the advocacy group the Union of Concerned Scientists, that the Bush administration has pressured scientists to downplay the threat of global warming.

Andrea Mitchell narrated the segment, and began with a clip of reporters from NBC's UK affiliate ITN on a boat in Antartica making concerned noises over melting icebergs. Andrea, they do tend to do that in the summer, which it now is in the austral.

We were then treated to clips of McCain, Obama and Hillary all making appropriately concerned noises. McCain was the most emphatic: "The argument about climate change is over. Now it's time to act."

The statement by Hillary might be variously interpreted: "Emissions are still going up."

Andrea Mitchell held out a ray of hope to an anxious world: "What has changed? The Democrats are now in charge of Congress, and there's a growing consensus that fossil fuel emissions the ice cap, with the prospect of dire consequences for the planet."

By the way, Ian Murray asserts in this NRO item that the allegations by the Union of Concerned Scientists are so much "junk science."
ABC Update: GMA was on the global warming beat, too. Introducing weatherman Sam Champion, Robin Roberts noted "everyone knows how passionate you are about global warming." Champion offered some alarmism regarding the coming dire impacts of global warming. Noting that on the occasion of a global warming conference in Paris, authorities will turn off the lights on the Eiffel Tower for five minutes, Champion enthused that it was a "neat thing."

http://newsbusters.org/node/10518

[Bubbalicious]

Fast-tracking global warming (http://alternet.org/blogs/peek/45641/)
Posted by Tara Lohan (http://alternet.org/bloggers//) at 11:31 AM on December 17, 2006.


Tara Lohan: A Texas utility giant hopes to be able to emit more CO2 than most countries.


These days if you live in a low-lying island state, like say, Tuvalu, pack your bags. If you live in Bangladesh, pack your bags too, or even coastal areas of Florida. The waters are rising (http://www.terradaily.com/2006/061214190201.r60l78gm.html) and the waters are warming.
If you are a poor nation and can't build higher dikes to protect your vulnerable coastal cities, pack your bags. And, if you live in New York or London (http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn10799-shorelines-may-be-in-greater-peril-than-thought.html), you're not in the clear either -- watch out for catastrophic storm surges.
Of course it's not just too much water that will be the problem, but also too little. The next few decades will be a bad time to live just about anywhere in Africa (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/16/AR2006121600431.html). Glaciers from the region's tallest peaks like Mount Kenya, the Rwenzori, and Kilimanjaro have lost nearly all their ice caps.
And similar things are happening in the Himalayas, the Andes, the Alps...
But don't worry; the world is aware of the problem and working on change. Over 150 nations gathered recently in Nairobi to talk about the climate crisis and the U.S., the largest contributor to global warming said via representative Harlan Watson (http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/45108/): "I do not see any change in our policy." The "policy" in question is to effectively do nothing. In fact, he added, "We feel very comfortable."
OK, so not everyone is doing something about the problem. Here in the U.S. we are doing something worse than nothing -- we are actively working in the wrong direction.
Never has this been more apparent than in Texas where utility giant TXU Corp. is seeking $11 billion to build 11 new coal-fired power plants in the state.
If these plants are built, TXU will become the country's largest corporate emitter of greenhouse gases. To put this in perspective, TXU would be contributing more greenhouse gas emissions than a combined 21 states and more than entire countries, such as New Zealand, Ireland, Denmark, and Sweden. They will also be negating all of the emissions that Japan had planned to cut and 80 percent of the U.K.'s pledged reduction.
Despite the fact that 79 percent of Texans are in favor of renewable energy and just six percent are in favor of more coal production, TXU's project is being fast-tracked by Gov. Perry (who received more than $80,000 in campaign contributions for TXU interests). By trying to quickly push through the permitting process, Perry will be allowing the state to skip the normally mandated period where alternative energy sources would be considered. But don't worry, it's not like there's a lot of wind or sun in Texas or anything.
Even with Perry's best efforts on behalf of polluting energy, there is still a lot to be done to stop the project: just ask the ever-vigilant folks at Rainforest Action Network (RAN) (http://www.ran.org/).
Sure, Texas might not be in your backyard, but with an international problem like global warming, all of our backyards just got a whole lot bigger.

[red states rule]

Nets Jump to Hype Democratic Hearings on 'Silencing' of Global Warming Science
Posted by Brent Baker on January 30, 2007 - 22:40.
The broadcast network evening newscasts on Tuesday, especially NBC and ABC, jumped to hype a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing meant to publicize a report from two far-left groups about how the Bush administration supposedly suppressed science about the dire threat of global warming -- as if that view isn't already getting plenty of play in the mainstream media. “The question in Washington today was this,” anchor Brian Williams intoned in leading the NBC Nightly News: “Did the Bush administration in any way try to cook the books on the topic of global warming? Government scientists were called before a congressional committee today and asked if the White House or anyone else ever tried to stifle or squelch or silence the evidence that climate change is taking place around the globe.” Andrea Mitchell refused to properly label the groups as she trumpeted: “With Democrats holding the gavel in both houses, advocacy groups were given the chance to present a new study revealing unprecedented and widespread interference with scientific reports, largely by a former oil industry lobbyist working for the White House.”

ABC's Jake Tapper largely followed the same script, but World News did not lead with his piece and he at least included a brief note of doubt as he cited a same-day Senate hearing on global warming and how “the committee's previous Chairman, Senator Jim Inhofe, has called global warming a 'hoax.'” Like Mitchell, however, he followed up with the same John McCain-enabled formulation: “For the most part, though, Senators from both parties expressed concern.” Tapper began with the House confab as he relayed how “scientists say their work on global warming has been watered down and twisted by a White House that does not want the public to hear about it.”

But the public certainly is hearing about the most-dire claims.

Just Tuesday, on ABC's Good Morning America as detailed in this NewsBusters posting by Scott Whitlock, Sam Champion highlighted how “some say we already may be at a point of no return.” Previewing a UN report, Champion touted:


“This morning, 500 of the top scientists in the world are meeting behind closed doors to finish up a landmark report on global warming. And the picture they're painting isn't pretty. We're talking about change that's not 100 years away, but within the next ten years. This is not the future -- it's happening today. Already massive glaciers and sea ice are disappearing. Droughts are ravaging Africa, Southern Asia, and Australia. And rising oceans are covering islands and beaches. And a draft of a new report on climate change obtained by ABC News paints a disastrous look for global warming....

“But some say we already may be at a point of no return. On Monday, Indonesia's environmental minister warned that rising sea levels may cover some 2000 of his country's more than 18,000 islands in just 23 years. And we'll be talking about other stories about global warming all this week as we count down to the release of that full report on Friday. And I'll be there in Paris on Friday for the release of that report.”

Back on the January 24 CBS Evening News, anchor Katie Couric teased a story about the same report:

"An important report on global warming comes out next week. We have it tonight. Is it too late to avert worldwide disaster?"
And two weeks ago, Williams set up a NBC Nightly News report from an ITN correspondent about an impending “catastrophe”:

"NBC News 'In Depth' tonight, a trip to one of the coldest and most remote places on earth to see in dramatic fashion the impact of climate change on planet earth. Correspondent Lawrence McGinty of our British partner ITN reports tonight from the stunning landscape of Antarctica, a place he says where a catastrophe is unfolding slowly but surely."
The MRC's Brad Wilmouth corrected the closed-captioning against the video for the January 30 NBC Nightly News story centered around the report from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project.

Brian Williams teased: “Did the Bush administration turn up the heat on government scientists to stifle their views on global warming?”


Williams led: "Good evening. The question in Washington today was this: Did the Bush administration in any way try to cook the books on the topic of global warming? Government scientists were called before a congressional committee today and asked if the White House or anyone else ever tried to stifle or squelch or silence the evidence that climate change is taking place around the globe. What happened today is a direct result of the last election. There is a new urgency these days on Capitol Hill, where the Democrats in charge say the reality out there is worse than the reports they've been getting. And they say the time to fix it is running very short. We begin tonight in our Washington news room with NBC's Andrea Mitchell. Andrea, good evening."

Andrea Mitchell: "Good evening, Brian. Government scientists have been complaining for two years that the Bush administration has been forcing them to soft-pedal their findings on global warming. But now Democrats have the clout to demand answers. With Democrats holding the gavel in both houses, advocacy groups were given the chance to present a new study revealing unprecedented and widespread interference with scientific reports, largely by a former oil industry lobbyist working for the White House."

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA): "They tried to delete a discussion of the human health and environmental effects of climate change."

Mitchell: "Documents uncovered by the Government Accountability Project, an advocacy group, revealed that critical findings were eliminated from draft reports. Questions like: Is abrupt climate change real? And: What is the relationship between the drought in the West and climate variability and change? Both crossed out with a handwritten note: 'It is not necessary here to list these examples.'"

Rick Piltz, former climate change senior associate: "It wasn't just policy, it was spinning the scientific, the state of knowledge."

Mitchell: "A survey of more than 300 scientists and seven agencies studying climate change found nearly half were personally pressured to eliminate the words 'climate change' or 'global warming.'"

Dr. Francesca Grifo, Union of Concerned Scientists: "Our investigations found high-quality science struggling to get out."

Mitchell: "There is now a growing consensus that fossil fuel emissions are melting the ice cap with dramatic results, as witnessed in Antarctica two weeks ago by our British partners, ITN."

Mark Austin, ITN News, over video of part of an iceberg collapsing: "You can see some of these icebergs are melting. You can feel, there we are, I mean, that, there we are, that gives you an idea of what it's like."

Mitchell: "Who watered down most of the government reports? The scientists point to Philip Cooney, a former oil lobbyist in charge of the Bush policy who then left to work for ExxonMobil. He refused to talk to NBC News today."

Carol Browner, Clinton EPA Administrator: "The idea that an oil, a former oil lobbyist would be allowed to edit a scientific document from one of the agencies is simply inexcusable."

Mitchell: "Now, candidates in both parties are scrambling to cap emissions."

Senator John McCain (R-AZ): "The argument about climate change is over. Now it's time to act. The argument is over."

Mitchell: "Tonight the Bush administration told NBC News claims that the administration interfered with scientists are false and our focus is on taking action and making real progress. Many Republicans and Democrats in Congress want to see a lot more."

http://newsbusters.org/node/10512

[Bubbalicious]

Guess what? Antarctica's getting colder, not warmer

global warming is a farce

-------------------------------------------------------


It is not a crisis and we are not going to die.


Which is it? Or rather, which one will Newsmax and Fox tell you it is today.

[red states rule]

-------------------------------------------------------




Which is it? Or rather, which one will Newsmax and Fox tell you it is today.


Ot the American Bashing Corporation

Weatherman Bias: GMA Meteorologist Touts Dire Threat of Global Warming
Posted by Scott Whitlock on January 30, 2007 - 15:22.
Proving that even the weatherman can be biased, "Good Morning America’s" Sam Champion used Tuesday’s edition of the ABC program to tout an apocalyptic study on global warming. In a report that featured no skepticism about the cause or genuine threat of climate change, Champion utilized dire language to discuss an impending report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It should be noted, as previously reported by NewsBusters, that this meteorologist has a committed agenda when it comes to global warming and environmental issues. He recently touted the "very sexy" group of actors and environmental activists/actors. Champion began Tuesday’s report by forshadowing the immediate future:

Sam Champion: "This morning, 500 of the top scientists in the world are meeting behind closed doors to finish up a landmark report on global warming. And the picture they're painting isn't pretty. We're talking about change that's not 100 years away, but within the next 10 years. This is not the future -- it's happening today."

The morning weatherman went on to cite the liberal position on global warming: A call for reducing carbon emissions and he also noted that the IPCC scientists cite humans as the cause: "No one’s really gotten together to blame it on humans--this big of a crowd."

Champion began the segment, which aired at 7:15 on January 30 and followed another global warming-related report, by predicting impending doom. He didn’t, however, note that previous media-promoted predictions of apocalypse have proved incorrect:

Chris Cuomo: "It's interesting, while politicians invite the blame game about who may or may not have muzzled science, there's actually a new report that hits on the most pressing issue, when global warming could make a difference. Sam, you've been gearing up for this report coming out. What could it mean?"


Sam Champion: "And first time study this size, Chris. This morning, 500 of the top scientists in the world are meeting behind closed doors to finish up a landmark report on global warming. And the picture they're painting isn't pretty. We're talking about change that's not 100 years away, but within the next 10 years. This is not the future -- it's happening today. Already massive glaciers and sea ice are disappearing. Droughts are ravaging Africa, Southern Asia, and Australia. And rising oceans are covering islands and beaches. And a draft of a new report on climate change obtained by ABC News paints a disastrous look for global warming."

Kenneth Denman (Co-author IPCC Report) "We're hoping that it will convince people that it's, you know, that climate change is real."

Champion: "The soon to be released report predicts an increase in heat waves, intense tropical storms, and hurricanes. A sharp rise in sea levels and at an even faster pace, the continuing melting of the world's ice. American scientists reportedly want the final version of the report to recommend new technologies, called geo-engineering. One idea, for instance, would use giant mirrors to deflect some of the sun's rays from getting to get to the Earth, cooling the planet back down. Sounds like science fiction. With NASA funding, University of Arizona professor Roger Angel is researching using small discs to create a giant sun shade in space."

Roger Angel: "The effect would be, could be, to take our temperature back to pre-industrial level."

Champion: "But these ideas are still considered a last resort. Most scientists believe we need to focus on reducing carbon emissions before looking into alternatives in space."

Mike MacCracken (Climate Institute): "Well, I don't think geo-engineering is a magic bullet. We just haven't found anything that has really come close to being able to do anything that doesn't have other side effects that you just wouldn't want to have happen."

Champion: "But some say we already may be at a point of no return. On Monday, Indonesia's environmental minister warned that rising sea levels may cover some 2000 of his country's more than 18,000 islands in just 23 years. And we'll be talking about other stories about global warming all this week as we count down to the release of that full report on Friday. And I'll be there in Paris on Friday for the release of that report."

Cuomo: "We hear about timing, but to have all these scientists on the same page about how soon? That's rare, isn't it?"

Champion: "That's what's new about this. No one’s really gotten together to blame it on humans--this big of a crowd."

Nobody has gotten together to blame this on humans? Perhaps the ABC meteorologist missed the concerted effort that was "An Inconvenient Truth." (Also, it's interesting to note that the plan cited by University of Arizona professor Roger Angel to use space discs is straight out of a Futurama episode, "Crimes of the Hot.")

So, while the East Coast continues to suffer under a cold snap, Americans should probably expect more global warming propaganda from GMA’s weatherman.
http://newsbusters.org/node/10504

[Bubbalicious]

It isn't happening? It is happening and it's not a big deal?

Which did the nice angry pundit man tell you to believe this week?

[CockySOB]

Which is it? Or rather, which one will Newsmax and Fox tell you it is today.

I'd be interested to hear RSR's answer. Look like contradictory statements to me.

[red states rule]

It isn't happening? It is happening and it's not a big deal?

Which did the nice angry pundit man tell you to believe this week?

I am not the only one who dismisses this crap. Of course the liberal media is not telling us this...........


Reuters Buries Key Finding in Global Warming Poll: Americans Aren’t Buying It
Posted by Noel Sheppard on January 30, 2007 - 11:26.
This is really too funny. On Monday, Reuters released the findings of an international ACNielsen Internet poll concerning global warming. As one might imagine, Reuters took the most dire assessments from the study and made them the focus of the piece.

Yet, the most startling conclusions from this survey – that only “50 percent reckoned [global warming] was caused by human activities,” and that “Americans [are] least convinced” about this – were buried deep in the article.

Instead, Reuters led with the following two paragraphs:

Thirteen percent of Americans have never heard of global warming even though their country is the world's top source of greenhouse gases, a 46-country survey showed on Monday.

The report, by ACNielsen of more than 25,000 Internet users, showed that 57 percent of people around the world considered global warming a "very serious problem" and a further 34 percent rated it a "serious problem."

However, the really interesting results were held back until the second half of the piece (emphasis mine):

The study also found that 91 percent of people had heard about global warming and 50 percent reckoned it was caused by human activities.

Hmmm. I guess that means that 50 percent don’t reckon it’s caused by human activities. Alas, here was another wonderful result that Reuters held back (emphasis mine):

People in China and Brazil were most convinced of the link to human activities and Americans least convinced.

Hmmm. Now, for those familiar with simple arithmetic principles, if 50 percent believe there is a link between global warming and human activities, but Americans are least convinced, this means that more than 50 percent of Americans aren't buying into Al Gore and the media's nonsense.

So, instead of titling this article “Survey shows 13 pct of Americans never heard of global warming,” why not have a headline, “Americans Aren’t Convinced of Link Between Global Warming and Human Activities?”

Nah. That would be too much like actually reporting the findings of this poll. We certainly couldn't have that.

http://newsbusters.org/node/10499

[Bubbalicious]

which is it?

[red states rule]

New Books Scientifically Disprove Man-Made Global Warming Theories
Posted by Noel Sheppard on January 30, 2007 - 10:20.
2006 will go down as the year that the media universally tried to sell America on the unproven theory that man-made global warming is destroying the planet, and will cause our imminent doom. Part of this hysteria includes fallacious assertions by all involved that there is a scientific consensus regarding these dire predictions.

Though they are likely to get little attention from an hysterical press, two books by prominent scientists have recently been released that scientifically disprove global warming theories, and supply a little sanity for those who like to proceed with caution before jumping on tenuous bandwagons.

As reported by the Center for Global Food Issues Tuesday (emphasis mine throughout, h/t Drudge):

Two powerful new books say today’s global warming is due not to human activity but primarily to a long, moderate solar-linked cycle. Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, by physicist Fred Singer and economist Dennis Avery was released just before Christmas. The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark and former BBC science writer Nigel Calder (Icon Books), is due out in March.

Singer and Avery note that most of the earth’s recent warming occurred before 1940, and thus before much human-emitted CO2. Moreover, physical evidence shows 600 moderate warmings in the earth’s last million years. The evidence ranges from ancient Nile flood records, Chinese court documents and Roman wine grapes to modern spectral analysis of polar ice cores, deep seabed sediments, and layered cave stalagmites.

Rather than using theories or unproven temperature models to predict the future, Singer and Avery looked at past historical climate activity:

Unstoppable Global Warming shows the earth’s temperatures following variations in solar intensity through centuries of sunspot records, and finds cycles of sun-linked isotopes in ice and tree rings. The book cites the work of Svensmark, who says cosmic rays vary the earth’s temperatures by creating more or fewer of the low, wet clouds that cool the earth. It notes that global climate models can’t accurately register cloud effects.

Svensmark and Calder studied the issue from a more chemical approach:

The Chilling Stars relates how Svensmark’s team mimicked the chemistry of earth’s atmosphere, by putting realistic mixtures of atmospheric gases into a large reaction chamber, with ultraviolet light as a stand-in for the sun. When they turned on the UV, microscopic droplets—cloud seeds—started floating through the chamber.

“We were amazed by the speed and efficiency with which the electrons [generated by cosmic rays] do their work of creating the building blocks for the cloud condensation nuclei,” says Svensmark.

The Chilling Stars documents how cosmic rays amplify small changes in the sun’s irradiance fourfold, creating 1-2 degree C cycles in earth’s temperatures: Cosmic rays continually slam into the earth’s atmosphere from outer space, creating ion clusters that become seeds for small droplets of water and sulfuric acid. The droplets then form the low, wet clouds that reflect solar energy back into space. When the sun is more active, it shields the earth from some of the rays, clouds wane, and the planet warms.

Unstoppable Global Warming documents the reality of a moderate, natural, 1500-year climate cycle on the earth. The Chilling Stars explains the why and how.

Hmmm. Imagine that: actually looking at climate trends over a 1500-year period to reach conclusions rather than extrapolating theories based upon weather changes in the last century.

By contrast, the global warmingists are predicting the outcome of a football game after only witnessing four minutes.

Which do you think represents better scientific analysis?

Regardless of the answer, don't expect the morning shows to be paying much attention to these books or these authors, or to ask global warmingism prophet Dr. Al Gore to comment about their findings.

What a disgrace.

http://newsbusters.org/node/10495

[Bubbalicious]

So whatever Newsbusters editorial you happen to be copy/pasting at any particular moment is whatever your opinion is on the topic at hand at that point in time.
I knew that already.

[red states rule]

So whatever Newsbusters editorial you happen to be copy/pasting at that moment is whatever your opinion is on the topic at hand at that given point in time.
I knew that already.

Then learn things that the liberal media is not reporting. This is one reason why Dems are trying to bring back the Unfairness Doctrine

To shut down these damn sites that do report the other side


WSJ: Al Gore Skips Agreed to Newspaper Interview With Danish Skeptic
Posted by Warner Todd Huston on January 21, 2007 - 10:35.
Proving that Al Gore isn't interested in any dispassionate investigation or debate about global Warming, Gore perpetrated a last minute disappearing act and skipped an interview with the biggest Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, that was set up months in advance.

Flemming Rose, the Jyllands-Posten culture editor, penned an interesting expose of Gore's ducking out on the Wall Street journal's Opinion Journal site today taking the former VP to task. How many other papers do you think will mention Gore's cowardice?

Bet, few... if not no... others do.

Al Gore is traveling around the world telling us how we must fundamentally change our civilization due to the threat of global warming. Last week he was in Denmark to disseminate this message. But if we are to embark on the costliest political project ever, maybe we should make sure it rests on solid ground. It should be based on the best facts, not just the convenient ones. This was the background for the biggest Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, to set up an investigative interview with Mr. Gore. And for this, the paper thought it would be obvious to team up with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist," who has provided one of the clearest counterpoints to Mr. Gore's tune.

Gee, Al. If you are so sure of your "facts" what is so outrageous with a little adult debate in front of a newspaper editor? It isn't like you were invited onto the Jerry Springer show or some other lowgrade venue, after all.

But, wait... NOW I can see why Gore didn't want to act like a man sure of himself. It's because he would have faced some hard questions about his ideas.

However, the U.N. Climate Panel suggests that if we follow Al Gore's path down toward an environmentally obsessed society, it will have big consequences for the world, not least its poor. In the year 2100, Mr. Gore will have left the average person 30% poorer, and thus less able to handle many of the problems we will face, climate change or no climate change.

In response, all Gore has is zealotry and wild-eyed alarmism, so he has nothing logical or well thought out with which to respond to such a question.

Mr Rose has a just a few examples of Gore's misrepresentations and lies in the Wall Street journal piece:

Gore says global warming has increased malaria in Nairobi, but the World Health Organization says the country is considered malaria free, unlike in the 1920's and 30's when it had epidemics regularly.
Gore says that Antarctica is melting and presents picture to "prove" it, but those pictures are from only 2 percent of Antarctica whereas 98 percent of the continent has actually COOLED over the last 35 years.
Gore says seas will rise 20 feet, but the U.N. climate panel only thinks it will be 1 foot. Also seas rose only 1 foot over the last 150 years already with little real trouble world wide.
Gore says the heat of global warming will kill "2,000" people in the U.K., but freezing temperatures will kill 20,000 more without such "warming". Why are the 2,000 killed by warming more important than the 20,000 who would be killed by freezing?
Yes, it's no wonder that Gore doesn't want to address the hilarity of his absurd claims. The editors of Jyllands-Posten should be happy that he skipped the interview he once agreed to. Dying from laughing is much worse than buying it from global warming!

More globaloney from Al Gore. But no real facts, sadly
http://newsbusters.org/node/10279

[red states rule]

A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Feelings
Posted by Ken Shepherd on February 5, 2007 - 01:27.
Ann Althouse has an excellent take on how the right images can tug on heartstrings and emotionalize and simplify for news consumers what should be an area for dispassionate, objective inquiry.

In a February 4 post to her blog, she writes:

Here's my question. How many people look at that picture and think the polar bears were living on some ice and it melted around them and now they are stuck?

And, yes, I realize a polar bear can drown... if, say, it's exhausted and swimming over 50 miles. But basically, these things can swim 15 miles easily, at a speed of 6 miles an hour, and they use the edge of an ice floe as a platform from which to hunt. Where's the photograph of the bear chomping down on a cute baby seal?

And, no, I'm not denying that there's global warming, even as I sit here a double pane of glass away from minus 12° air. I'm just amused at human behavior, such as the way it is possible to feel arguments at us. In particular, we are susceptible to argument by animal. We love the animal, if it's pictured right, in a way that pulls our heartstrings.

Althouse is definitely on to something. In January 2006 I wrote about how population changes in a species of frog were being blamed on global warming, even though there are other more immediate causes that just as easily explain why the buggers were croaking.

And of course for some media outlets, including ABC, this tactic is a two-way street. In June 2006, we at the MRC's Business & Media Institute tracked how the network was begging viewers to submit what they considered eyewitness evidence of the impact of global warming.


http://newsbusters.org/node/10610

[Pale Rider]

I never thought I'd see the day, when people would so willingly say...

Tax me tax me tax me, tax me till it hurts...:uhoh:

Liberals do, conservatives don't. Read my sig line.

[MtnBiker]

Holy doodle should this thread be renamed the Newsbuster thread? :eek:

[red states rule]

Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide
Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?
By Timothy Ball

Monday, February 5, 2007

Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist. And I am not the only one trying to make people open up their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was the first Canadian Ph.D. in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition. Few listen, even though I have a Ph.D, (Doctor of Science) from the University of London, England and was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. For some reason (actually for many), the World is not listening. Here is why.


What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens? Why does no one acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes on?

Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.

No sensible person seeks conflict, especially with governments, but if we don't pursue the truth, we are lost as individuals and as a society. That is why I insist on saying that there is no evidence that we are, or could ever cause global climate change. And, recently, Yuri A. Izrael, Vice President of the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed this statement. So how has the world come to believe that something is wrong?

Maybe for the same reason we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. "It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.

I was as opposed to the threats of impending doom global cooling engendered as I am to the threats made about Global Warming. Let me stress I am not denying the phenomenon has occurred. The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.

Since I obtained my doctorate in climatology from the University of London, Queen Mary College, England my career has spanned two climate cycles. Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970's global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact. By the 1990's temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus. It appears I'll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling.

No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.

I once received a three page letter that my lawyer defined as libellous, from an academic colleague, saying I had no right to say what I was saying, especially in public lectures. Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society. This becomes progressively worse as they receive more and more funding from governments that demand a particular viewpoint.

In another instance, I was accused by Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki of being paid by oil companies. That is a lie. Apparently he thinks if the fossil fuel companies pay you have an agenda. So if Greenpeace, Sierra Club or governments pay there is no agenda and only truth and enlightenment?

Personal attacks are difficult and shouldn't occur in a debate in a civilized society. I can only consider them from what they imply. They usually indicate a person or group is losing the debate. In this case, they also indicate how political the entire Global Warming debate has become. Both underline the lack of or even contradictory nature of the evidence.

I am not alone in this journey against the prevalent myth. Several well-known names have also raised their voices. Michael Crichton, the scientist, writer and filmmaker is one of them. In his latest book, "State of Fear" he takes time to explain, often in surprising detail, the flawed science behind Global Warming and other imagined environmental crises.

Another cry in the wildenerness is Richard Lindzen's. He is an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT, renowned for his research in dynamic meteorology - especially atmospheric waves. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has held positions at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. Linzen frequently speaks out against the notion that significant Global Warming is caused by humans. Yet nobody seems to listen.

I think it may be because most people don't understand the scientific method which Thomas Kuhn so skilfully and briefly set out in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." A scientist makes certain assumptions and then produces a theory which is only as valid as the assumptions. The theory of Global Warming assumes that CO2 is an atmospheric greenhouse gas and as it increases temperatures rise. It was then theorized that since humans were producing more CO2 than before, the temperature would inevitably rise. The theory was accepted before testing had started, and effectively became a law.

As Lindzen said many years ago: "the consensus was reached before the research had even begun." Now, any scientist who dares to question the prevailing wisdom is marginalized and called a sceptic, when in fact they are simply being good scientists. This has reached frightening levels with these scientists now being called climate change denier with all the holocaust connotations of that word. The normal scientific method is effectively being thwarted.

Meanwhile, politicians are being listened to, even though most of them have no knowledge or understanding of science, especially the science of climate and climate change. Hence, they are in no position to question a policy on climate change when it threatens the entire planet. Moreover, using fear and creating hysteria makes it very difficult to make calm rational decisions about issues needing attention.

Until you have challenged the prevailing wisdom you have no idea how nasty people can be. Until you have re-examined any issue in an attempt to find out all the information, you cannot know how much misinformation exists in the supposed age of information.

I was greatly influenced several years ago by Aaron Wildavsky's book "Yes, but is it true?" The author taught political science at a New York University and realized how science was being influenced by and apparently misused by politics. He gave his graduate students an assignment to pursue the science behind a policy generated by a highly publicised environmental concern. To his and their surprise they found there was little scientific evidence, consensus and justification for the policy. You only realize the extent to which Wildavsky's findings occur when you ask the question he posed. Wildavsky's students did it in the safety of academia and with the excuse that it was an assignment. I have learned it is a difficult question to ask in the real world, however I firmly believe it is the most important question to ask if we are to advance in the right direction.


Dr. Tim Ball, Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (www.nrsp.com), is a Victoria-based environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. He can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com

[Bubbalicious]

Dr. Tim Ball, Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (www.nrsp.com) (http://www.nrsp.com%29/), is a Victoria-based environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. He can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com

Dr. Tim Ball: The Lie that Just Won't Die

5 Feb 07
The deathless and - in many specific respects - completely fictional meanderings of Dr. Tim Ball have begun appearing again on right-wing blogs all over the net. At City Troll (http://thecitytroll.blogspot.com/2007/02/global-warming-is-not-due-to-human.html), at Convenient Untruth (http://climatevaries.blogspot.com/index.html) and at New Orleans Lady (http://www.hannity.com/forum/showthread.php?p=8187766#post8187766), the same tired and retreaded old climate rant paints Dr. Ball as the courageous victim of a plot to silence a well-meaning skeptic.
But Ball can't even tell the truth about his own resume. His claim to be the first Climatology Ph.D. in Canada is a total falsehood; his degree was in historical geography - not climatology - and it was nowhere near the first ever granted to someone writing vaguely in the field. It also was can by the university as a doctor of philosophy, not the more prestigious "doctor of science" tht Ball claims in these articles.
He claims as well to have been a professor (again of climatology) at the University of Winnipeg for 32 years, while he confirmed in his own Statement of Claim in a pending lawsuit (look here (http://www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-vs-dan-johnson-lawsuit-documents) ) that he was a professor (of geography, never climatology) for just eight years.
Dr. Ball claims never to have been paid by oil and gas interests, but if you look here (http://www.charlesmontgomery.ca/mrcool.html) , you'll find a Globe and Mail story in which Dr. Barry Cooper, the man behind Ball's former industry front group, the Friends of Science (http://www.desmogblog.com/friends-of-science-friends-of-tobacco) , offers this clumsy admission: "[The money's] not exclusively from the oil and gas industry," says Prof. Cooper. "It's also from foundations and individuals. I can't tell you the names of those companies, or the foundations for that matter, or the individuals."
Here (http://www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-wilfull-disregard-for-the-truth) you'll find a podcast of Dr. Ball talking to the Ottawa Citizen (http://www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-wilfull-disregard-for-the-truth) , saying that he goes out of his way to ignore who might be paying his bills, but crediting the energy industry lobby firm, the High Park Group (http://www.highparkgroup.com/default.htm) . And here (http://www.desmogblog.com/toronto-star-looks-at-canadian-denial-machine), you'll find High Park Group veteran Tom Harris, telling the Toronto Star that his new industry front group, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/quick/) , was created at the suggestion of High Park Group president Timothy Egan.
Tom Harris, executive director of the NRSP, is credited by New Orleans Lady for passing along this version (http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm) of the Ball tirade, also printed Monday on the right-wingy website, Canada Free Press. Yet all of these factual inconsistencies have been brought to Harris's attention on previous occasions.
It is inevitable that this post will be criticized as an ad hominem attack on dear Dr. Ball (and perhaps on Harris, as well). But how can you argue science with someone who doesn't feel bound by the limits of truth?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just endured an unprecedented process of vetting and peer-review to produce a document, the veracity of which has been double-checked and endorsed by thousands of the best scientists in the world. It must be soul-destroying to see a long-retired geographer who rarely published during his colourless academic career and who never conducted any research in atmospheric science dismiss that effort without a shred of evidence or a hint of good conscience.



--------------------------------------------------------------------


NRSP Controlled by Energy Lobbyists

18 Jan 07
Two of the three Directors (http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/cgi-bin/sc_mrksv/corpdir/dataOnline/corpns_re?company_select=4326741#directors) on the board of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (http://www.nrsp.com/background.html) are senior executives of the High Park Advocacy Group (http://www.highparkgroup.com/default.htm), a Toronto-based lobby firm that specializes in “energy, environment and ethics.”
Timothy Egan, is the president of the High Park Advocacy Group, and a registered lobbyist (https://strategis.ic.gc.ca/app/secure/ec/lrrs/search.do;jsessionid=0000UVxwWQcANcnQGhVl9N4A7Cm:1 0hc5g1ed) for the Canadian Gas Association and the Canadian Electricity Association. Julio Legos is the High Park Group’s Director of Regulatory Affairs, whose biography (http://www.highparkgroup.com/jlagos.htm) says, “Julio’s practice at HPG is focused on federal and provincial energy and environmental law and policy, particularly as they affect Canadian industry.”
The Executive Director of the NRSP, Tom Harris (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tom_Harris), is also a former High Park consultant, and the NRSP mailing address is in the building where, until recently, High Park maintained its Toronto offices.
It appears that High Park has taken a page from the APCO-Worldwide playbook. APCO is the PR and lobbying firm that created a “grassroots” organization called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) (http://www.desmogblog.com/astroturf-the-only-grass-that-withstands-toxic-friends-of-science) on behalf of tobacco giant Philip Morris in the 1990s. In that situation, Steve Milloy “quit” APCO to set up a pro-tobacco website called www.JunkScience.com (http://www.junkscience.com/). Milloy later took over as executive director of TASSC and continues, today, to lobby against smoking restrictions. Documents, since made public, show that APCO established TASSC specifically to create the appearance of an arm’s length organization supporting tobacco’s cause.
In this instance, the creation of the NRSP as an “arm’s length” “grassroots” organization also enabled High Park and to avoid identifying who is paying for the NRSP’s public campaign against climate change regulations. The federal government’s own website makes this kind of “grassroots” lobbying subject to the restrictions of the Lobbyists’ Registration Act (http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/L-12.4/199278.html) (subject to an important loophole).
The Question and Answer section under the General Registration Requirements (http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/lr-el.nsf/en/lr00046e.html#11) of the act states:
“4. What is "grass-roots" lobbying?
“Grass-roots lobbying is a communications technique that encourages individual members of the public or organizations to communicate directly with public office holders in an attempt to influence the decisions of government. Such efforts primarily rely on use of the media or advertising, and result in mass letter writing and facsimile campaigns, telephone calls to public office holders, and public demonstrations.”
(Here (http://www.freedominion.ca/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=888142), for the record, is a recent example of the NRSP’s Tom Harris doing just that.)
But setting up a separate organization allows High Park to claim an exception, also to be found in the Q&A section of the General Registration Requirements (http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/lr-el.nsf/en/lr00046e.html#11):
“5. I am involved in organizing and directing a grass-roots lobbying campaign. Do I have to register?
“If you are a registered lobbyist, you must report grass-roots lobbying as a communications technique. If you are not engaged in any registerable lobbying activity, it is not necessary to register for the grass-roots lobbying campaign.”
Thus, by removing himself from the High Park employee list and taking an office across the hall (the NRSP mailing address is #2-263 Roncesvalles Avenue, in Toronto; High Park’s address was (http://web.archive.org/web/20031024171640/http:/www.highparkgroup.com/), until very recently, #4-263 Roncesvalles Avenue) Tom Harris is able to carry out any direction Timothy Egan may be giving in this “grassroots” campaign against energy industry regulation without fulfilling what the Lobbyist act (http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/lr-el.nsf/en/lr20030e.html#4) describes as the “obligation to provide accurate information to public office holders and to disclose the identity of the person or organization on whose behalf the representation is made and the purpose of the representation.”
The federal Lobbyists Registry was created specifically so that politicians and members of the public can know who is paying to influence the political decision-making process. To that end, the federal government’s Lobbyist Code of Conduct (http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/lr-el.nsf/en/lr01044e.html#code) says:
“1. Identity and purpose
“Lobbyists shall, when making a representation to a public office holder, disclose the identity of the person or organization on whose behalf the representation is made, as well as the reasons for the approach.”
But Tom Harris is not technically a lobbyist and Timothy Egan and Julio Legos may well be “volunteering” their time as directors of the NRSP.
So, Egan is a registered lobbyist for the Canadian Gas Association (https://strategis.ic.gc.ca/app/secure/ec/lrrs/registrationSummary.do;jsessionid=00005mj-irVv8srvVSpJovWLIsC:10hc5g1ed?browse=1&language=eng&regId=50432), which is part of an energy industry coalition that includes the Canadian Nuclear Association, the Canadian Association of Oil Well Drilling Contractors, the Canadian Energy Alliance, the Propane Gas Association of Canada, Inc., the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association and the Coal Association of Canada, (as well as some conservation and alternative energy interests such as the Canadian Energy Efficiency Alliance, the Canadian Wind Energy Association and Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Canada). But while a paid apologist for this fossil-fuel-dominated group directs NRSP operations, and while the NRSP's stated purpose is to block government action on climate change - the Canadian public has no right to ask who's paying the bills for the NRSP campaign.
That may be legal, but it doesn't seem right.




http://www.desmogblog.com

[red states rule]

The left wants you fired from your job if you do not buy in to the junk science of global warming



Global warming debate spurs Ore. title tiff

06:09 PM PST on Tuesday, February 6, 2007

By VINCE PATTON, kgw.com

In the face of evidence agreed upon by hundreds of climate scientists, George Taylor holds firm. He does not believe human activities are the main cause of global climate change.


Taylor also holds a unique title: State Climatologist.

Hundreds of scientists last Friday issued the strongest warning yet on global warming saying humans are "very likely" the cause.


“Most of the climate changes we have seen up until now have been a result of natural variations,” Taylor asserts.


Taylor has held the title of "state climatologist" since 1991 when the legislature created a state climate office at OSU The university created the job title, not the state

His opinions conflict not only with many other scientists, but with the state of Oregon's policies.


So the governor wants to take that title from Taylor and make it a position that he would appoint.


In an exclusive interview with KGW-TV, Governor Ted Kulongoski confirmed he wants to take that title from Taylor. The governor said Taylor's contradictions interfere with the state's stated goals to reduce greenhouse gases, the accepted cause of global warming in the eyes of a vast majority of scientists.


“He is Oregon State University's climatologist. He is not the state of Oregon's climatologist,” Kulongoski said.


Taylor declined to comment on the proposal other than to say he was a "bit shocked" by the news. He recently engaged in a debate at O.M.S.I. and repeated his doubts about accepted science.


In an interview he told KGW, "There are a lot of people saying the bulk of the warming of the last 50 years is due to human activities and I don't believe that's true." He believes natural cycles explain most of the changes the earth has seen.


A bill will be introduced in Salem soon on the matter.


Sen. Brad Avakian, (D) Washington County, is sponsoring the bill. He said global warming is so important to state policy it's important to have a climatologist as a consultant to the governor. He denied this is targeted personally at Taylor. "Absolutely not," Avakian said, "I've never met Mr. Taylor and if he's got opinions I hope he comes to the hearing and testifies."


Kulongoski said the state needs a consistent message on reducing greenhouse gases to combat climate change.


The Governor says, "I just think there has to be somebody that says, 'this is the state position on this.'"

(KGW Reporter Vince Patton contributed to this report)
http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_020607_news_taylor_title.59f5d04a.html

[Bubbalicious]

In the face of evidence agreed upon by hundreds of climate scientists, George Taylor holds firm. He does not believe human activities are the main cause of global climate change.

Taylor also holds a unique title: State Climatologist.

Hundreds of scientists last Friday issued the strongest warning yet on global warming saying humans are "very likely" the cause.

“Most of the climate changes we have seen up until now have been a result of natural variations,” Taylor asserts.


that thing's like swiss cheese

[Hagbard Celine]

The left wants you fired from your job if you do not buy in to the junk science of global warming



Global warming debate spurs Ore. title tiff

06:09 PM PST on Tuesday, February 6, 2007

By VINCE PATTON, kgw.com

In the face of evidence agreed upon by hundreds of climate scientists, George Taylor holds firm. He does not believe human activities are the main cause of global climate change.


Taylor also holds a unique title: State Climatologist.

Hundreds of scientists last Friday issued the strongest warning yet on global warming saying humans are "very likely" the cause.


“Most of the climate changes we have seen up until now have been a result of natural variations,” Taylor asserts.


Taylor has held the title of "state climatologist" since 1991 when the legislature created a state climate office at OSU The university created the job title, not the state

His opinions conflict not only with many other scientists, but with the state of Oregon's policies.


So the governor wants to take that title from Taylor and make it a position that he would appoint.


In an exclusive interview with KGW-TV, Governor Ted Kulongoski confirmed he wants to take that title from Taylor. The governor said Taylor's contradictions interfere with the state's stated goals to reduce greenhouse gases, the accepted cause of global warming in the eyes of a vast majority of scientists.


“He is Oregon State University's climatologist. He is not the state of Oregon's climatologist,” Kulongoski said.


Taylor declined to comment on the proposal other than to say he was a "bit shocked" by the news. He recently engaged in a debate at O.M.S.I. and repeated his doubts about accepted science.


In an interview he told KGW, "There are a lot of people saying the bulk of the warming of the last 50 years is due to human activities and I don't believe that's true." He believes natural cycles explain most of the changes the earth has seen.


A bill will be introduced in Salem soon on the matter.


Sen. Brad Avakian, (D) Washington County, is sponsoring the bill. He said global warming is so important to state policy it's important to have a climatologist as a consultant to the governor. He denied this is targeted personally at Taylor. "Absolutely not," Avakian said, "I've never met Mr. Taylor and if he's got opinions I hope he comes to the hearing and testifies."


Kulongoski said the state needs a consistent message on reducing greenhouse gases to combat climate change.


The Governor says, "I just think there has to be somebody that says, 'this is the state position on this.'"

(KGW Reporter Vince Patton contributed to this report)
http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_020607_news_taylor_title.59f5d04a.html

I don't understand what's "junk" about it? There ARE higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The overall global temperatures are rising. The last five years were the hottest on record. And all of the glaciers all over the Earth are melting. What's there to believe in? It's a fact that has to be faced.

[Gaffer]

I don't understand what's "junk" about it? There ARE higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The overall global temperatures are rising. The last five years were the hottest on record. And all of the glaciers all over the Earth are melting. What's there to believe in? It's a fact that has to be faced.

What's junk is they are taking "on faith" that there is warming caused by man. Just like a religion, and trying to force everyone to believe it. Melting of glaciers is not world wide. The hottest 5 years on record is based on what record. They have only been keeping records on weather for a little over a 100 years. And the early records are questionable concerning accuracy.

In the 70's it was a new ice age that would be covering the world in the next 50 to 100 years. Now its global warming caused by cars and cow farts. Its all man's fault and America is the major culpret. Its part of the blame America first crowd.

[Bubbalicious]

Link: National Academy of Sciences: 'High Confidence' That Planet Is Warmest in 400 Years link (http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11676)

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/06/23/GR2006062300505.gif

http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/images/posterglacier.jpg

[Gaffer]

Yeah bub we know you like the chart and pictures. They are your response to everyone that questions the global warming. They mean nothing.

[red states rule]

Yeah bub we know you like the chart and pictures. They are your response to everyone that questions the global warming. They mean nothing.

As with all his posts

[Bubbalicious]

I've yet to see that info debunked.
And no, some hack on NewsMax doesn't know more about climate change than the National Academy of Sciences.

[stephanie]

Ooooooooooooooo

The Academy of Science...

All of sudden, a scientist has become a GOD...

:poke: