The Failed Presidency.

Most of what I have read has been in Scientific American, Nature, Nature Biology, American Scientist, Science, and other similar "leftist rags."

Again, you make the insult, but fail to name these mysterious "crazies."


Something I had alluded to before you went on this tirade.


Again, no one is arguing this fact with you. Have you difficulty reading for content? Not trying to be insulting, just trying to understand your position.

I am happy that you agree, Professor Hobibit, concerning the Medieval Warm Period. That would fall in your area of expertise, would it not?

You then concede the fact that the earth's cycles of warming and cooling predate human existence- not to mention SUV's.

To be more specific, The National Academy of Sciences( I am sure that you know, Professor hobibit, of their prestigious standing) said in their report of June 10th 2001 that:

"While the activities of mankind are part of the natural world, the confention exists in most discussions of the atmosphere that "natural process" are those that would still exist without the presence of human beings"

But what is the charge?

The charge is that we are spewing more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and as CO2 rises,it tends to prevent some energy from escaping to space. If the climate system does not shed that extra energy, the buildup of Co2 in the air could enhance the largely natural greenhouse effect.

Eventually, under this scenario, the planet gets so warm that icecaps melt, malarial mosquitos swarm and droughts starve the inhabitants.


So what to do?

In July 1997, the Senate of the United States voted 97-0 AGAINST ratifying any climate-change treaty.

Why?

The icecaps are melting for heaven's sake.

Perhaps the Senators knew more than the tabloids.

Perhaps they knew that

First, the cost of enforcing radical limits on Co2 emissions woluld be from 300 to 400 Billion a year

and

Second, there were great uncertainties about whether the earth would heat up in a dangerous way in the next century and whether human-induced greenhouse gases were a significant culprit.

Here is the conclusion from the Academy's report.

"Because there is considerable UNCERTAINTY in currrent understanding of how the climate system varies naturallyand reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded AS TENTATIVE AND SUBJECT TO FUTURE ADJUSTMENTS"


Source:

www.nap.edu/catalog/10139.html?onpi_newbooks_060801

All of which I pointed out earlier. However, if there is any possibility we can allay some of the effects, why not do so? Perhaps that's a beter use of funds than tax cuts.
As for the (purported) existance of common sense or intelligence in the legislative branch, look at how many of them are fundamentalist Christians.

Professor Hobibit:

Allay effects?

What effects?

What causes the effects?

How much would it cost( the Clinton administration said 300 to 400 Billion) to allay effects which have not been measured adequately and which may be caused by natural effects rather than man made effects.

Note-
No scientist will doubt that over the last 100 years there has been a warming of about 1 degree NEAR THE SURFACE and averaged over the earth. But according to the study made by the National Academy of Sciences referenced earlier there are two important qualifactions of the fact that the temperature at the EARTH'S SURFACE has gone up by 1 Degree Fahreheit.

l. There was a strong surface warming between 189o and 1940 then a cooling( indeed some predicted an Ice-Age)he 1940's to the 1970's) and then a warming from 1970 till now.

It is starnge that the earth was warmer from 1890 to 1940 when Co2 emissions were insignificant compared to today.

Second, The recent warming has been observed onlyu on the surface of the earth. More sophisticated temperature records taken from the surface to a few miles up using NASA satellites show no warming over the past 22 years.

Yup, c.i., those are links, allright. And one of 'em, nyenvirolaw.org, is an honsest-to-gosh PDF without a single picture in any of its seven pages. The other one, yourplanrtearth.org, was pretty, and had a wonderful, uncharacteristically candid caveat on its sampling page:
http://www.yourplanetearth.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=14&aid=8.
I like candor. They're obviously concerned folks who care about science and the earth, even if I happen to think they're given to a bit of credulous hysteria fanned by less-than-credible science. That's cool, at least they're up front about it.

Now, nyenvirolaw.org sorta lacks candor. IMHO. But then, they're a lawfirm specializing in suing the government, not real environmental activists, so nothing better should be expected. Its how they pay themselves. Fine ... everybody's got a right to a job, even if they mask it with an agenda. These guys are about THE MONEY. Their entire 7-page rant was poorly crafted, unscientic, weighted with insinuation and thinly veiled unsupported implications, and revolved around the following:
http://www.epa.gov/oigearth/ereading_room/WTC_report_20030821.pdf (dialup warning: very large PDF file, digitally signed. Several minutes to download over a 512K DSL connection).

The EPA admits it made mistakes. Obviously, that was their mistake ... it was the perfect opening for envirolaw. It doesn't matter much to envirolaw that subsequent studies showed nor abnormal hazard in fact existed; the REAL ISSUE, according to envirolaw, is that the EPA, treading unexplored territory in a time of great pressure, uncertainty, and general shock, disbelief, and horror, made a mistake ... a mistake acknowledged freely, and a mistake of no demonstrated dire consequence, but a mistake that promises good pickings from a lawsuit against what in the end is The American Taxpayer. In the cited report, and in its predecessors and all the related commentaries, addendums, and corrections, other mistakes are acknowledged. That's pretty much the point of reports; "Lets see what we could have done better, so we can do better if there is a next time." I would suggest that rather than read about the EPA report, you read the EPA report ... and its predecessors. The are public domain and easy to find. They have some pictures, too ... not flashy graphics so much, but illustrative none the less. Alltogether, there are a couple thousand pages, but a lot of that is charts, tables, source citations, and the like, so prolly only a few hundred actual text-only pages. I figure you get a lot more out of going to the source when its available ... even if the source doesn't read with the energy, snap, and goodfeeling of the stories and opinion pieces about it. I'm funny that way. I prefer to look at the facts and form my own opinion. I may or may not endorse someone else's opinion, but I generally have my own, relatively informed, opinion, whether or not anybody else may endorse or contest that opinion.

The "Your planet Earth" link( thank you, CI) had a rather good, but, in my opinion, incomplete, section on why the talks on Kyoto failed. Anyone interested in the so-called "global warming should read that link.

First, there are other discussions in A2K where you ought to be making these arguments, second, ever hear the phrase "there's no free lunch"?

Kyoto would have plunged the US into a deep and lengthy depression. How many additional children are you willing to plunge into poverty because you think it "couldn't hurt" to try to solve a problem we may not have, may not be causing and may not be able to change? You care about the environment? Kyoto obligates 28 nations to take action, and requires NOTHING of all others. Under Kyoto, many industries that operate relatively cleanly under tight US environmental regulations would have two choices; go bankrupt or ship their facilities to countries not constrained by Kyoto. Suddenly you've replaced cleaner factories operating under strict controls with dirty factories operating under few or no regulations.

So, Kyoto, the "answer" to global warming that "we might as well try because it couldn't hurt" ends up causing poverty and increasing global environmental damage.

And that for something we ought to try "just because". There is no free lunch, and you can't make the kind of changes global warming wonks are clamoring for without reaping some negative consequences. So, you are effective asking people to accept almost certain and extreme negative consequences in an effort to avert distant, uncertain and largely harmless consequences.

Not for me, thanks.

As a personal view on the ozone layer, I'm of the opinion that there isn't enough science to determine whether what we see today is a normal cycle or CO2 is the culprit. The ozone layer hole around the Antarctic 'seems' to be getting larger. The snow around the Andes Mountains seems to be melting away at an alarming rate. The icefields in Canada seems to be melting away. As for the situation in New York City after nine-eleven, I just don't trust this administration to tell the truth. That the EPA would declare that the air was 'clean' soon after the destructdion of the twin towers seems on the surface very irresponsible. Toxic dust seems reasonable even to this lay person. We still don't have stats on long-term health effects. On the other side of the coin is the small pox scare of this administration; they made all the military folks take the small pox immunization including health care workers. We have been learning that there are no biological or chemical weapons in Iraq, including small pox. On the one side, there were provable toxins in the air in New York City. On the other, there were no evidence of small pox, but this administration forced our military to get those immunization for a non-existent disease. It's only my opinion.

I received this from a friend in Australia.
*********************************

Most of us know Asbestos fibers, when ingested, are a proven cause of cancer. Some us might know that the World Trade Center towers were two of the last big buildings constructed with asbestos.

When the twin towers collapsed in September 2001, they filled New York City with a lethal mix of not only asbestos but the pulverised dust of countless computer screens, light fixtures, calculators, telephones, network servers,
paging systems, copy machines and other office equipment laden with mercury and other toxic metals.

The Environmental Protection Agency quickly acted to advise that spewing such a toxic mix into New York's air presented a lethal danger to the public, but that lives could be saved by taking precautions.

But we now hear that the White House intercepted these planned EPA warnings, citing "competing considerations" ahead of the health of the
people of New York -- including the re-opening of the stock exchange as quickly as possible, and limiting clean-up costs and liability claims.

As a result of these actions, the long-term death toll from the WTC attacks could eventually reach many thousands more than the initial toll. And those slow and agonising deaths will have been directly at the hand of the US president.

ci would that be murf?

Yup!

Commentary > Daniel Schorr
from the September 26, 2003 edition

A war still in search of a rationale

By Daniel Schorr

WASHINGTON – It is more than six months since the invasion of Iraq, and it remains a war in search of a rationale.
A massive search and a series of investigations of scientists and technicians have yet to produce the weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to put the US in danger imminent enough to justify preemptive action. A Washington Post poll last month showed that 69 percent of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein had some role in the Sept. 11 attacks. But the Bush administration seems ambivalent about whether to keep making that assertion.
In his May 1 victory speech from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Bush said that the Iraq battle was "one victory in the war on terror that began on Sept. 11."
Since then, the administration has become much less definite. On NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sept. 14, Vice President Dick Cheney called Iraq "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11." Two days later, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seemed to contradict Mr. Cheney, telling a news conference he had no reason to believe that Hussein had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. And the very next day, Bush, seeming to side with Mr. Rumsfeld, said "we have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with Sept. 11."
And yet, in his United Nations speech on Tuesday, Bush said that Iraq was "the central front" in the war against terrorism, as though reluctant to give up the theme of Iraq's link to terrorism.
Then there was the bizarre new justification of the war offered by Secretary of State Colin Powell. In a visit to the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, Mr. Powell said that a 1998 poison-gas attack that killed 5,000 Kurds was justification enough for bringing down Hussein. What made his statement so bizarre was that at the time of the poison-gas attack, he was President Reagan's national security adviser. In those days the US was backing Iraq in its war with Iran. While the Reagan administration condemned the use of chemical weapons as a "grave violation" of international law, no sanctions were imposed on the Baghdad regime.
"The world should have acted sooner," Powell told Kurdish families at a mass grave site. As a justification for the invasion of Iraq 15 years later, that's almost embarrassing.

Daniel shorr is an intelligent guy, but he really does not have a good radio voice. His voice makes me turn channels.

That is two personal opinions, but what about his points?

Well, I have been meaning to mention it before and I had this article reminded me to say as much.

Acquiunk, wouldn't your post stating I was making personal comments and getting away from the original post missing the point that you were trying to make?

Yeah, "does not have a good radio voice" says nothing about the article.

You both are absolutely correct. Thank you for pointing out the fact that I am NOT TALKING ABOUT THE ARTICLE!

So what do you think about the article?