'US climate policy bigger threat to world than terrorism'

So you are saying that the U.S. should be hamstrung while giving 'developing nations' and unfair advantage in the world market?

That is more than unfair, it is laughable.

A group of other countries gathering together and saying that 'Well U.S., we know you are ahead economically right now but we all decided that you have to follow some new rules that will hold back your economy and cost you billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs but we all feel that you should do this in the sense of fairness. ..... Oh yes, and by the way, these rules wont apply to us until we have caught up because it would cost too much money for us to do it.

I dont think this even passes the first stage of the 'Common sense' test.

Fedral,

The US position nearly mirrors mine. The US objections were about China and Russia but the moderate US positions also included a developing nations clause.

It's not nearly as absurd as you'd liek to think.

To go slowly:

Some nations are simply not manufacturing enough for it to be a significant concern. Some nations are also not developed enough to take these measures as they require technological advancement that they have not yet reached.

So inherent to these discussions is the fact taht if we want this to happen in the next few years some nations would have to be exempt as they do not have the resources or ability to enforce this policy.

Now which nations fit this criteria can be argued, but that there are some nations that do not posess the ability is common knowlege.

I happen to think China and Russia should not be exempt, and that was main sticking point of the US, not the existence of exemptions themselves.

See, the US, despite being among a handful of countries most opposed to these measures, recognizes that developing country exemptions is a lot less absurd that your knee-jerk accusation would imply.

I apologize for the tone of my reply Craven, I misunderstood what you were saying.

I somewhat agree. As long as ALL[/u] the major industrialized and near industrialized countries are included in the cuts (And by this I mean Russia, China, India, Australia and EVERY country in the EU)

I just think that the possible economic hardships that it might cause upon the U.S. isn't worth the 'gain'.

I mean, we in the U.S. use a lot of coal to provide energy. That's because the States has a LOT of coal. Imagine if you would, the amount of nuclear power plants (something the greenies HATE) or fossil fuel plants we would have to build if we were forced to cut back on coal usage. The U.S. already runs the MOST efficient and lowest pollution coal plants the world has ever seen. As the law of diminishing returns shows us, each level of pollution control provides less and less return for a extremely limited pollution control return after a certain point.

I just don't think that the potential lowering of a few %'s is going to impact the environment a bit. (see the above article)

I kinda figured, but no worries.



I agree, but with the possible exception of India.

Thing is, in terms of volume they need to be in the treaty. But in terms of development it's a hard case to make.

But that's a mere quibble.



Personally I don't care about the enviroment much (it simply isn't one of my hot topics, I guess we can all care only about so much) so I'm inclined to agree.

But I do think the US position has some elements to criticize. I'll expound later.



Yep, the greens would have America painted as a big polluting cigar. While there is reason to support that (American society is very consumer driven and materialism has pollution as a natural byproduct) it neglects the fact that the US is also one of the most enviromentally concious nations on earth.

In many other nations there's no such thing as a recycle bin.

In many other nations the only reason cans are recycled is because theer are people poor enough to live off of it and who pick up the cans in the street (all of my friends in Brazil said they do not litter, except for cans as they will only be on the street for 5 minutes).



Neither do I. But there are those who do and who think this is a matter of life or death. I think mcuh of the green science is absurd but there is an underlying truth to it.

It might not be as apocalyptic as the greens would have you believe but it is true that we are going to have problems eventually if we do not change.

So while we might not see immediate enviromental results it would be the biggest step toward change in man's history.

And if we can agree that our habits are going to hit a wall one day then we can agree that change is necessary at some point.

So while I don't think Kyoto would have saved the planet (or even have made a noticable difference) it would represent a huge difference in terms of the change being undertaken.

It would be a big tough step. Curbing materialism for the sake of enviromentalism is a hard sell, humans think about the now more than the future.

Now about the US, here's where I fault us.

I would not have signed Kyoto in the form it was presented. but then again the US could have forced Russia and China to sign if we were interested.

Russia and China do not have the economic might to dictate anything to the US. The US has the economic might to not dictate but apply very heavy pressure and a very fat rich carrot.

If we were interested we could have gotten more nations on baord. But the fact that we were not interested simply killed the idea for two reasons:

1) We are the largest polluter in trems of volume, and by FAR.
2) A polemic treaty with many reluctant nations needs a strong party advocating it. The US was needed to bring about the solidarity in the first place.

You mean exactly what country?

If you guys can solve the list of countries you will have done better than all the diplomats in the world have done thus far. ;-)

I wish they'd first agree that a change is at some point necessary. Then deal with the implementation.

Well, I was just wondering about the mentioning of the EU-states, since the "European Climate Change Programme (ECCP)" has been established a year or so ago and is binding law to all member states.

The US value is closer to 30%. But I'm not surprised by the statistics you produce nor your attitude.

Paul Epstein, like many, has transplanted the inquiries of science into the popular press and sound bytes.
Climatological models, which drive much of the "conclusions' can be faulty and are not well verified. Hell theyre not even well calibrated. Theres one model out there ive seen which takes a gradient in assumed climate change(mostly an upward gradient in heat and temperature rise). The model tries to predict what the outcome is. The outcome is the
1 continued melting of polar ice caps
2polar ice cap meltwater oozes in to the Northern ocean deeps and gradually destroys the major N/S streams. The streams, robbed of their heat engine, quickly allows the Northern latitudes to become cold again
therefore, global warming actually results in another ice AGe. This is interesting because the previous 4 big pleistocene Ice Ages started in similar fashions, without the help of humans. The thing that correlates well with one of the Ice Ages is the Bruhne polar reversal about 700K yrs ago. The last Glaciation lies smack in the middle of a Melankovitch cycle of axial precession
The interesting thing now is , we are experiencing a decay in our present magnetic dipole and , we are in the front end of another axial precession.
'Nature always bats Last"-raup
.

I dont know whether this is , or is not true, but its what science is coming up with and we as intelligent l folks who arent climatologists need to delve into the literature and see wherein the range of truth lies.

I love when people do nothing but deride peoples arguments without posting anything of substance ... just like a liberal, ignore facts you don't like, deride the ones you don't agree with and never post a coherent thought that might lead to a positive exchange of ideas.

[quote="Fedral]I love when people do nothing but deride peoples arguments without posting anything of substance ... just like a liberal, ignore facts you don't like, deride the ones you don't agree with and never post a coherent thought that might lead to a positive exchange of ideas. [/quote]

I l'ove' those, who state something and ignore the questions about it - no matter, what political site they belong to.

Walter,

Can you tell me what question that Wilso asked in his little post ?

All it looked like to me was an attempt to minimalize an statement that he disagreed with without offering anything of substance to counter.

farmerman, It's interesting that you mention the ice caps and glaciers, because when we visited the Columbia icefields in Canada last year, it's been melting away before the 20th century. The Whyte Museum in Banff has photographs showing the melt down from the late 1800's to the current period, and we didn't have all that carbon producing machines back then. I agree with you, that climatic change on this planet comes in cycles measured in thousands of years - not a couple of decades.

better watch it ci, your closely approaching heresy.
()hee heee)


My interests are in verification of "the climate models' . Anybody who works with models knows that you can default to values that may not be true, or may be computed over and over and never be questioned. The track record of short term "predicted versus actual' climate values from these climate models is not one to brag about.

About a year ago there was a seminar presentation in the Geology Department at the University I teach at which addressed current attempt to reconstruct the climate of east Africa (mostly the Rift Valley) for the last 4 million years. It was an interesting and eclectic group of people, some of them pretty close to Indiana Jones types. This research has implications for early hominid evolution. The general consensus among the participants is that the data shows two trends. 1) the planet has become increasingly cooler over the last four million years and 2) the global climate has become increasingly unstable. The extremes of cold and warm are becoming more pronounced. No one took the current controversy over anthropogenic global warming very seriously. The global climate is becoming warmer. But it is rebounding from a rather deep cooling trend and nothing in the data showed that the current trend was anything out of the ordinary, That is other than that the data suggest that the warming trend will, like the last cooling trend, be more of an extreme then was the last cycle.

"The interesting thing now is , we are experiencing a decay in our present magnetic dipole and , we are in the front end of another axial precession."

Can you explain that Farmerman?

Forgive me if someone already asked....

I wonder what happens when the magnetic pole becomes south.

When I meet a conservative who's capable of a positive exchange of ideas then I"ll give it a go. But I won't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

I wasn't referring to Wilso's post but to my question.

Deb, the earths axis wobbles about 3degrees off its true 11 degree axial tilt. about every 40000 years, also, the equinoxes(precession of the equinoxes) change in a sliding maximum that is between 19000 and 23000 yrs, lastly the earths orbit changes from elliptical to less elliptical in a mode that cycles about 400000 yrs. All these, are part of the Milankovitch cycle sequences and are responsible for recognized changes in earths weather, and the stratigraphic record (more or less deposition of sediments that are caused by increased water availability to erode)

On top of this, the earths magnetic poles wander all over the place and, every few hundred thousand years, they actually flip. now they just dont turn off and on like a light switch, the n (seeking) pole begins to decay as secondary fields of high gauss occur in the hemispheres. like right now , we have a few polar maxima out near the S Bering sea and in the north sea. Mariners can easily account for them because we dont use compasses much anymore. by the way I have a compass correction factor that , in the late 1970s showed that my local declination was about 11 degrees W (for E Pa), today its almost 16 Degrees, and its changing. we expect a major pole change in the next few thousand years, but leading up to the flip , there will be weather and PACs (punctuated cycles) that will have an enormous effect upon our environment
believe me, im a major proponent for clean air and new technologies in air cleanup. Im of a liberal political bent but i hate the way this area of science has been politicized , I want very clean air, but for other reasons. I agree that air pollution is a bringer of disease. We are being rained on with PCBs at a rate of about 15ppb per square ft per year. We dont need to divert our good intentions by predicting climate changes. it is changing, but as many studies showed, it is damn difficult to even pick the human effects out of the overall climate data. It is easy to correlate these planetary cycles and see what is the effects. were in an INterglacial period, as acquiunk said. Weve come out of a very cold period less than 10K yeqrs
(some people say that greenland is still in the Pleistocene epoch). Interglacial stages have clear PACS that show rising seas and increased sedimentation and beach erosion etc. then, some big event , like a polar flip can be part of the events that trigge
r a new ice Sheet.
the statements by very learned people about the disasters of human induced global warming concern me . by analogy, in the 1960s and 70s , there were 2 schools of geophysicits that said the sea floor was spreading and others who laughed at this. There were many learned minds on both sides. we dont deny sea floor spreading today based upon the preponderence of evidence. Same thing with climate change, as we get more data, we see that milankovitch cycles are a dominant cause/ effect in our planets weather. its been going on for hundreds of millions of years and mostly without human help.
Im not so learned but I have to respectfully stand on the sidelines and yell
'You dont have the data to make that sweeping conclusion"