thanks advocate. i'll read in detail later tonight.
did give it a scan, though. i was struck by a line at the tail mentioning melting glaciers. interesting stuff, that.
my niece was a student majoring in hydrology at u.a./juno for six years. she was fortunate enough to get a little place that had a great view of mendenhall glacier, which was within a very short walk. minutes really.
two years ago, she was offered a full scholarship to earn her doctorate at cornell. of course she hopped on that and was back east doing her thing. since she is completely in love with alaska, she got an arrangement going where she could spend some time this semester back in juno working on yet another project.
according to her, the glacier is literally disappearing, and at a quite rapid rate.
seeing as how she's had exxon/mobile courting her since her sophmore year, i guess she knows her stuff.
----
ya, know.. i keep asking "anti-" people why they are so opposed to even considering that global warming is a possibility;
is it politics? do they just hate al gore that much?
is it religious and believe the rapture is upon us?
is it simply that the idea of riding around in anything smaller than an suv or an f-150 is so repugnent?
i can get the accusations of "liberal claptrap" and "junk science" and all of that, but i can't get a straight answer as to why they believe global warming is absolutely inconceivable.
and that's really strange to me coming from folks who are willing to allow anything, give up personal liberties and such in the name of being "kept safe".
i wonder how many of them have actually even seen Inconvenient Truth.
I think there is a physiological problem with the thinking patterns of conservatives. Unfortunately, they amazingly get into power.
DontTreadOnMe wrote:Foxfyre wrote:Hiya DTOM. You've been scarce lately. Good to see you back. So how's my favorite liberal?
doin' okee-dokee, foxy. still revving up the revolution..i can count on your support, right ? :wink:
Foxfyre wrote:But please don't try to present Al Gore as having any credibility or virtue on this issue. He just doesn't.
could you post the sources on your gore statements ? curious to read them.
When we find a mutually agreeable revolution, I'm all yours.
As for the Gore stuff, a whole lot of it has been posted by Minitax, myself, and others in the last two or three days so if you review back just a few pages you'll find a lot of it. I don't have a link for Gore buying offsetting carbon credits with his own businesses as I've only seen/heard this on television or radio so far, but I'll look. The other sources are pretty undisputable though.
Advocate, bless his heart, does sincerely believe in his defense of Gore, but so far hasn't come up with any credible defense against the postings we've already made and we have cited our sources. Most of my stuff is on the Snopes site.
It's a free country and Gore is free to say any fool thing he wishes, and he usually doesn't disappoint us there. But when they start pushing that stuff on the kids, I do get my back up.
Here are some links with some addition insights to the carbon credit thing:
FOX NEWS
BUSINESS WEEK
CNS NEWS
Advocate wrote:I think there is a physiological problem with the thinking patterns of conservatives. Unfortunately, they amazingly get into power.
but i've even come across a few "liberals" that automatically dismiss it. not many, but a few. and conversey, a few conservatives that are either on board with it or at least open to new info and discussion.
even my dad, a lifelong conservative/republican, who lives about 45 04 so miles east of carthage, tn. is starting to come around. he still thinks that gore's a doofus, but he is getting a little concerned that something is going on. beyond what he and i call the planet's natural cycles.
that's fairly encouraging to me. he's 85 years and "fer shoor ain't no librulll".
Norway's PM has said that solving climate change is a question of 'solidarity and equity':
Norway aims for zero-carbon status with all emissions offset by 2050
Quote:Norway plans to be the first country in the world to become "carbon neutral" and cut its net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. The prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, has proposed the move, expected to encourage other rich countries to act further and faster on climate change.
...
"By 2050 greenhouse gas emissions will have to be reduced drastically. Rich countries should become carbon neutral. This does not mean no emissions from the countries in question. But it does mean that each tonne of greenhouse gases emitted is to be offset by an equivalent reduction elsewhere. This adds up to zero emissions," he said.
"Norway will be at the forefront of international climate effort. I propose that in the period up to 2050 Norway will undertake to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 100% of our own emissions." He said the government would "sharpen" measures to meet its existing obligations under the Kyoto protocol by 10% in the period up to 2012, and had agreed to a 30% cut in emissions by 2030.
The prime minister's proposal propels Norway to the top of the international carbon cutting league. Britain has legally committed itself to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60% up to 2050, California has proposed 80%, and both Sweden and Iceland have pledged where possible to stop all oil imports by then. Europe says it intends to cut emissions by 20% by 2020 and by 30% if others make similar cuts.
[...]
Yes, well, we're not all thinly-populated countries with large windfall profits from oil exports, are we? ;p
Completely aside from the silliness of offsetting -all- your carbon reductions... I mean, it works fine if you're a very small country in a very large world market, but if a larger country tried this, it'd warp the heck out of the offset market, no?
One group you missed Foxy is the group that I'm in that just wants less pollution in our air, in our water, on the ground, and in our food.
I guess no one else really cares about that. Or our kids who have increasing rates of illness likely due to many of these forms of pollution.
Foxy (and I assume you are Foxy) mentioned, I believe, cited the Competitive Enterprise Institute so-called destruction of Gore's thesis. We now know that CEI is a phony front organization for the polluters.
Global-warming denialists in denial.
A River in Egypt
by Bradford Plumer
Post date 04.05.07
red Smith isn't exactly known for his timidity on the subject of climate change. The president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market think tank based in Washington, D.C., he has derided concern over global warming and has gone on television to rail against Al Gore's "evil consumptive ways." But, in February, when Smith was called to testify before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, he sounded like a cornered man.
"I am aware," he began somewhat cautiously, "that CEI is regarded as a contrarian voice on the science of climate change." Senate Republicans had invited him to comment on an emissions-reduction plan put forward by a group of green-minded companies, including General Electric and Duke Energy. But, with Barbara Boxer wielding the gavel, Smith couldn't simply launch into his usual tirade against global warming. Instead, like a boy forced to apologize for pulling his sister's hair, he ceded grudgingly, "I am happy for the purposes of this discussion to accept all the scientific arguments behind their proposals." Hence, he sniffed, "attempts to allege 'climate denialism' in response to my points are ad hominem attacks not worthy of consideration."
It's getting hard out here for a global-warming skeptic. Al Gore has an Oscar. The latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc) has declared with 90 percent certainty that greenhouse gases are largely responsible for heating the planet, a conclusion even the White House now accepts. Capitol Hill--where groups like CEI could once count on a friendly hearing from congressional Republicans, 84 percent of whom are still unconvinced that climate change is caused by humans--is now controlled by Democrats. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil, which had donated more than $2 million to CEI since 1998, recently announced that it would no longer fund the organization. Mocked by longtime enemies, abandoned by erstwhile friends, what's a global-warming skeptic to do?
t wasn't long ago that CEI was reveling in its role as the country's most notorious skeptic group. In 1997, the organization helped form the Cooler Heads Coalition to "dispel the myths of global warming" by, among other things, sending pseudo-experts to testify before Congress and appear on television. The group's director of energy and global warming policy, Myron Ebell, played an instrumental role in convincing President Bush to reverse his campaign pledge to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions from the utility industry. (The Clean Air Trust named Ebell its "clean air villain of the month" in March 2001 for his "ferocious lobbying charge.") Last year, to preempt the release of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, the institute aired two schmaltzy 60-second spots in 14 cities singing the praises of carbon dioxide. Both ended with the tagline: "They call it pollution ... we call it life."
That sort of misinformation has long been the group's métier. CEI was following a strategy like the one outlined in a memo from the American Petroleum Institute, which The New York Times obtained in 1998: "Victory will be achieved when ... recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the conventional wisdom.'" So long as people were forced to spend their waking hours debating whether climate change was really happening, they wouldn't have time to discuss what to do about it.
Unfortunately for CEI, that debate is over, and climate-change skeptics are on the losing end. Now, the group finds itself beleaguered in Washington--not to mention vilified in the national press. Ellen Goodman of The Boston Globe recently wrote that climate-change doubters are "on a par with Holocaust deniers" in a column that skeptics love to cite as evidence that they're being persecuted. At the end of an interview, CEI's in-house lawyer, Chris Horner, told me with a resigned sigh, "Look, don't write the standard story here, making us out to be the bad guys."
o, with their careers in peril, CEI types are adapting to the new climate. Although there are still plenty of unabashed global-warming deniers out there--especially on college campuses, where budding conservatives who don't seem to have gotten the memo yet are churning out op-eds--many skeptics are now coalescing around a more moderate-sounding approach. Ebell insists that neither he nor his colleagues dispute the fact of global warming as they once did. "We try to react to the scientific research that comes out--and we've adjusted our political rhetoric as well," he says. And adjust they have, developing a new line that goes something like this: Sure, we'll accept that global warming is occurring and humans bear some responsibility. But it's hard to predict exactly how bad a warmer world will be. And the proposals for reducing emissions in the United States are all costly and rife with problems. And, even if they could work, we can't stop climate change because it's impossible to convince India and China to curb their rapidly growing emissions. And so on.
One tactic that lately seems to give deniers special pleasure is mounting their case against the global-warming consensus from the left. So you get the odd spectacle of Smith going before the Senate to denounce cap-and-trade--the widely endorsed idea that the government should set a national ceiling on carbon emissions and then allow companies to buy and sell pollution credits--on populist grounds. "The corporations we see baying for a cap-and-trade program are out to enrich themselves without thought for the poor," he told Congress. (He even pointed out that--horror--Enron had once supported the idea.) Or you get conservative Senator James Inhofe referring to companies that would benefit from a cap-and-trade regime as "climate profiteers." Or Paul Driessen--the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death--saying things like, "It's incredibly patronizing and colonialistic to tell Africa you can't develop because we're concerned about global warming," while arguing that funding the fight against global warming "takes money away from spending on malaria."
Even as they claim to be on board with the latest science, some deniers have continued peddling half-truths. This became clear during my conversation with Ebell. "We've had a flat global mean temperature since 1998," he notes. "So what are we worried about?" (Ebell is cherry-picking here--1998 was an exceptionally hot year, thanks to El Niño, but global average temperatures have risen steadily since 1900.) He also notes, as did many other "reformed" skeptics I talked to, that the latest ipcc assessment actually lowered previous estimates of the magnitude of the human contribution to warming. (This is misleading; the ipcc mainly just increased its estimate of the cooling effect of aerosols. Those particles will eventually get cleaned up due to clean-air laws, and the result will be more warming, not less.)
Meanwhile, many global-warming skeptics are suffering the indignity of having to deny that they were ever deniers in the first place. Take Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute. Green has previously praised Michael Crichton's State of Fear, a novel thick with disinformation about global warming, for having "educated millions of readers about climate science." And, in 2004, he wrote a paper with notorious climate-change denier Timothy Ball called The Science Isn't Settled. The paper argued that the scientific models used to predict global warming were "of dubious merit." Now he insists that he accepts the ipcc's baseline conclusions about climate change and says of his relationship with Ball, "We don't agree. The fact that we haven't worked together since then suggests we don't agree." Sounds like the heat is getting to him.
Maporsche, except CO2 is -not- a traditional pollutant. Scrub the smog, the nitrates, the particulates, the ozone, yadda yadda, out of the air, and all that improves the air quality, sure. (I should know, living in Houston - it ain't good here, but it's a lot better than it was when I was young!) But an increase in the concentration of CO2 is not harmful to people - at least, not for a few orders of magnitude larger than the amounts we're talking about for global warming.
Like I've said earlier, cleaner air actually makes the warming problem worse - particulates act to scatter incoming sunlight. Think of it as a greenhouse effect with dirty glass. The cleaner that air is, the more light makes it to ground and warms things up...
Wait, Av, MaPorsche didn't really say anything about CO2 at all.
You see, there are many environmentalists like myself and MP who aren't crazy-go-nuts over the idea that the world is going to end over global warming just yet - we are more interested in cleaning the quality of the air and water. This has health benefits for everyone and damnit, it's just nice to take in a deep breath of cold, sweet air.
I wish they would go back to calling carbon offsets 'trees.' And work on planting them.
Cycloptichorn
Quote:Think of it as a greenhouse effect with dirty glass. The cleaner that air is, the more light makes it to ground and warms things up...
Transparency. From Oedipus up to Karl Rove, its benefits have been mixed.
Hmm, dirty air is better. Sounds like a swift-boating of the environment.
The article is in the current edition of The New Republic Magazine, which has an excellent reputation.
Should I spend the time giving names of thousands of scientists who don't agree with the couple you have mentioned, considering that you wouldn't know them?
Advocate wrote:The article is in the current edition of The New Republic Magazine, which has an excellent reputation.
Should I spend the time giving names of thousands of scientists who don't agree with the couple you have mentioned, considering that you wouldn't know them?
I just asked for names of a few scientists who concur with the science in Gore's movie. You stated there were many so it shouldn't be hard to come up with a few. No need to list thousands.
What? ;p
No, really, it's true. Granted, I'm hardly claiming that global warming is -totally- due to cleaner air or anything stupid like that. But it really is an operative effect - the less particulate pollution we have in the air, the more energy makes it to ground level to get trapped in the ol' greenhouse effect.
My real point here is that clean air issues and the global warming issue really aren't related, for all that they're both environmental issues. Conflating them is -really bad-. The arguments for cleaner air have nothing at all to do with global warming. The arguments against global warming have nothing at all to do with cleaner air. And, well, this is the global warming thread, so it's safe to say that if you don't make a clear distinction, I'm going to assume that points you raise have something to do with global warming. ;p
Avatar ADV wrote:What? ;p
No, really, it's true. Granted, I'm hardly claiming that global warming is -totally- due to cleaner air or anything stupid like that. But it really is an operative effect - the less particulate pollution we have in the air, the more energy makes it to ground level to get trapped in the ol' greenhouse effect.
My real point here is that clean air issues and the global warming issue really aren't related, for all that they're both environmental issues. Conflating them is -really bad-. The arguments for cleaner air have nothing at all to do with global warming. The arguments against global warming have nothing at all to do with cleaner air. And, well, this is the global warming thread, so it's safe to say that if you don't make a clear distinction, I'm going to assume that points you raise have something to do with global warming. ;p
This has been the 'environment' thread for a year or so now, it serves an omnibus of issues.
I agree with you that particulate matter in the atmosphere can work against our terrorfo-- whoops, terraforming efforts
Cycloptichorn
