Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

In the 1980s, Addington, then in his 20s, served as deputy counsel to CIA director William Casey, the moving force behind the Iran-Contra affair and the most powerful figure in the Reagan administration after the president. Along with other hotshots in the counsel's office, Addington was part of what became known within the agency as the "Lawless Group," named after Richard Lawless, a CIA operative who was a close assistant to Casey, according to a former senior CIA official. After Casey's death, Rep. Dick Cheney co-opted the "Lawless Group," putting its members in key positions when he was secretary of defense during the first Bush administration and vice president in the second. (Lawless, for example, after working as Jeb Bush's business partner, served as deputy undersecretary of defense, retiring this past April.)

"A lot of the decisions on Iran-Contra were signed off by the counsel's office," a longtime senior CIA official told me. "It was not a renegade operation. It had lawyers, just like now. Everything they were doing was run by the general counsel's office and Addington was deputy. You may draw your own conclusions, as the Russians say." In fact, the role of the counsel's office surfaced in the trial of Alan Fiers, the CIA agent in charge of the Central American Task Force, who pleaded guilty to misleading Congress. But that role was never investigated or ever really reported.

"These guys don't like the mainstream CIA. In fact, they hate it," the CIA official explained. "They don't like information unless it fits what they want to hear. They hate the CIA because the CIA tells them what they don't want to hear. They want assessments that prove ideological points. They are looking for simplistic answers to complicated issues. They inhabit a make-believe world of moving up into perceived areas of expertise. It's the same guys; they all resurface when Republicans are back in power. It's the same group. It's a system. The similarities are amazing in all these wars we've been dragged into."

Casey is the half-forgotten forefather of the radical Bush presidency. A clandestine agent of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, the intelligence group predating the CIA, Casey became a wealthy and politically influential lawyer. He was among the original godfathers of the conservative movement, serving on the board of the right-wing Regnery publishing house, operating as financier of William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review and founding conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute.

An avid supporter of Richard Nixon's, Casey was appointed chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and president of the Import-Export Bank. Casey regarded the Watergate scandal as a mere political attack, "political shenanigans," as he described it to Nixon in a private letter in May 1973. In 1980, Casey was director of Reagan's campaign. After the election he wanted to be named secretary of state, but settled for CIA director.

ican711nm wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:

I think that your questions are silly and not serious at all.

Cycloptichorn

I think my questions are serious and not silly at all. So answer them if you can!

This is the only one I think is worth answering:

Quote:

Do you think we ought to find a substitute for the CO2 we and the rest of the world's animals exhale?

I think that you should try feel free to start your experiments at home.

Cycloptichorn

(1) What do you think is the primary cause of both Earth and Mars warming?

(2) Why do you think Anarctic is cooling, while Arctic is warming?

I mistakenly thought that over time, the misuse of our results would slowly fade, but it seems this practice has instead grown. Our results have now been used as "evidence" against global warming by Ann Coulter in her latest book, "Godless: The Church of Liberalism", which followed closely Michael Crichton's misuse of our results in his novel/congressional testimony, "State of Fear". If you search my name on the web, you will find pages of examples of misuse of our results in everything from climate discussion groups to Senate policy committee documents. Not only has this abuse grown, it has evolved. Someone recently sent me a link to a web column where I was quoted as saying "the unexpected colder climate in Antarctica may possibly be signaling a lessening of the current global warming cycle". As Jon Stewart might say…"whaaaa?" Not only have I never thought such a thing, I've definitely never said it!

(3) Do you think CO2 in Earth's atmosphere does not reflect at least as much heat radiated by the sun back into space as it reflects heat radiated by the earth back to the earth?

(4) Do you think we ought to find a substitute for the CO2 we and the rest of the world's animals exhale?

Your goofus response is avoidance of answering of questions (1). (2), and (3). I interpret your silly answer to question (4) to be equivalent to an answer of NO!

all right, icann.

1. It isn't clear that Mars is in fact warming, or that it is warming overall, or that there is any sort of long term warming going on there. Observation period too short, too many unknown variables.

Mars's frozen CO2 polar icecaps have been repeatedly observed to be shrinking over the last decade

The earth is very clearly warming because of increased anthropogenic CO2 (and other anthropogenic greenhouse effects of lesser significance, like increased methane).

The earth is very clearly warming. It has warmed an average about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 100 years. BUT it is not clear that "increased anthropogenic CO2 (and other anthropogenic greenhouse effects of lesser significance, like increased methane)" are anymore than an insignificant contributor to that warming. We know that the earth has a history of warming trends (tropical ages) and cooling trends (ice ages) before humans existed on earth. We know that the sun's radiation increases and decreases over 11 and multi-thousand year cycles. We know that correlation is not in itself cause. That is, we know that when two or more things happen to co-occur, we cannot logically conclude that any one or more of those things caused the other.

2. The Antarctic too seems to be warming. The Ross ice shelf, for example, is fissioning large chunks.

Yes, "the Ross ice shelf is fissioning large chunks." But, the Ross ice shelf and its fissioning chunks are each getting larger.

3. Energy from the sun is absorbed by the earth as heat. When it is reradiated from the earth it is at a different wavelength than when it came in. The original wavelength is not reflected by CO2. The reradiated wavelength is. So CO2 dooes not reflect heat from the sun back into space. It only reflects the reradiated energy back to earth.

You claim: the original wavelength of the sun's radiation is not reflected by CO2. The sun's radiations contain a great many different significant heating wave lengths. What evidence do you have that all those heating wave lengths are not reflected by CO2?

Take a look at the window panes in a typical greenhouse. The outside is darker than the inside. Why? Because the outside darker side reflects less and absorbs more radiation than does the inside lighter side. On the otherhand, CO2's absorbtion and reflection indices are symmetric--neither side is darker than the other. That is, both sides of a CO2 layer absorb and reflect the same.

4. This question is really dumb, as parados points out. I can only assume you aren't serious.

... .

Energy is necessary to sustain much if not all human life on this earth.

human life has been around for 10,000.

mappie wrote-

Quote:

human life has been around for 10,000.

You must be joking mappie. The Venus of Willendorf is 30,000 years old. And a monkey couldn't have done that.

The Earth doesn't get much "heat" from the sun because we are so far away. We get LIGHT from the sun which CO2 does NOT reflect. The LIGHT is turned to heat in an easily understood change in energy. The HEAT is then reflected by the CO2.

parados wrote:

The Earth doesn't get much "heat" from the sun because we are so far away. We get LIGHT from the sun which CO2 does NOT reflect. The LIGHT is turned to heat in an easily understood change in energy. The HEAT is then reflected by the CO2.

This is an interesting and novel distortion of elementary physics. Where did you get it? How then do you suppose radiant heat transfer works in the absence of visible light?

Have you ever heard of the Stephan Boltzman law?

It is you, in this case, who doesn't know what he is writing about.

spendius wrote:

mappie wrote-

Quote:

human life has been around for 10,000.

You must be joking mappie. The Venus of Willendorf is 30,000 years old. And a monkey couldn't have done that.

Typo, meant to say around 100,000. Homo Sapiens.

As of 1990, upon a revised analysis of the stratigraphy of its site, it is estimated to have been carved 24,000-22,000 BCE.

ican711nm wrote:

Energy is necessary to sustain much if not all human life on this earth.

You know that this is false right? Energy has been produced only for the last hundred fifty years or so, human life has been around for 10,000.

Maybe to sustain our 'way of life', but surely not our lives themselves.

Nah- we combined oxygen and carbon and hydrogen, which water is full of, to make alcohol.

Well- to be exact we found it. Then we refined the process without the faintest idea of the chemistry.

What other species discovered that?

There must have been a guiding hand considering how long the rest of creation had to sort a simple thing like that out.

georgeob1 wrote:

parados wrote:

The Earth doesn't get much "heat" from the sun because we are so far away. We get LIGHT from the sun which CO2 does NOT reflect. The LIGHT is turned to heat in an easily understood change in energy. The HEAT is then reflected by the CO2.

This is an interesting and novel distortion of elementary physics. Where did you get it? How then do you suppose radiant heat transfer works in the absence of visible light?

Have you ever heard of the Stephan Boltzman law?

It is you, in this case, who doesn't know what he is writing about.

Forgive me for feeling I could provide a silly answer to a stupid question but since you feel so strongly that the correct science should be explained in all its detail please feel free to do so. I would love to see your treatise on the wavelengths radiated by the sun compared to the earth and how CO2 and other green house gasses respond to the various wave lengths. We certainly wouldn't want to leave anyone with the impression that CO2 will always block as much energy across the spectrum from the sun as it reflects back to the earth.

While you are at it you could explain how glass works with those various wavelengths. After all, we wouldn't want someone to think you could stop the green house effect by simply scratching off the dark side of a piece of glass or the dark side of a green house gas. Science is science and we wouldn't want anyone to misuse it or explain it incorrectly now would we?




You might also want to explain how LIGHT is restricted to "visible light."

The sun is presently radiating more energy however it is not enough to account totally for the increased warming on either planet.