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

Killing Osama Bin Laden would have been complimented, but bombing aspirin factories do not qualify, oe. This subject amply illustrates why you need a president with decent character. That is why Bush will be remembered by history as far more decent and a much better president than Clinton ever dreamed of being. Some of us already know this, but history takes a while to assimilate all the facts. Facts indicate Clinton dropped the ball big time, he was not doing his job, and not taking Osama Bin Laden is but one of his huge failures on his watch. Then there is always Sandy Berger, the guy that was stuffing papers into his pants before the 9/11 inquiry, so who knows what he was covering up, it could have included how they dropped the ball on Osama Bin Laden, or alot of other things as well.

You seem to kindly forgive President Bush that he mistook weather balloons for weapons of mass destruction and mistakenly invaded an entire country, but you're quite harsh when President Clinton launched a limited strike in an effort to kill bin Laden and mistakenly destroyed an Aspirin factory. Why the double standard?

Also, you completely failed to comment on the statements by Republicans who accused Clinton of staging the attacks on bin Laden as a distraction from Lewinsky. Why is that?


It's because Bush caught bin Laden and Clinton didn't, right?

Weather balloons are quite dangerous, possibly more dangerous than WMDs.
This man made HOAX called Global Warming is very dangerous.

The difference, oe, is that Bush had character, Clinton did not. Clinton was a lout, while Bush had class. And what did you expect, Bush to do the job of the CIA besides all of his other work? What in the world do you think we pay the CIA people for, to sit around and have tea with officials in Niger and then write oped pieces about how they had just proven that Hussein did not have WMD, simply because they hated Bush, after the head of the CIA told Bush it was a slam dunk. Good grief, I guess Bush should have done his own intelligence work too, besides all of the other stuff on his plate?

I prefer to read about Global Warming.

He did do his own intelligence. It told him that Saddam was a WMD waiting to happen if left unhindered. And a disgrace to humanity. And not amenable to argument.

And that he would be shirking his duty if he left it for another president to sort out when Saddam had hired more scientists and bought more kit with the money he got from screwing his population.

As I understood it from last night's news on Sky the Copenhagen summit will have a deeper carbon footprint that some African countries do. 15,ooo highly paid folks are jetting in and being looked after in that style we associate with expense accounts. And President Obama has nothing to bring to the table except a policy to create millions of polluting jobs. No doubt the other big hitters are the same. The little hitters are irrelevant.

A couple of thousand prostitutes are descending on the venue just as used to happen with Church councils.

You are quite funny okie..

When it comes to Bush, you defend the information he acted on as coming from the CIA. When it comes to Clinton, you seem to forget that the information he acted on in Sudan came from the same CIA you now use to justify Bush's actions.

December 7, 2009
In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril
By ANDREW C. REVKIN and JOHN M. BRODER

Just two years ago, a United Nations panel that synthesizes the work of hundreds of climatologists around the world called the evidence for global warming “unequivocal.”

But as representatives of about 200 nations converge in Copenhagen on Monday to begin talks on a new international climate accord, they do so against a background of renewed attacks on the basic science of climate change.

The debate, set off by the circulation of several thousand files and e-mail messages stolen from one of the world’s foremost climate research institutes, has led some who oppose limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and at least one influential country, Saudi Arabia, to question the scientific basis for the Copenhagen talks.

The uproar has threatened to complicate a multiyear diplomatic effort already ensnared in difficult political, technical and financial disputes that have caused leaders to abandon hopes of hammering out a binding international climate treaty this year.

In recent days, an array of scientists and policy makers have said that nothing so far disclosed " the correspondence and documents include references by prominent climate scientists to deleting potentially embarrassing e-mail messages, keeping papers by competing scientists from publication and making adjustments in research data " undercuts decades of peer-reviewed science.

Yet the intensity of the response highlights that skepticism about global warming persists, even as many scientists thought the battle over the reality of human-driven climate change was finally behind them.

On dozens of Web sites and blogs, skeptics and foes of greenhouse gas restrictions take daily aim at the scientific arguments for human-driven climate change. The stolen material was quickly seized upon for the questions it raised about the accessibility of raw data to outsiders and whether some data had been manipulated.

An investigation into the stolen files is being conducted by the University of East Anglia, in England, where the computer breach occurred. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has also said he will look into the matter. At the same time, polls in the United States and Britain suggest that the number of people who doubt that global warming is dangerous or caused by humans has grown in recent years.

Politics, ideology and economic interests interlace the debate, and the stakes on both sides are high. If scientific predictions about global warming’s effects are correct, inaction will lead at best to rising social, economic and environmental disruption, at worst to a calamity far more severe. If the forecasts are wrong, nations could divert hundreds of billions of dollars to curb greenhouse gas emissions at a time when they are struggling to recover from a global recession.

Yet the case for human-driven warming, many scientists say, is far clearer now than a decade ago, when the skeptics included many people who now are convinced that climate change is a real and serious threat.

Even some who remain skeptical about the extent or pace of global warming say that the premise underlying the Copenhagen talks is solid: that warming is to some extent driven by greenhouse gases spewing into the atmosphere from human activities like the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

Roger A. Pielke Sr., for example, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado who has been highly critical of the United Nations climate panel and who once branded many of the scientists now embroiled in the e-mail controversy part of a climate “oligarchy,” said that so many independent measures existed to show unusual human-influenced warming taking place that there was no real dispute about it. “The role of added carbon dioxide as a major contributor in climate change has been firmly established,” he said.

The Copenhagen conference itself reflects increasing acceptance of the scientific arguments: the negotiations leading to the talks were conducted by high-ranking officials of the world’s governments rather than the scientists and environment ministers who largely shaped the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Late last week, President Obama changed the date of his visit to Copenhagen to Dec. 18, the last day of the talks.

For many, a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was a marker of a shift in the global warming debate. In it, the panel " a volunteer network of hundreds of scientists from many disciplines who meet periodically to review climate studies and translate the results into language useful to policy makers " concluded that no doubt remained that human-caused warming was under way and that, if unabated, it would pose rising risks.

Over the last several decades, other reviews, by the National Academy of Sciences and other institutions, have largely echoed the panel’s findings and said the remaining uncertainties should not be an excuse for inaction.

The panel’s report was built on two decades of intensive scientific study of climate patterns.

Greenhouse gases warm the planet by letting in sunlight and blocking the escape of some of the resulting heat. “The physics of the greenhouse effect is so basic that instead of asking whether it would happen, it makes more sense to ask what on earth could make it not happen,” said Spencer Weart, a physicist and historian. “So far, nobody has been able to come up with anything plausible in that line.”

The atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases released by humans has risen rapidly in the last century, along with industrialization and electricity use. Carbon dioxide from burning of coal, oil and natural gas is the most potent of the greenhouse gases because it can persist in the atmosphere for a century or more.

Methane " from landfills, livestock and leaking pipes, tanks and wells " has recently been found to be a close second. And these gases not only have a heating effect, but also cause evaporation of water from sea and soil, producing water vapor, another powerful heat-trapping gas.

In reaching its conclusion, the climate panel relied only partly on temperature data like that collected by the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, whose circulated e-mail correspondence set off the current uproar. It also considered a wide range of data from other sources, including measurements showing the retreat of glaciers in mountain ranges around the world, changes in the length and character of the seasons, heating of the oceans and marked retreats of sea ice in the Arctic.

Since 1979, satellites have provided another check on surface temperature measurements. Strong disagreements about how to interpret the satellite data were largely resolved after the Bush administration began a review in which competing research groups worked out some of their differences.

Science is about probability, not certainty. And the persisting uncertainties in climate science leave room for argument. What is a realistic estimate of how much temperatures will rise? How severe will the effects be? Are there tipping points beyond which the changes are uncontrollable?

Even climate scientists disagree on many of these questions. But skeptics have been critical of the data assembled to show that warming is occurring and the analytic methods that climate scientists use, including mathematical models used to demonstrate a human cause for warming and project future trends.

Both sides also have at times been criticized for overstatement in characterizing the scientific evidence. The contents of the stolen e-mail messages and documents have given fresh ammunition to the skeptics’ camp.

The Climatic Research Unit’s role as a central aggregator of temperature and other climate data has also made it a target. One widely discussed file extracted from the unit’s computers, presumed to be the log of a researcher named Ian Harris, recorded his years of frustration in trying to make sense of disparate data and described procedures " or “fudge factors,” as he called them " used by scientists to eliminate known sources of error.

The research in question concerned attempts to chart past temperature changes by studying tree rings and other indirect indicators, an area of research that has long been fraught with disputes. An influential study that drew in part on the British data was challenged in 2003. In 2006, a review by the National Academy of Sciences concluded, with some reservations, that “an array of evidence” supported the broad thrust of the research.

To skeptics, the purloined files suggest a conspiracy to foist an expensive policy agenda on the nations of the world and to keep inconsistent data from the public.

“If we were arguing about archaeology then people could hoard their data,” said Stephen McIntyre, a blogger and retired Canadian mining consultant who since 2003 has investigated climate data, sometimes finding errors. “But I don’t think the public has any time for that” in the climate debate.

Many scientists, however, deny that any important data was held back and say that the e-mail messages and documents will in the end prove merely another manufactured controversy.

“There will remain after the dust settles in this controversy a very strong scientific consensus on key characteristics of the problem,” John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, told a Congressional hearing last week. “Global climate is changing in highly unusual ways compared to long experienced and expected natural variations.”

Whichever view prevails, the questions will undoubtedly linger well after the negotiators who are trying to work out the complex issues that still stand in the way of an international climate treaty leave Copenhagen.

Andrew C. Revkin reported from New York, and John M. Broder from Washington.

December 7, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Cap and Fade
By JAMES HANSEN

AT the international climate talks in Copenhagen, President Obama is expected to announce that the United States wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. But at the heart of his plan is cap and trade, a market-based approach that has been widely praised but does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It merely allows polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars.

Supporters of cap and trade point to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that capped sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from coal-burning power plants " the main pollutants in acid rain " at levels below what they were in 1980. This legislation allowed power plants that reduced emissions to levels below the cap to sell the credit for these excess reductions to other utilities whose emissions were too high, thus giving plant owners a financial incentive to cut back their pollution. Sulfur emissions have been reduced by 43 percent in the two decades since. Great success? Hardly.

Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate. If every polluter’s emissions fell below the incrementally lowered cap, then the price of pollution credits would collapse and the economic rationale to keep reducing pollution would disappear.

Worse yet, polluters’ lobbyists ensured that the clean air amendments allowed existing power plants to be “grandfathered,” avoiding many pollution regulations. These old plants would soon be retired anyway, the utilities claimed. That’s hardly been the case: Two-thirds of today’s coal-fired power plants were constructed before 1975.

Cap and trade also did little to improve public health. Coal emissions are still significant contributing factors in four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States " and mercury, arsenic and various coal pollutants also cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments.

Yet cap-and-trade schemes are still being pursued in Copenhagen and Washington. (Though I head the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I’m speaking only for myself.)

To compound matters, the Congressional carbon cap would also encourage “offsets” " alternatives to emission reductions, like planting trees on degraded land or avoiding deforestation in Brazil. Caps would be raised by the offset amount, even if such offsets are imaginary or unverifiable. Stopping deforestation in one area does not reduce demand for lumber or food-growing land, so deforestation simply moves elsewhere.

Once again, lobbyists are providing the real leadership on climate change legislation. Under the proposed law, some permits to pollute would be handed out free; and much of the money actually collected from permits would be used to pay for boondoggles like “clean coal” research. The House and Senate energy bills would only assure continued coal use, making it implausible that carbon dioxide emissions would decline sharply.

If that isn’t bad enough, Wall Street is poised to make billions of dollars in the “trade” part of cap-and-trade. The market for trading permits to emit carbon appears likely to be loosely regulated, to be open to speculators and to include derivatives. All the profits of this pollution trading system would be extracted from the public via increased energy prices.

There is a better alternative, one that would be more efficient and less costly than cap and trade: “fee and dividend.” Under this approach, a gradually rising carbon fee would be collected at the mine or port of entry for each fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas). The fee would be uniform, a certain number of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide in the fuel. The public would not directly pay any fee, but the price of goods would rise in proportion to how much carbon-emitting fuel is used in their production.

All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs.

For example, when the fee reached $115 per ton of carbon dioxide it would add $1 per gallon to the price of gasoline and 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity. Given the amount of oil, gas and coal used in the United States in 2007, that carbon fee would yield about $600 billion per year. The resulting dividend for each adult American would be as much as $3,000 per year. As the fee rose, tipping points would be reached at which various carbon-free energies and carbon-saving technologies would become cheaper than fossil fuels plus their fees. As time goes on, fossil fuel use would collapse.

Still need more convincing? Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country’s. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger S.U.V. " because the total emissions are set by the cap.

In a fee-and-dividend system, every action to reduce emissions " and to keep reducing emissions " would be rewarded. Indeed, knowing that you were saving money by buying a small car might inspire your neighbor to follow suit. Popular demand for efficient vehicles could drive gas guzzlers off the market. Such snowballing effects could speed us toward a pollution-free world.

The plans in Copenhagen and Washington have not been finalized. It is not too late to trade cap and trade for an approach that actually works.

Yes, Bush used intelligence, but the intelligence I am talking about is the spy work that the CIA was supposed to do. Of course we know now that the Democrats after the Soviet Union fell, they argued that intelligence work was no longer needed much, and they defanged the CIA, thus the CIA did alot of its intel work from satellites and airplanes, nobody on the ground. Blame the Dems for that. So if the Democrats really want to blame somebody, instead of blaming Bush for actually believing a bureaucracy that they themselves had defanged and screwed up, they should take a look in the mirror and aks themselves why the CIA screwed up. Instead you ended up with politicians and the press that hated Bush accomplish one of the biggest spin jobs in history, plus people in the CIA ended up trying to cover their own backsides, including sending the idiot Joseph Wilson to Niger to drink tea and find out nothing, then come back and write his stupid op ed claiming he had actually found out something and had proven Hussein did not have WMD. The man was a total and absolute fraud, but instead the press swallowed his swill to also spin it against Bush.

Meanwhile, Clinton failed to use any intelligence and take a known and dangerous terrorist, OBL, when he had the opportunity, directly leading to the 3,000 deaths and all the destruction of 9/11, yet the 9/11 commission with a bunch of partisans turned a blind eye and ignored this fact, plus ignored the implications of Sandy Berger, also the wall with Jaime Gorlick, etc. etc.

It is frustrating to see the illiterate Democrats whitewash and spin the truth of what has happened.

Wilson was a fraud because he claimed that Saddam didn't have WMD?


Well, reportedly Bush and the neocon brigades failed to use intelligence and take bin Laden when they had the opportunity, too:

Let's see how illiterate Republicans will whitewash and spin the truth of what has happened, shall we? Or rather, let's not. Let's leave this thread to the discussion about climate change... that was quite interesting just a bit ago.

okie wrote:

Did you all get that? All democrats are "illiterate" and dumber than okie. The one poster on a2k who never provides credible support for his claims - except FOX and Limbaugh.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=f80a6386-802a-23ad-40c8-3c63dc2d02cb
As of December 20, 2007, more than 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries have voiced significant objections to major aspects of the alleged UN IPCC "consensus" on man-made global warming.

oe, I think the report is total and absolute BS. This is more cover your backside with BS, and besides who should believe John Kerry, a certified and known liar? This has been known since his days of Vietnam, and so I am surprised the guy is even still in Congress,let alone believed in regard to anything.

I will await and see what Rummy has to say about this, to set the record straight. Recently, he has had to correct some of the misinformation being put out there by Obama and his crew, and I suspect he could do the same with this.

EPA: Greenhouse gases are Harmful to Humans

What a huge load of political BS that is!

ObamacareGate, Climategate, and all the rest of the lies propagated by the Obama administration and Congress make Watergate look like a molehill, as compared to a mountain of gates we are dealing with now. Fact is, it is becoming difficult to even discuss any problem or issue reasonably with liberals because they live in a state of denial of reality. Their world is some vision of idealism not rooted in reality or facts, and they will use any lie to propagate anything that fits their template of their utopian vision of the world.

I don't know if people are recognizing this or not, but the liberal leftists' politics have now become their religion. That explains why reality, facts, and honesty are no longer viewed as necessary for them to observe. Anything goes as far as they are concerned, in order to further their agenda. Actually, this is not very surprising, as ultra socialists and communists, or Marxist sympathizers, have never been noted for their honesty.

Liberals are so religiously convinced of global warming, that no fact is too trivial or too large to manipulate or alter to their template of belief. After all, the earth is in the balance, the earth is their god, and they must err on the side of safety, just in case there is some small chance that they could in fact be correct. And of course it is obvious that socialists or Marxists love the idea of global warming, because it provides a justification for their belief in central authority. They therefore must protect that justification with everything they have, even if it means corrupting a scientific field to do it.

Exactly ! It is no longer an opinion with them. You must be one of the faithful or feel the wrath of man.