US AND THEM: US, UN & Iraq, version 8.0

one billion barrels of oil is certainly a huge find Brand X

...almost enough to meet the entire world demand for












12 days

Now a couple of studies have arrived that indicate that the air is cleaner than in years and therefor letting more unrefracted sunrays to the earth which... will result in a greater greenhouse effect. So dirty air might be better in the long run!

one billion barrels of oil is certainly a huge find Brand X ...almost enough to meet the entire world demand for 12 days

The general consensus among climatologists is that global warming is anthropogenic (resulting from man's activities).
This is a false statement. There is no such general consensus among climatologists. This alleged general consensus is a myth. Rather it is a general consensus among people with only scientific backgrounds who are readers and observers of the popular media, but not active climatologists.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher than ever, and started to increase rapidly with the industrial revolution and associated population increase. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been measured indirectly from their content in glacial formations to have fluctuated widely over many many thousands of years. These fluctuations are hypothesized to have been caused mostly by volcanic activity and highly variable amounts of plant life all over the earth..

But if you want to cling to the hope that everything will come right with a little dirty air, feel free. Do you have children or grandchildren?
The dirty air comment was meant to be an ironic joke. Of couse I'd rather the air be clean and global cooling (i.e., the next ice age cycle) be delayed as a consequence.

I have children and grandchilden. And it is for them more than me that I seek to end the ignorance of true environmental causes and effects that is aggressively promoted by alleged environmentalists.

posted this on the other Iraq thread but its just as appropriate here

I really truly do not understand American behaviour over Iraq. I've said I dont want USUK to lose, in that I want us to create a modern free democratic Muslim Iraq which is pro west and at peace.

And this is how the Americans go about it.

This from a subscription piece in today's Independent on Sunday which I have very kindly typed out ...

AMERICA'S SHAME TWO YEARS ON FROM 'MISSION ACCOMPLISHED'

by Robert Fisk

Two years after 'Mission Accomplished' whatever moral stature the United States could claim at the end of its invasion o fIraq has long ago been squandered in the torture and abuse and deaths at Abu Ghraib. That the symbol of Saddam Hussein's brutality should have been turned by his own enemies into the symbol of their own brutality is a singularly ironic epitaph for the whole Iraqi adventure.
It's long past time for Robert Fisk and his like thinking cohorts to get a grip on reason. America did not commit the alleged tortue, and abuse and deaths at Abu Graib. Less than a dozen American conscripts committed that. Furthermore, it was the American administation that first disclosed this alleged tortue, and abuse and deaths at Abu Graib, and it is the American administration that is holding the perpetrators accountable.

But this is not only about Abu Ghraib. There are clear and proven connections now between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the cruelty at the Americans' Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Curiously General Janis Karpinski the only senior US officer facing charges over Abu Ghraib, admitted to me a year earlier when I visited the prison that she had been at Guantanano Bay, but that at Abu Ghraib she was not permitted to attend interrogations- which seems very odd.
A vast quantity of evidence has now been built up on the system which the Americans have created for mistreating and torturing prisoners. I have interviewed a Palestinian who gave me compelling evidence of anal rape with wooden poles at Bagram- by Americans not by Afghans. Many of the stories now coming out of Guantanamo- the sexual humiliation of Muslim prisoners, their shackling to seats in which they defecate and urinate, the use of pornography to make Muslim prisoners feel impure, the female interrogators who wear little clothing (or in one case pretended to smear menstrual blood on a prisoner's face) are incresingly proved true. Iraqis whom I have questioned at great length over many hours, speak with candour of terrifying beatings from military and civilian interrogators, not just in Abu Ghraib but in US bases elsewhere in Iraq.
At the American camp outside fallujah, prisoners are beaten with full plastic water bottles which break cutting the skin. At Abu Ghraib prison dogs have been used to frighten and to bite prisoners.
How did this culture of filth start in America's 'war on terror'?...
Terrorists are not credible witnesses either. "This culture of filth" started thousands of years ago with some of the members of the human race. Today you know they exist in your own local culture. This article does not mention the far worse and widespread depravity of the jihadist terrorist culture that aggessively promotes the murder of civilians and the beheading of the combatants they capture. In that way the writer of this article displays his bigoted agenda.

...With the insurgency growing ever more vicious and uncontrollable, the emptiness of Mr Bush's silly boast is plain. The real mission, it seems was to institutionalise the cruely of Western armies, staining us forever with the depravity of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Bagram - not to mention the secret prisons which even the Red Cross cannot visit and wherein who knows what vileness is conducted. What, I wonder is our next "mission"?What I wonder is the author's next depraved mission? Is it to continue to excuse the perpetrators of terror for their horrible actions, both before and after the Ameican invasion of Iraq, based on the less serious and less frequent crimes of what a relatively few American criminals do?

... "The current scientific consensus on global warming might be summarized by the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In their Third Assessment Report, they concluded that "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities".

There is a really simple little graph on the page too.

"My serious point is that there is no current consensus among actual climatologists what the causes actually are."
and you've got it seriously wrong

Debate over global warming climate models

Gerald North of Texas A&M University in College Station, agrees that the IPCC's predictions are baseless, in part because climate models are highly imperfect instruments. As he said after the IPCC report came out: "It's extremely hard to tell whether the models have improved" since the last IPCC report. "The uncertainties are large."

Peter Stone, an MIT climate modeler, said in reference to the IPCC, "The major [climate prediction] uncertainties have not been reduced at all."

Dr. David Wojick, an expert in climate science, who recently wrote in an article in Canada's National Post, "The computer models cannot...decide among the variable drivers, like solar versus lunar change, or chaos versus ocean circulation versus greenhouse gas increases. Unless and until they can explain these things, the models cannot be taken seriously as a basis for public policy.
"
Climate modelers from four separate climate modeling centers who wrote in the October 2000 edition of Nature that, "Forecasts of climate change are inevitably uncertain." They go on to explain that, "A basic problem with all such predictions to date has been the difficulty of providing any systematic estimate of uncertainty," a problem that stems from the fact that "these [climate] models do not necessarily span the full range of known climate system behavior."