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Wed 29 Mar, 2006 03:19 pm
When I came home from work today, my son told me he had gone to a coffee shop where a television was tuned to a bush press conference.
bush admitted global warming was real.
Things must be much worse than most of think they are. Looks like we have about 20 minutes to live.
What would have made this most forked tongued of white men admit reality? 60 Minutes' expose of WH machinations? A personal visit from the Second Person of the Trinity?
I wonder if this is a cover up.
Bush Speech on Global Climate Change - June 2001
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/06/20010611-2.html
That's one hell of a tape delay they have at the coffee shop.
Well, if bush admitted years ago that global warming is real, why isn't it part of his policy-making?
A group of fundamentalist Christians recently proclaimed activism in the name of the planet because in the Bible, God gave man dominion over the planet.
What about responsibility, george?
Re: Bush Admits Global Warming Is Real
plainoldme wrote:When I came home from work today, my son told me he had gone to a coffee shop where a television was tuned to a bush press conference.
bush admitted global warming was real.
Things must be much worse than most of think they are. Looks like we have about 20 minutes to live.
What would have made this most forked tongued of white men admit reality? 60 Minutes' expose of WH machinations? A personal visit from the Second Person of the Trinity?
I wonder if this is a cover up.
Twenty minutes to live? That much? I walked outside to see if I could find any signs of that rapture business! Glory Be. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!
What would make ole Forked tongue admit reality? That one is simple to answer. That silly little fool doesn't know what he is reading from one day to the next!
I have decided that what my son saw in the few minutes it took to purchase a cup of coffee was a sort of documentary or extended news analysis and that he never saw it in its entirety.
What was interesting, is another customer in the shop was reduced to screaming, yelling that global warming is a sham.
Was that McGentrix or Ticomayo?
blacksmithn wrote:Was that McGentrix or Ticomayo?
You think, Foxfyre is abroad?
Ha, ha, he, he.
I don't believe it for a second. Have not heard any reference to this change of position anywhere....and besides... ole George never admits to wrong thinking....other than in the most abstract ways.
ican must have been with foxfyre.
Speaking of ican, foxfyre, tico & M cG..... What a gang! Are they a foursome or two twosomes?
Maybe, they are the latest incarnation of the hydra, the mythic monster with nine heads.
The screamer in the coffee shop was an over-weight man, so that rules out foxfyre.
From another forum: Date Posted: 04/17/2006 8:58 AM
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The ferocity with which the exploiters of our planet defend their RIGHT to do as they want with our planet is amazing. Krugman writes about it in this op ed piece. Of course, the exploiter-in-chief will never read this or be able to accept it for action.
pril 17, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Enemy of the Planet
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Lee Raymond, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, was paid $686 million over 13 years. But that's not a reason to single him out for special excoriation. Executive compensation is out of control in corporate America as a whole, and unlike other grossly overpaid business leaders, Mr. Raymond can at least claim to have made money for his stockholders.
There's a better reason to excoriate Mr. Raymond: for the sake of his company's bottom line, and perhaps his own personal enrichment, he turned Exxon Mobil into an enemy of the planet.
To understand why Exxon Mobil is a worse environmental villain than other big oil companies, you need to know a bit about how the science and politics of climate change have shifted over the years.
Global warming emerged as a major public issue in the late 1980's. But at first there was considerable scientific uncertainty.
Over time, the accumulation of evidence removed much of that uncertainty. Climate experts still aren't sure how much hotter the world will get, and how fast. But there's now an overwhelming scientific consensus that the world is getting warmer, and that human activity is the cause. In 2004, an article in the journal Science that surveyed 928 papers on climate change published in peer-reviewed scientific journals found that "none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."
To dismiss this consensus, you have to believe in a vast conspiracy to misinform the public that somehow embraces thousands of scientists around the world. That sort of thing is the stuff of bad novels. Sure enough, the novelist Michael Crichton, whose past work includes warnings about the imminent Japanese takeover of the world economy and murderous talking apes inhabiting the lost city of Zinj, has become perhaps the most prominent global-warming skeptic. (Mr. Crichton was invited to the White House to brief President Bush.)
So how have corporate interests responded? In the early years, when the science was still somewhat in doubt, many companies from the oil industry, the auto industry and other sectors were members of a group called the Global Climate Coalition, whose de facto purpose was to oppose curbs on greenhouse gases. But as the scientific evidence became clearer, many members ? including oil companies like BP and Shell ? left the organization and conceded the need to do something about global warming.
Exxon, headed by Mr. Raymond, chose a different course of action: it decided to fight the science.
A leaked memo from a 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, in which Exxon (which hadn't yet merged with Mobil) was a participant, describes a strategy of providing "logistical and moral support" to climate change dissenters, "thereby raising questions about and undercutting the 'prevailing scientific wisdom.' " And that's just what Exxon Mobil has done: lavish grants have supported a sort of alternative intellectual universe of global warming skeptics.
The people and institutions Exxon Mobil supports aren't actually engaged in climate research. They're the real-world equivalents of the Academy of Tobacco Studies in the movie "Thank You for Smoking," whose purpose is to fail to find evidence of harmful effects.
But the fake research works for its sponsors, partly because it gets picked up by right-wing pundits, but mainly because it plays perfectly into the he-said-she-said conventions of "balanced" journalism. A 2003 study, by Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, of reporting on global warming in major newspapers found that a majority of reports gave the skeptics ? a few dozen people, many if not most receiving direct or indirect financial support from Exxon Mobil ? roughly the same amount of attention as the scientific consensus, supported by thousands of independent researchers.
Has Exxon Mobil's war on climate science actually changed policy for the worse? Maybe not. Although most governments have done little to curb greenhouse gases, and the Bush administration has done nothing, it's not clear that policies would have been any better even if Exxon Mobil had acted more responsibly.
But the fact is that whatever small chance there was of action to limit global warming became even smaller because Exxon Mobil chose to protect its profits by trashing good science. And that, not the paycheck, is the real scandal of Mr. Raymond's reign as Exxon Mobil's chief executive.
The new conservative position on global warming is that we're in the midst of a natural warming trend; The globe is warming, but not because of anything mankind is doing.
Truth be known, I'm unconvinced that global warming is our fault. But major climate change would still be quite upsetting; we need to be on top of it.
Actually, that is not a new position, but one the conservatives have been flogging for some time.
I like the position of some evangelicals who say that God gave man dominion over the earth and man must live up to that responsibility and take care of the planet and work to save it.
The problem with acknowledging global warming is the problem of personal responsibility. I have said time and time again that I set my thermostat to 60 degrees in the winter during the daylight hours that I am home and down to 52 at night.
That is what all the young couples that my former husband and I encountered when we were newly weds were doing.
People heat their houses to temperatures that are unhealthy: any temperature over 68 promotes winter colds by drying out the mucus membranes.
Why don't fat Americans walk more? The list could go on and on, but few want to grab the bull by the horns.
Actually, I remember on abuzz, some people ranting about how the word during the 1960s was that there would be another Ice Age. Well, there was one popular publication article that I knew about -- in Parade magazine. It was based on the premise that there had been at least four major periods of glaciation in the past, so there should be another. reasonable assumption.