Did someone call for a Capitalist?

Sorry, I was out richening up the MFI's fuel mixture.

Slacker is correct - I shouldn't have singled out the far right when the far left has done as much or worse. They play for the same team, after all. There's still the problem of the never-ending growth principle of our economy..

"Destroyers and use-uppers.. curse them!" - Treebeard
:D

Hey man, lay off my pad. ;)

The head of the university where I work is now the Chairman of the National Academy of Science (he was also appointed as chief advisor to Bush on this matter, where his recommendations were ignored) and one of our researchers won the Nobel prize for some key research on proving the effects of greenhouse gases on the environment. I've both heard them speak on the subject, they both provide a fairly convincing argument about the trends in climate change and where they think the sources come from.

They just don't hand out these type of posts to people that do crap research.

As an aside, the pollution issues are going to get us far before we make the planet untenable by temperature change.

JCM

So what`s the guy`s name, what University, what does he say ?
I agree with the pollution issue being worse than green house gases. And often, like in cars, both go together.

Aurel

Do you the-sky-is-falling types ever get outside your self made metropolis hells? There is a clean, pure, beautiful country out there. I think you guys project the filth of these tiny little(in relation) cesspools onto the country at large. For the most part I believe we are pretty good stewards of our land. Look out the window next time you fly over us:)

Why is it people believe Global warming / weather pattern shifts influenced by "man" can be a hoax or some kind of conspriacy for the "left", but cant believe that Bush stole the election from Gore! lol

I was born in Inuvik and have worked in the far north most of my adult life. I can tell you first hand that there is something weird going on up there. You can get a sunburn on a cloudy day - It wasn't like that when I was a kid.

Talk to some Inuit people(not many in western Michigan I suppose - :D), they are genuinley scared about whats going on. They have carved their existence from the ice for a few thousand years and have a pretty good understanding of changing weather. Their hunting season has become deperately short as the ice melts so soon nowadays. They fall through the ice because they expect it to be thick and strong. Their mortality rate is rising in spite of modern medicine. But what would they know compared to the op-ed you read..

Do you we-can't-do-anything-wrong types ever leave the sanctity of your country edens? There are crimes being committed against the system that keeps you alive. I think you guys lash out at anyone that wants to change a system that is failing our planet - you might have to change your wasteful lifestyle. For the most part I believe us to be terrible stewards of the land. Try looking at yourself the next time you attack people for trying to right the wrongs inflicted upon Mother Nature.

Well said Tony.

Environmentals issues shoudn't be hyjacked by the left / right battle. Why is it that anybody concerned by Kyoto is tagged as a Liberal or Hippies. Dont you Conservatives guys have childrens also ?

Yes. But they are critical thinkers

Did he say critically thick?

yup. ya sure got me on that one, uh huh.

Thought so, simple mistake to make, typos eh!

And risk venturing out into Jesusland, no way they'd do that!

FWIW, even scientists have political and economic positions – especially scientists whose studies are funded by those who would bear “costs” of change. Even when that cost is ultimately borne by a consumer.

Readers are welcome to review Ms. Ray’s viewpoints from the following, although I don’t remember reading Rush Limbaugh’s name in most “peer review journals”.

In Upstream: Scientific Study and Political Reaction", Michael McElroy takes Ray and Rush Limbaugh to task for misleading the public. Also of interest was the reaction when he corrected misinformation published in the Wall Street Journal.

"Trouble in the Ozone" by Michael Swords is another recounting of how Ray and Rush Limbaugh came to such inaccurate conclusions about ozone depletion.

From the article: "Now, what was the response to all of this? (Edit- the theory of global warming caused by industrial emissions) In very short order there appeared a number of books. Among them was "Trashing the Planet" by the late Dixy Lee Ray. [1] This book was especially insidious, because early on she announced that she was a scientist and a politician and that other scientists and reporters had done a poor job of representing the truth, and that she was going to repair the damage. That she was a scientist with credentials made her errors particularly serious. Dixy Lee Ray believed, for example, that acid rain is not related to the use of coal. It is very difficult to find anybody, even in the coal industry, who would take so extreme a point of view. Dixy Lee Ray also seemed to believe that if you put sulphur into the atmosphere, somehow it will go away. Well, it does go away. It comes down in the form of acidic compounds and it can do damage to streams and soils.

The book had an impact, especially when picked up by Rush Limbaugh, a new apostle of environmental science. I do not remember exactly how many listeners Mr. Limbaugh has per week, but it is certainly more than the number of people who read either Science or Nature. He has influence. I got slightly involved in this controversy a few years ago when I responded to an op-ed piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The piece was so full of errors that I felt obliged to sit down and try to correct some. I tried hard not to make my letter controversial, so I wrote in a style of, "Look, here's an error. Here's a fact and here's the way it's misrepresented in this particular op-ed piece. "

I was astonished at the response. A large amount of mail came to my office, almost all of which was negative. Some of it was actually personally abusive and quite threatening. Had I received some of those letters at home, I should have been quite concerned. There was a common theme in all of them; the same misinformation was repeated. You could see the Limbaugh-Ray connection. I was accused of all kinds of bad thinking."

OTOH, (from Harper’s magazine) “reports of changes in the world's climate have been with us for fifteen or twenty years, most urgently since 1988, when Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, declared that the era of global warming was at hand. New record-setting weather extremes seem to have become as commonplace as traffic accidents, and three simple facts have long been known: the distance from the surface of the earth to the far edge of the inner atmosphere is only twelve miles; the annual amount of carbon dioxide forced into that limited space is six billion tons; and the ten hottest years in recorded human history have all occurred since 1980. What do we do with what we know?

In Sept 1995, 2,500 climate scientists serving on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new statement on the prospect of forthcoming catastrophe. Never before had the IPCC (called into existence in 1988) come to so unambiguous a conclusion. The panel flatly announced that the earth had entered a period of climatic instability likely to cause "widespread economic, social and environmental dislocation…”

Energy industries now constitute the largest single enterprise known to mankind. It is no wonder that for the last five or six years many of the world's politicians and most of the world's news media have been promoting the perception that the worries about the weather are overwrought. But while skeptics portray themselves as besieged truth-seekers fending off irresponsible environmental doomsayers, testimony revealed the source and scope of their funding for the first time.

World Climate Review, a quarterly that routinely debunks climate concerns, was funded by Western Fuels. Over the last six years, either alone or with colleagues, Balling has received more than $200,000 from coal and oil interests in Great Britain, Germany, and elsewhere. Balling (along with Sherwood Idso) has also taken money from Cyprus Minerals, a mining company that has been a major funder of People for the West—a militantly anti-environmental "Wise Use" group. Lindzen, for his part, charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled "Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus," was underwritten by OPEC. Singer, who last winter proposed a $95,000 publicity project to "stem the tide towards ever more onerous controls on energy use," has received consulting fees from Exxon, Shell, Unocal, ARCO, and Sun Oil, and has warned them that they face the same threat as the chemical firms that produced chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a class of chemicals found to be depleting atmospheric ozone.

Volcanos do not produce CFC’s – the primary source of ozone depletion. The analogy that volcanic activity is somehow equal to industrial emissions just doesn’t hold water – pun intended.

The energy (edit) industry's public relations arsenal, however, is made up of much more than a few sympathetic scientists. The Global Climate Coalition distributed a report by Accu-Weather Inc. that denied any significant increase in extreme weather events. The report flies in the face of contradictory evidence cited by officials of the insurance industry, which, during the 1980s, paid an average of $3 billion a year to victims of natural disasters—a figure that has jumped to $10 billion a year in this decade. A top official of a Swiss reinsurance firm told the World Watch Institute: "There is a significant body of scientific evidence indicating that [the recent] record insured loss from natural catastrophes was not a random occurrence." More succinctly, the president of the Reinsurance Association of America said climate change "could bankrupt the industry.

Ultimately, this will be an economic war fought between energy and insurance companies.

EDITORIAL:
Species are dying at a faster rate than in the past. The Artic icecap is melting faster and becoming smaller than ever before. Glaciers all over the planet are shrinking more than ever before. Amphibians are mutating because of increased radiation.

If we can support outsourcing of intellectual capital under the guise of free market economic change; for example, Microsoft moving programming to India and WalMart purchasing goods from China rather than North Carolina, why can’t the same free market economy support the challenge of emission control?

What is the true economic effect of “emissions outsourcing” in the long run. What is the long term economic harm of reducing industrial emissions ? Of what exactly are we afraid ? Becoming more efficient and less dependent upon foreign energy sources?

Who claimed volcanos were depleting the ozone layer? The discussion was about greenhouse gas emmissions and that the emmisions from each major volcano event = the entire human CO2 Output over the past several hundred years.

And Bryant - I was born in "Jesusland" - fourth generation. If one cannot see the changes in our land, climate, and daily weather over the past 10 or 15 years.... well, maybe we're just not paying close enough attention.

Is sulfur dioxide a CFC?

Of course not. But where did he state that it was? :confused:

I have a question. Would you consider any emmisions from Power plants pollution?

You mean Slacker? He didn't say that volcanos produced CFC's. His point was that volcanos produced as much or more emissions as mankind... therefore, by analogy - volcanic emissions are more dangerous than man's emissions. I don't think that's true.

My point is that it is not simply the gross total of emissions (volcano vs mankind, for example) that is the problem, although quantity is definitely a problem, but rather the type of emission that is the concern.

Specifically CFC's and other industrial wastes that effect the molecular chains of atmospheric gases. Frankly, I don't think the "volcano damage vs mankind damage" argument works....