Climate Warning Long Post

[Ron61]

This is a long post but it was on my news module that changes every 30 minutes so posting the link wouldn't do much good as it will be gone in a few minutes. I think I will break this into two posts.

White House issues climate report 4 years late
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Posted Thu May 29, 2008 12:07pm PDT

In this file photo originally provided by Paramount Pictures Classics, Al Gore is shown in a scene from his documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth.' Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli says operatic treatment of Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth' will help people see the world's environmental predicament from a fresh point of view. 'Opera makes you reflect,' he said in a phone interview Friday, May 30, 2008. He is working on an opera based on 'An Inconvenient Truth,' Gore's book and film about climate change. (AP Photo/Paramount Classics, Eric Lee)
WASHINGTON - Under a court order and four years late, the White House Thursday produced what it called a science-based "one-stop shop" of specific threats to the United States from man-made global warming.

While the report has no new science in it, it pulls together different U.S. studies and localizes international reports into one comprehensive document required by law. The 271-page report is notable because it is something the Bush administration has fought in the past.

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist who was not involved in the effort, called it "a litany of bad news in store for the U.S."

And biologist Thomas Lovejoy, one of the scientists who reviewed the report for the federal government, said: "It basically says the America we've known we can no longer count on. It's a pretty dramatic picture of all kinds of change rippling through natural systems across the country. And all of that has implications for people."

White House associate science director Sharon Hays, in a teleconference with reporters, declined to characterize the findings as bad, but said it is an issue the administration takes seriously. She said the report was comprehensive and "communicates what the scientists are telling us."

See next post for rest

Ron

[Ron61]

That includes:

• Increased heat deaths and deaths from climate-worsened smog. In Los Angeles alone yearly heat fatalities could increase by more than 1,000 by 2080, and the Midwest and Northeast are most vulnerable to increased heat deaths.

• Worsening water shortages for agriculture and urban users. From California to New York, lack of water will be an issue.

• A need for billions of dollars in more power plants (one major cause of global warming gases) to cool a hotter country. The report says summer cooling will mean Seattle's energy consumption would increase by 146 percent with the warming that could come by the end of the century.

• More death and damage from wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters and extreme weather. In the last three decades, wildfire season in the West has increased by 78 days.

• Increased insect infestations and food- and waterborne microbes and diseases. Insect and pathogen outbreaks to the forests are causing $1.5 billion in annual losses.

"Finally, climate change is very likely to accentuate the disparities already evident in the American health care system," the report said. "Many of the expected health effects are likely to fall disproportionately on the poor, the elderly, the disabled and the uninsured."

The report was required by a 1990 law which says that every four years the government must produce a comprehensive science assessment of global warming. It had not been done since 2000.

Environmental groups got a court order last summer to force the Bush administration to produce the document by the end of this month. Hays said the White House has preferred issuing studies on individual global warming issues, such as an agricultural effects report that was released on Tuesday.

"It's totally begrudging," said Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch at the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, a whistleblowers' organization. "It's important the government go on record honestly acknowledging this stuff."

Ron

[Wes Tausend]

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Not much more can be said, Ron. The science behind likely planet warming from greenhouse effect is rational. But no one knows for sure whether we are suffering from it already or ever will. It is one of those issues where most want to take the safe course because consequences of being wrong are so dire.

I don't know if global warming even matters that much any more. Apparently the earth has done it before and eventually simply comes back, with or without us.

The ugliest truth is that the world is like a village that has chopped down all the nearby firewood and life in the village (or planet if you wish) will never be as easy from here on. It's not anybody's fault and it is everybody's fault.

Not signing the Kyoto Treaty still seems right to me because it would have immediately caused the panic, or more correctly, "scarcity economics" that we have now. G.W. could have looked at it this way, to give him credit to delay the inevitable. Yet, he may be one of the unluckiest presidents we've ever had. The year 2008 may be eventually be remembered as distinctly as 1776. We were the Petroleum Age in our Heyday.... Were.

During "scarcity economics", hoarding is the rule. When it becomes evident that the village is going to be low on firewood, the price of wood goes up catastrophically before the actual shortage hits. Why? Because of hoarding, the fear, the belief that the commodity will be scarce and therefore more valuable.

And the modern day version of hoarding? Futures Speculation. Oil speculation, electric power speculation, food speculation etc.

We're being Enron-ated from every direction now. Sucks. Easy-does-it Earth is ready to fall like Rome. But Earth itself will go on as did the peninsula. We call them Italians now.

I hope whoever gets in this November has a lot of common sense. Humanity is going to need it. I hope we can still be called humans when this is all over.

We're going to desperately need a sense of humor.


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[Ron61]

Wes,

No matter who we elect, it is going to take all countries working to together to really make any noticeable difference. And as we gobble up the natural resources, the human race will need to be gone for several million years for nature to correct everything. Now if we could just get space ships and use them to send some of the more intelligent people to other planets, and I don't mean Al Gore, maybe the race could survive. In our case here and I have seen it getting worse for years is the water shortages. Such a simple thing but we can't live without it. You can survive for days without food, but not water.

Ron

[Scott S]

Shut the doors of the Church of the Environment

Download a PDF of this storyBy Charles Krauthammer
June 1, 2008

WASHINGTON -- I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.

Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems -- from ocean currents to cloud formation -- that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.

Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. "The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity," warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, "is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."

If you doubt the arrogance, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue.

But declaring it closed has its rewards. It not only dismisses skeptics as the running dogs of reaction, i.e., of Exxon, Cheney and now Klaus. By fiat, it also hugely re-empowers the intellectual left.

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself.

Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment -- carbon chastity -- they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

Just Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

So what does the global warming agnostic propose as an alternative? First, more research -- untainted and reliable -- to determine (a) whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that affect climate, and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant, whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms (like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to compensate.

Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean.

But your would-be masters have foreseen this contingency. The Church of the Environment promulgates secondary dogmas as well. One of these is a strict nuclear taboo.

Rather convenient, is it not? Take this major coal-substituting fix off the table and we will be rationing all the more. Guess who does the rationing?

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Charley pretty much nailed how I feel about the issue.


Scott S

[Joe Wicked]

If the amount of deaths go up from the usage, then there will be less people to use it correct?

[427 S/O]

Lot's of fatalist have eaten their words promoting this GW BS, including the guy that lost his job predicting massive hurricane's after Katrina, we didn't have any hurricanes the next year and only a couple of minor ones the next!. Only one side of this argument get's press. The 400 or so scientist making a stand against GW were ignored. Most folks just blindly follow along........

[Maurice Butler]

check out the BBC documentary entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle" shows how it has become a religion - robust debate is not allowed because you get labelled a heritic - remind you of a arabic religion

[Wes Tausend]

Originally Posted by Maurice Butler

check out the BBC documentary entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle" shows how it has become a religion - robust debate is not allowed because you get labelled a heritic - remind you of a arabic religion

Here are a couple of links to the documentary Maurice refers to...

Buy it: ( http://www.amazon.com/Great-Global-W.../dp/B000WLUXZE )

General info: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gre...arming_Swindle )

The Global Warming controversy kind of reminds me of the controversy surrounding Evolution vs Creationism.

In the Evolution vs Creationism debate each side now claims science is on their side. Each has their followers.

Of course there is a difference ....where Evolution/Creationism is about the beginning of humanity and Global Warming is more about the end of humanity.


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