The Global Warming Debate

Greed

Star
Registered
A trade-off of sorts.

You watch a free online viewing of The Global Warming Swindle and in return you direct me to a free online viewing of An Inconvenient Truth (I don't do torrents).

I'm doing this because I saw an article about how universities readily hosted viewings of An Inconvenient Truth, but rarely host viewings of popular global warming movies saying the opposite. Draw your own conclusions about principles and fairness.

You can watch The Global Warming Swindle and decide if it has any less integrity than Vice President Gore's presentation.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
A trade-off of sorts.

You watch a free online viewing of The Global Warming Swindle and in return you direct me to a free online viewing of An Inconvenient Truth (I don't do torrents).

I'm doing this because I saw an article about how universities readily hosted viewings of An Inconvenient Truth, but rarely host viewings of popular global warming movies saying the opposite. Draw your own conclusions about principles and fairness.

You can watch The Global Warming Swindle and decide if it has any less integrity than Vice President Gore's presentation.

Tell it to Faux Snooze.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Post an article with footnotes.

source: Union of Concerned Scientist

Scientific Integrity

Reports and Research
Manipulation of Global Warming Science

Since taking office, the George W. Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine the view held by the vast majority of climate scientists that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are making a discernible contribution to global warming.1 Despite promises by the president that “my Administration’s climate change policy will be science-based,”2 the past several years have seen widespread political interference in the work of federal climate scientists, edits to official scientific documents and a general attempt to foster uncertainty about robust scientific conclusions. This A-to-Z Guide to Political Interference in Science documents 11 additional cases of interference in the field of climate science.

After coming to office, the administration asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to review the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and provide further assessment of climate science’s “certainties and uncertainties.”3 In 2001 the NAS panel rendered a strong opinion affirming the conclusions of the IPCC and stating that “Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.”4

Also in 2001, President George W. Bush established the U.S. Climate Change Research Initiative (CCRI). One of the initiative’s two main priorities was to study “areas of uncertainty” in global climate change science.5

In May 2002, President Bush expressed disdain for a State Department report6 to the United Nations that pointed to a clear human role in the accumulation of heat-trapping gases and detailed the likely negative consequences of climate change; the president called it “a report put out by the bureaucracy.”7 In September 2002, the administration removed a section on climate change from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) annual air pollution report,8 even though the climate issue had been discussed in the report in each of the preceding five years. (Manipulation of another EPA report is described in the A-to-Z article “Dr is for EPA Draft Report on the Environment”).

The American Geophysical Union (AGU), the world’s largest organization of earth scientists, released a strong statement in 2003 describing human-caused disruptions of Earth’s climate.9 “Human activities are increasingly altering the Earth's climate,” the AGU statement declared. Yet Bush administration spokespersons continued to contend that uncertainties in climate science were too great to warrant mandatory action to slow emissions.10

Scientists were also largely excluded from internal policy discussions relating to climate change. “This administration seems to want to make environmental policy at the White House,” an EPA scientist said. “I suppose that is their right. But one has to ask: on the basis of what information is this policy being promulgated? What views are being represented? Who is involved in the decision making? What kind of credible expertise is being brought to bear?”11 The Bush administration often “does not even invite the EPA into the discussion” on climate change issues, the scientist said.

Dr. Rosina Bierbaum, a Clinton administration appointee to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) who also served during the first year of the Bush administration, also said that science was kept out of the process of policymaking on the topic of climate change. From the start of the Bush years, Bierbaum said, “The scientists [who] knew the most about climate change at OSTP were not allowed to participate in deliberations on the issue within the White House inner circle.”12

Through such consistent tactics and a focus on uncertainty, the Bush administration has avoided fashioning any policies that would significantly reduce the threat implied by those findings.

The discussion may have changed with the February 2007 release of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of hundreds of scientists from 113 countries, which declared that “human-generated greenhouse gases account for most of the global rise in temperatures over the past half-century.” The New York Times quoted Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, as saying “Feb. 2 [2007] will be remembered as the date when uncertainty was removed as to whether humans had anything to do with climate change on this planet.”13

The 2007 report Atmosphere of Pressure, by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project, extensively documents Bush administration efforts to manipulate the work of federal climate scientists and exercise strict control over which scientists are allowed to talk to the media and which scientific results are communicated to the public.14

1. This page contains material excerpted from the 2004 UCS Report, Scientific Integrity in Policymaking.
2. White House, President’s Statement on Climate Change (July 13, 2001).
3. National Academy of Sciences, Commission on Geosciences, Environment and Resources, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, 2001.
4. Ibid.
5. U.S. Climate Change Science Program. 2003. The Climate Change Research Initiative. Washington, DC. Accessed October 25, 2006.
6. US Climate Action Report, Department of State, May 2002.
7. K.Q. Seelye, “President Distances Himself from Global Warming Report,” New York Times, June 5, 2002.
8. Past EPA Air Trends Reports can be found at http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/reports.html; the 2001 report is the first Summary Report that doesn’t discuss climate change.
9. American Geophysical Union, Human Impacts on Climate, December 2003. Accessed March 13, 2007.
10. P. Dobriansky, “Only New Technology Can Halt Climate Change,” Financial Times, December 1, 2003.
11. Author interview with EPA scientist, name withheld on request, January 2004.
12. As quoted in N. Thompson, “Science friction: The growing—and dangerous—divide between scientists and the GOP,” Washington Monthly, July/August 2003. Accessed March 13, 2007.
13. Rosenthal, E. and Revkin, A.C., Science Panel Calls Global Warming “Unequivocal,” New York Times, February 2, 2007. Accessed March 13, 2007.
14. Union of Concerned Scientists and Government Accountability Project. 2007. Atmosphere of Pressure.
 

puertorock2005

Star
Registered
I've seen Inconvenient Truth and my question is why can't we atleast try something to stop killing this Gott Damn planet already. If Global Warming won't Kill Mother Earth, our pollution will, or racism, either way, we are parasites to this planet period. I'm not saying I believe it, but damn if that shit didn't look convincing. I can't stand listening to fucking Conservatives who have their heads in the Ground like ostriches and don't want to lighten the fuck up.
 

puertorock2005

Star
Registered
I'm not directing this towards you, I will watch this Swindle movie, but I'm talking about conservatives period, who sound like a bunch OLD white men who just want america to go back to slavery times, Just listen to them and the way they talk.
 

Greed

Star
Registered
I didn't know the Republicans were campaigning on 65 degree tempertures in Chicago.

Where's the link?
 

Fuckallyall

Support BGOL
Registered
I just love this debate, if for nothing else than the amount of actual science availble to match up with the theory. I live in the DC area today, and this morning on the weather, it was predicted that today was going to be in the 60's. It might get close to the record of 71, which was set back on '02 - 1902 that is. It is just another example of how we look at shit that we don't know, but like to pretend to. There has been a report on Trophospheric temps, that indicate that the warming predicted is not happening. I'll find it and post for Thoughtone to ignore and go back to his FauxNewsRepublicanLibertarianMeanPeopleWhoHateNonWhitePeopleButLiketoMessWithThem polemics.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
I just love this debate, if for nothing else than the amount of actual science availble to match up with the theory. I live in the DC area today, and this morning on the weather, it was predicted that today was going to be in the 60's. It might get close to the record of 71, which was set back on '02 - 1902 that is. It is just another example of how we look at shit that we don't know, but like to pretend to. There has been a report on Trophospheric temps, that indicate that the warming predicted is not happening. I'll find it and post for Thoughtone to ignore and go back to his FauxNewsRepublicanLibertarianMeanPeopleWhoHateNonWhitePeopleButLiketoMessWithThem polemics.

I understand, scientific trends mean nothing. Like I said, blame the facts. Damn liberal science.

source: BBC News.com

2005 Warmest Ever Year In North

This year has been the warmest on record in the northern hemisphere, say scientists in Britain.

It is the second warmest globally since the 1860s, when reliable records began, they say.

Ocean temperatures recorded in the northern hemisphere Atlantic Ocean have also been the hottest on record.

The researchers, from the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia, say this is more evidence for the reality of human-induced global warming.

Their data show that the average temperature during 2005 in the northern hemisphere is 0.65 Celsius above the average for 1961-1990, a conventional baseline against which scientists compare temperatures.

The global increase is 0.48 Celsius, making 2005 the second warmest year on record behind 1998, though the 1998 figure was inflated by strong El Nino conditions.

The northern hemisphere is warming faster than the south, scientists believe, because a greater proportion of it is land, which responds faster to atmospheric conditions than ocean.

Northern hemisphere temperatures are now about 0.4 Celsius higher than a decade ago.

"The data also show that the sea surface temperature in the northern hemisphere Atlantic is the highest since 1880," said Dr David Viner from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

Error bar

No measurements of average temperature can be completely accurate, and David Viner believes the team's calculations are subject to an error of about plus or minus 0.1 Celsius.

However, he says, the long-term trend is clearly upwards — rapidly over the last decade — indicating the reality of human-induced global warming.

"We're right, the sceptics are wrong," he told the BBC News website.

"It's simple physics; more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, emissions growing on a global basis, and consequently increasing temperatures."

However, Fred Singer from the Science & Environmental Policy Project in Washington DC, a centre of the "climate sceptics" community, disputed this interpretation.

"If indeed 2005 is the warmest northern hemisphere year since 1860, all this proves is that 2005 is the warmest northern hemisphere year since 1860," he told the BBC News website.

"It doesn't prove anything else, and certainly cannot be used by itself to prove that the cause of warming is the emission of greenhouse gases.

"It requires a more subtle examination to know how much of warming is due to man-made causes — there must be some — and how much is down to natural causes."

Eight of the 10 warmest years since 1860 have occurred within the last decade.

_41126372_temp_anom_gra416.gif

source: The Washington Post.com

Climate Experts Worry as 2006 Is Hottest Year on Record in U.S.


By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 10, 2007; Page A01

Last year was the warmest in the continental United States in the past 112 years -- capping a nine-year warming streak "unprecedented in the historical record" that was driven in part by the burning of fossil fuels, the government reported yesterday.

According to the government's National Climatic Data Center, the record-breaking warmth -- which caused daffodils and cherry trees to bloom throughout the East on New Year's Day -- was the result of both unusual regional weather patterns and the long-term effects of the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"People should be concerned about what we are doing to the climate," said Jay Lawrimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Burning of fossil fuels is causing an increase in greenhouse gases, and there's a broad scientific consensus that is producing climate change."

The center said there are indications that the rate at which global temperatures are rising is speeding up.

Average temperatures nationwide in 2006 were 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the mean temperatures nationwide for the 20th century, the agency said. It reported that seven months in 2006 were much warmer than average, and that last month was the fourth-warmest December on record. Average temperatures for all 48 contiguous states were above or well above average, and New Jersey logged its hottest temperatures ever.

Many researchers are concerned that rising temperatures could lead to widespread melting of the polar ice caps, resulting in higher sea levels and more extreme droughts and storms. But NOAA also pointed to one silver lining: The unusually warm temperatures from October to December helped keep residential energy use for heating 13.5 percent below the average for that period.

NOAA said an El Ni?o weather pattern in the equatorial Pacific also contributed to the warm temperatures by blocking cold Arctic air from moving south and east across the nation.

Climate experts generally do not make much of temperature fluctuations over one or two years, but Lawrimore said the record 2006 temperatures were part of a long and worrisome trend. For instance, NOAA said, the past nine years have all been among the 25 warmest years on record for the continental United States.

Advocates for more action to control carbon dioxide emissions also voiced concern.

"No one should be surprised that 2006 is the hottest year on record for the U.S.," said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a public interest group. "When you look at temperatures across the globe, every single year since 1993 has been in the top 20 warmest years on record."

"Realistically, we have to start fighting global warming in the next 10 years if we want to secure a safe environment for our children and grandchildren," she said.

Lawrimore said other NOAA research has found that the rate of temperature increase has been significantly greater in the past 30 years than at any time since the government started collecting national temperature data in 1895. Globally, 2005 was the hottest year on record, Lawrimore said, and 2006 was slightly cooler.

He said that although there is a scientific consensus that carbon dioxide from cars, power plants and factories is leading to global warming, there is no consensus yet on whether the warming will increase more quickly or more slowly in the future. Some researcher have predicted that temperatures worldwide will increase by a catastrophic 7 to 8 degrees on average by the end of the century, while others project an increase of a more modest 2 degrees by century's end.

The burning of oil and other fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which rises, blankets the Earth and traps heat. Climate scientists report that there has not been this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the past 650,000 years.

The Bush administration has rejected proposals to cap carbon dioxide emissions or impose carbon taxes as a way to limit global warming. Lawrimore said he believes the problem could and should be addressed by developing new technologies for powering vehicles and industry.

Late December's springlike temperatures in the eastern two-thirds of the country made it the fourth-warmest December on record in the United States and contributed greatly to the record high for the year. Several Northern cities were unusually warm -- with Boston 8 degrees above average and Minneapolis-St. Paul 17 degrees above average for the last three weeks of the month.
 

Greed

Star
Registered
When you can't dispute the facts, try hyperbole.

:smh:
Unlike you I don't like to guess what random people online mean. I prefer to go by what they say.

You quoted me saying it's 65 degrees in Chicago and called it Republican rhetoric. Was I really supposed to take you more serious than I did.
 

Greed

Star
Registered
I just love this debate, if for nothing else than the amount of actual science availble to match up with the theory. I live in the DC area today, and this morning on the weather, it was predicted that today was going to be in the 60's. It might get close to the record of 71, which was set back on '02 - 1902 that is. It is just another example of how we look at shit that we don't know, but like to pretend to. There has been a report on Trophospheric temps, that indicate that the warming predicted is not happening. I'll find it and post for Thoughtone to ignore and go back to his FauxNewsRepublicanLibertarianMeanPeopleWhoHateNonWhitePeopleButLiketoMessWithThem polemics.
You should have put debate in quotation marks.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Unlike you I don't like to guess what random people online mean. I prefer to go by what they say.

You quoted me saying it's 65 degrees in Chicago and called it Republican rhetoric. Was I really supposed to take you more serious than I did.


Back to the argument that your side is trying to make that global warming is not caused by man, but by some sort of natural climatic trend, on day doesn’t make a trend, one year doesn’t make a trend.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator



source: The Washington Post.com

Climate Experts Worry as 2006 Is Hottest Year on Record in U.S.


By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 10, 2007; Page A01

Last year was the warmest in the continental United States in the past 112 years -- capping a nine-year warming streak "unprecedented in the historical record" that was driven in part by the burning of fossil fuels, the government reported yesterday.



You might want to see: 2006 Hottest Year in U.S. August 14, 2007, http://www.bgol.us/board/showthread.php?t=147547&highlight=2006+year at post # 26.

QueEx

`
 

Greed

Star
Registered
Back to the argument that your side is trying to make that global warming is not caused by man, but by some sort of natural climatic trend, on day doesn’t make a trend, one year doesn’t make a trend.
I didn't make an argument. Your vanity is telling you I made an argument because you want to believe that's what you're doing in reply.

Only position you've staked out in this thread about global warming is Republicans are bad.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<u>Bumped by an Opinion Piece </u>

<font size="5"><center>The media snowjob on global warming</font size></center>


Lorne Gunter, National Post
Monday, March 10, 2008

Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism -- and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy -- can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.

The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors -- the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc, -- not human sources are behind global warming.

The Washington Post's first instincts (not just on its opinion pages, but in its news coverage, too) were cleverly to sew doubt of the group's credibility by pointing out to readers that many of the participants had ties to conservative politicians, such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and that the conference sponsor -- the Heartland Institute -- received money from oil companies and health care corporations.

That's standard fare, and partly fair, so that's not what I am talking about.

The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC's famous report of last year.

After reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: "While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists."

First of all, the IPCC and Mr. Gore won the Peace Prize, not a science prize, which only proves they are good at politics. They didn't win the Physics Prize, for instance.

Also, while the former vice-prez may have invented the Internet (by his own admission), he is demonstrably not a scientist. Yet in the same paragraph as the Washington Post lionizes Mr. Gore for his work saving the planet, it backhands non-scientists for meddling in the climate change debate, never once showing any hint it recognized its own hypocrisy.

And the paper displays its utter lack of intellectual curiosity, too.

Hundreds of scientists may have contributed bits and pieces of work to the IPCC's gargantuan report, but just 62 wrote the chapter said to "prove" that man is behind global warming -- not that many more than the 23 from the new NIPCC who the Post so snidely dismiss as inconsequential in number. And just 52 people -- many of them the kind of non-scientists the Post would have us believe have no business passing judgment -- wrote the IPCC's "Summary for Policy-makers." That's the publication that gets all the ink and drives the climate alarmism because it contains the most provocative statements about the certainty of manmade warming.

The bias is that whatever the IPCC and its defenders claim, the Washington Post and most other outlets report without scrutiny. Meanwhile, the motives and sources of all sceptics are instantly suspected and derided.

There's nothing wrong with scrutinizing the motives of people engaged in a dicey debate. The subjectivity arises from scrutinizing only one side and always with a preconceived notion of what you are going to find.

Such bias is typical, though, of the climate debate, and not just among reporters and editors.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column that was provocatively titled, "Forget global warming:Welcome to the New Ice Age." In it, I explained that, far from being warming activists, some solar scientists see the recent downturn in solar activity as harbinger of a coming Ice Age.

I wondered how come we don't hear about that in equal measure with the claims of an impending meltdown?

I received over 1,800 e-mails, most of them complimentary. A large number, though, were as hysterical and vicious as any I have received on any subject in almost two decades in journalism.

How could I not believe? Was I being dishonest or just stupid? How much had EXXON paid me? Until I could write in favour of the warming theorists, I should "go back into your oil company-funded bubble. You @*!/x-ing hack."

And that was from a climate scientist at a major university.

At last week's Manhattan climate conference, delegate after delegate related stories about how they had been denied tenure, shut out of scientific conferences and rejected by academic journals because no matter how scrupulous their research, their conclusions disagreed with the prevailing orthodoxy of the Climate Change Pharisees. They spoke, too, of colleagues too afraid for their jobs even to turn up at the conference.

I don't believe we are headed for an ice age any more than we're hurtling towards a meltdown. But we are in the midst of overwhelming bias in favour of the meltdown side.

lgunter@shaw.ca

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion...01dfc-7ee1-4c9b-9a58-2ef1f3eb8443&k=66577&p=1
 

actinanass

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
wasn't it 20 years ago, they were talking about global cooling?

Lets be honest, its hard for them to get TEXAS weather right two days from now, how the fuck can they get a forecast 18 years from now. It doesn't add up...
 

Fuckallyall

Support BGOL
Registered
Climate alarmists pose real threat to freedom

From The Aulstralian.au

Vaclav Klaus | March 12, 2008

A WEEK ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will nevertheless be identical: the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality. What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its present strongest version, climate alarmism.

As an economist, I have to start by stressing the obvious. Carbon dioxide emissions do not fall from heaven. Their volume (ECO2) is a function of gross domestic product per capita (which means of the size of economic activity, SEA), of the number of people (POP) and of the emissions intensity (EI), which is the amount of CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP. This is usually expressed in a simple relationship: ECO2 = EI x SEA x POP. What this relationship tells is simple: If we really want to decrease ECO2 we have to either stop the economic growth and thus block further rise in the standard of living, stop the population growth, or make miracles with the emissions intensity.

I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries. This ambition goes very much against past human experience which has always been connected with a strong motivation to better human conditions. There is no reason to make the change just now, especially with arguments based on such incomplete and faulty science. Human wants are unlimited and should stay so. Asceticism is a respectable individual attitude but should not be forcefully imposed upon the rest of us.

I am also afraid that the same people, imprisoned in the Malthusian tenets and in their own megalomaniacal ambitions, want to regulate and constrain demographic development, which is something only the totalitarian regimes have until now dared to experiment with. Without resisting it we would find ourselves on the slippery road to serfdom. The freedom to have children without regulation and control is one of the undisputable human rights.

There are people among the global-warming alarmists who would protest against being included in any of these categories, but who do call for a radical decrease in carbon dioxide emissions. It can be achieved only by means of a radical decline in the emissions intensity.

This is surprising because we probably believe in technical progress more than our opponents. We know, however, that such revolutions in economic efficiency (and emissions intensity is part of it) have never been realised in the past and will not happen in the future either. To expect anything like that is a non-serious speculation.

I recently looked at the European CO2 emissions data covering the period 1990-2005, the Kyoto protocol era. You don't need huge computer models to very easily distinguish three different types of countries in Europe.

In the less developed countries, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, which during this period were trying to catch up with the economic performance of the more developed EU countries, rapid economic growth led to a 53 per cent increase in CO2 emissions. In the post-communist countries, which went through a radical economic restructuring with the heavy industry disappearing, GDP drastically declined. These countries decreased their CO2 emissions in the same period by 32 per cent. In the EU's slow-growing if not stagnating countries (excluding Germany where its difficult to eliminate the impact of the fact that the east German economy almost ceased to exist in that period) CO2 emissions increased by 4 per cent.

The huge differences in these three figures are fascinating. And yet there is a dream among European politicians to reduce CO2 emissions for the entire EU by 30 per cent in the next 13 years compared to the 1990 level.

What does it mean? Do they assume that all countries would undergo a similar economic shock as was experienced by the central and eastern European countries after the fall of communism? Do they assume that economically weaker countries will stop their catching-up process? Do they intend to organise a decrease in the number of people living in Europe? Or do they expect a technological revolution of unheard-of proportions?

What I see in Europe, the US and other countries is a powerful combination of irresponsibility and wishful thinking together with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project.

This brings me to politics. As a politician who personally experienced communist central planning of all kinds of human activities, I feel obliged to bring back the already almost forgotten arguments used in the famous plan-versus-market debate in the 1930s in economic theory (between Mises and Hayek on the one side and Lange and Lerner on the other), the arguments we had been using for decades until the moment of the fall of communism. The innocence with which climate alarmists and their fellow-travellers in politics and media now present and justify their ambitions to mastermind human society belongs to the same fatal conceit. To my great despair, this is not sufficiently challenged, neither in the field of social sciences, nor in the field of climatology.

The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong. They believe in their own ability to assemble all relevant data into their Central Climate Change Regulatory Office equipped with huge supercomputers, in the possibility of giving adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of individuals and institutions.

We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. We need to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.
Vaclav Klaus is President of the Czech Republic. This is an edited extract from a speech he gave on March 4 to the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York.
 
Last edited:

Partial_Mathers

Star
Registered
Re: Climate alarmists pose real threat to freedom

I think that uncontrolled copulation IS important, but what about the food needed to feed the millions of babies born to parents who can hardly feed themselves? The population is pressing harder and harder on available resources as each year passes, and no new land is opening up to accomodate it. They hoarde millions of acres of land for corn to make ethanol. ETHANOL. The agriculture industry has been suffering as more and more people get jobs and white and blue collar workers. Sooner or later, there just won't be enough food. People have starved to death since time immemorial, of course, but now that ratio is rising more and more every year. And with each scientific advance in medicine, people with diseases and genetic defunctions gain the ability to live as long as the humans without them, thus deteriorating the gene pool even further. To save people from death and disease is good, obviously. But we are doing so at the expense of the future and well being of the rest of us which have to draw from these gene pools which may be sterile or defective(both proven) is equally bad and equates to the collective suicide of the entire human race. Is there a middle ground to prevent this? Will parents want their inferior children to die when medicine is available? I do not know at this point...
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<font size="4">
BUMP


</font size>

<IFRAME SRC="http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/a-thin-silver-l.html" WIDTH=750 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/a-thin-silver-l.html">link</A>

</IFRAME>
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<IFRAME SRC="http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/an-inconvenient.html" WIDTH=750 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/an-inconvenient.html">link</A>

</IFRAME>
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<IFRAME SRC="http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/too-convenien-1.html" WIDTH=750 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/too-convenien-1.html">link</A>

</IFRAME>
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<IFRAME SRC="http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/too-convenien-2.html#previouspost" WIDTH=750 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/too-convenien-2.html#previouspost">link</A>

</IFRAME>
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<IFRAME SRC="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7513002.stm" WIDTH=780 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7513002.stm">link</A>

</IFRAME>
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
<font size="5"><center>
19-square-mile ice sheet breaks loose in Canada</font size></center>



195aa658-10ff-472b-a8d6-958ca989d68e.jpg

In this July 29, 2008 file photo large pieces of ice are seen drifting off after
separating from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf. A chunk of ice shelf nearly the size
of Manhattan has broken away from Ellesmere Island in Canada's northern
Arctic, another dramatic indication of how warmer temperatures are changing
the polar frontier, scientists said Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2008. (AP Photo/Sam
Soja, The Canadian Press)


Associated Press
By CHARMAINE NORONHA
September 3, 2008

TORONTO — A chunk of ice shelf nearly the size of Manhattan has broken away from Ellesmere Island in Canada's northern Arctic, another dramatic indication of how warmer temperatures are changing the polar frontier, scientists said Wednesday.

Derek Mueller, an Arctic ice shelf specialist at Trent University in Ontario, told The Associated Press that the 4,500-year-old Markham Ice Shelf separated in early August and the 19-square-mile shelf is now adrift in the Arctic Ocean.

"The Markham Ice Shelf was a big surprise because it suddenly disappeared. We went under cloud for a bit during our research and when the weather cleared up, all of a sudden there was no more ice shelf. It was a shocking event that underscores the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic," said Mueller.

Mueller also said that two large sections of ice detached from the Serson Ice Shelf, shrinking that ice feature by 47 square miles _ or 60 percent _ and that the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf has also continued to break up, losing an additional eight square miles.

Mueller reported last month that seven square miles of the 170-square-mile and 130-feet-thick Ward Hunt shelf had broken off.

This comes on the heels of unusual cracks in a northern Greenland glacier, rapid melting of a southern Greenland glacier, and a near record loss for Arctic sea ice this summer. And earlier this year a 160-square mile chunk of an Antarctic ice shelf disintegrated.

"Reduced sea ice conditions and unusually high air temperatures have facilitated the ice shelf losses this summer," said Luke Copland, director of the Laboratory for Cryospheric Research at the University of Ottawa. "And extensive new cracks across remaining parts of the largest remaining ice shelf, the Ward Hunt, mean that it will continue to disintegrate in the coming years."

Formed by accumulating snow and freezing meltwater, ice shelves are large platforms of thick, ancient sea ice that float on the ocean's surface but are connected to land.

Ellesmere Island was once entirely ringed by a single enormous ice shelf that broke up in the early 1900s. All that is left today are the four much smaller shelves that together cover little more than 299 square miles.

Martin Jeffries of the U.S. National Science Foundation and University of Alaska Fairbanks said in a statement Tuesday that the summer's ice shelf loss is equivalent to over three times the area of Manhattan, totaling 82 square miles _ losses that have reduced Arctic Ocean ice cover to its second-biggest retreat since satellite measurements began 30 years ago.

"These changes are irreversible under the present climate and indicate that the environmental conditions that have kept these ice shelves in balance for thousands of years are no longer present," said Mueller.

During the last century, when ice shelves would break off, thick sea ice would eventually reform in their place.

"But today, warmer temperatures and a changing climate means there's no hope for regrowth. A scary scenario," said Mueller.

The loss of these ice shelves means that rare ecosystems that depend on them are on the brink of extinction, said Warwick Vincent, director of Laval University's Centre for Northern Studies and a researcher in the program ArcticNet.

"The Markham Ice Shelf had half the biomass for the entire Canadian Arctic Ice Shelf ecosystem as a habitat for cold, tolerant microbial life; algae that sit on top of the ice shelf and photosynthesis like plants would. Now that it's disappeared, we're looking at ecosystems on the verge of extinction,' said Mueller.

Along with decimating ecosystems, drifting ice shelves and warmer temperatures that will cause further melting ice pose a hazard to populated shipping routes in the Arctic region _ a phenomenon that Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper seems to welcome.

Harper announced last week that he plans to expand exploration of the region's known oil and mineral deposits, a possibility that has become more evident as a result of melting sea ice. It is the burning of oil and other fossil fuels that scientists say is the chief cause of manmade warming and melting ice.

Harper also said Canada would toughen reporting requirements for ships entering its waters in the Far North, where some of those territorial claims are disputed by the United States and other countries.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/04/19squaremile-ice-sheet-br_n_123795.html
 

drxmd

Potential Star
Registered
I am not sure whether this has been discussed but,humans are only a mild contributor to co2 emissions. Natural events such as volcanoes are the primary producers of co2. Also, global warming cannot be contributed to human activity only. Its the sun people! This could be a 10,000, 20,000 or a million year orbital cycle which affects the earths temperatures. The sun is the primary engine of earths weather, slight variances in our orbital patterns can make dramatic effects. I do not believe in AL Gores theories, this is another ploy for you and me to pay taxes.
 

Fuckallyall

Support BGOL
Registered
I am not sure whether this has been discussed but,humans are only a mild contributor to co2 emissions. Natural events such as volcanoes are the primary producers of co2. Also, global warming cannot be contributed to human activity only. Its the sun people! This could be a 10,000, 20,000 or a million year orbital cycle which affects the earths temperatures. The sun is the primary engine of earths weather, slight variances in our orbital patterns can make dramatic effects. I do not believe in AL Gores theories, this is another ploy for you and me to pay taxes.

While I am not convinced that AGW is fact, what you allude to is inaccurate.

1. From what I remember, most CO2 beyond the natuaral ocillation comes from burning of fossil fuels, and the degeneration of cut down forests.

2. Scientists have records of the Suns activity, and don't see the change needed to generate the swing we have.
 
Top