Huffington was a supproter of republicans through the clinton years. she leans towards democrats but she can claim to be unbiased
Yes and no. A number of tests have actually been done, by Mother Nature. We know when certain volcanoes erupted, and we know with a fairly high degree of certainty what they ejected into the atmosphere, and we know what the impact was on global temperatures. We could even now come pretty close to duplicating what those volcanoes did and most likely produce a very similar result. If we want to do something more sophisticated, however, like target the poles and/or use materials that don’t harm the ozone layer, then more uncertainty would be introduced and more research would be needed to greatly increase the certainty that we could produce the results we wanted to produce. It’s also very important that we grapple with this issue so that we can come to an international agreement on when it might be done and who would be able to do it. Trying to shut down these discussions and this kind of research by demonizing the science and making the issue un-PC is not a solution. It’s just a manipulative, self-serving, right wing, strong arm tactic, which in this case is being used by Greenpeace.
Thanks! I learn a lot from this discussion forum and I don't mind at all contributing something back. And I agree with you completely on the far left, and they certainly annoy me more because you would think that they should know better. I think the underlying lesson taught by both groups is probably the same, however. This is what happens when groups stop engaging the greater community and stop thinking about what's good for everyone and start thinking only about what's good for themselves and their fiends, and it doesn't matter whether these groups started out on the right or the left.
Let's just take the position (for argument's sake) that man's CO2 emissions really are causing global warming. Are you willing to fork over $4,000 to Congress every year to reduce temperatures by 0.18 degrees by the year 2100? ...perhaps the medicine is worse than the disease?
Ok I do not post here too often but I must say something. Why are people quoteing the Manhatten Institute is beyound me. That is the same think tank that is funding by the oil industry. Nice try trader. Next time try better. MI really? Come on guys you can do better.
People who say that limiting the CO2 emissions are too great of a burden to American people do not understand the reality of situation. The cost of doing nothing is greater. Think about it most of the energy that produces CO2 emissions are non renewable and with greater demand for them around the world the more scarce thus more pressure it puts on the US to find more for the demands of the populace. It is in the best interest to come up with cleaner renewable recourses then to rely on the oil and coal industry. Kid you not China and India's economic development has and will put pressure on the Earth resources'. So in the long run looking out for environment and choosing renewable clean resources will save the US, Because people who where b****ing about the prices of oil and energy last year have not seen nothing yet. We must act now to make sure that we have the needed resourses to continue. If we do not act now it will cost us in the long run. So the cost of continuing the same course will end up being the real killer to our economy. When oil hits 300 dollars a barrel in the future what are we going to do then? That would put more of a dent in the GPD then any purposed plan out there to reduce our CO2 production.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25683682-5019059,00.html Our Aussie right wing freaks are awesome!! FAMILY First senator Steve Fielding has made up his mind on global warming - there's not enough evidence that it's real. After talks with the government and top scientists, Senator Fielding, whose vote could be crucial in passing the Federal Government's plan to put a price on carbon emissions, has released a document setting out his position. "Global temperature isn't rising," it says. Senator Fielding says he would not risk job losses on "unconvincing green science" to set up a carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS). The ETS has sparked raucous debate today in Parliament, with ministers breaking off from attacking Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull over the infamous utegate email to mock Coalition MPs who reject climate change science. Related Coverage Green awards: Heroes and zeros Global warming isn't real, says Fielding NEWS.com.au, 24 Jun 2009 Climate scheme Bill put off NEWS.com.au, 23 Jun 2009 Regulations fail to quiet ETS dissent The Australian, 20 Jun 2009 Emissions trading bill doomed - Greens NEWS.com.au, 14 Jun 2009 Rudd's ETS has no hope - Xenophon NEWS.com.au, 10 Jun 2009 Your Say The senator should be congratulated on his stance. He is correct that "evidence" of global warming is grossly insufficient, and based primarily on unreliable modelling pre... (Read More) Justin Do you know some environmental heroes or zeros? Vote now in the 2nd annual news.com.au Green Awards. Not happening Senator Fielding's document was prepared with the help of some of the country's most prominent climate-sceptic scientists. It says it is a "fact" that the evidence does not support the notion that greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous global warming. The Senate is due to debate emissions trading legislation this week. The Government is struggling to muster enough votes to pass the legislation ahead of a vote scheduled for tomorrow. Senator Fielding's stance appears to torpedo the chance of the scheme passing as the Government would need his support, as well as that of the Greens and independent Nick Xenophon. The support of the Greens is not assured. The party is concerned that the Government's model for emissions trading lets big polluters off too lightly and has an emissions reduction target which is too weak to do any good. Senator Xenophon has asked for the vote to be delayed until August to allow senators to consider other models. Postponing the vote could technically give the Government a possible trigger for a double dissolution election, because it could be seen as a failure to pass. The independent had previously said the scheme was deeply flawed and failed to address crucial environmental issues. He had said the Government would need to negotiate with him and other senators to get the legislation passed. If all cross-bench senators reject the ETS, the Government would need the support of the Opposition to pass the scheme.
More on the Australian legislative body's refusal to accept the lies of global warming... note the comment about how CO2 levels have risen since 2001, but the Earth's temperature has not... This is such pathetic fake science being trotted out by the envirokooks -- certainly falling well short of the basic tenets of the scientific method. 2% of the greenhouse gases (CO2) is what we are debating here. It has a meaningless impact on the Earth's temperature. Meaningless. And it's about time people started speaking up against Al Gore's self-serving lies. Could Australia Blow Apart the Great Global Warming Scare? By Robert Tracinski and Tom Minchin As the US Congress considers the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, the Australian Senate is on the verge of rejecting its own version of cap-and-trade. The story of this legislation's collapse offers advance notice for what might happen to similar legislation in the US—and to the whole global warming hysteria. Since the Australian government first introduced its Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) legislation—the Australian version of cap-and-trade energy rationing—there has been a sharp shift in public opinion and political momentum against the global warming crusade. This is a story that offers hope to defenders of industrial civilization—and a warning to American environmentalists that the climate change they should be afraid of just might be a shift in the intellectual climate. An April 29 article in The Australian described the general trend—and its leading cause. There is rising recognition that introduction of a carbon tax under the guise of "cap and trade" will be personally costly, economically disruptive to society and tend to shift classes of jobs offshore. Moreover, despite rising carbon dioxide concentrations, global warming seems to have taken a holiday…. With public perceptions changing so dramatically and quickly it is little wonder Ian Plimer's latest book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, has been received with such enthusiasm and is into its third print run in as many weeks. [It's now up to the fifth printing.] The public is receptive to an exposé of the many mythologies and false claims associated with anthropogenic global warming and are welcoming an authoritative description of planet Earth and its ever-changing climate in readable language. One of the most remarkable changes occurred on April 13, when leading global warming hysteric Paul Sheehan—who writes for the main Sydney newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, which has done as much to hype the threat of global warming as any Australian newspaper—reviewed Plimer's book and admitted he was taken aback. He describes Plimer, correctly, as "one of Australia's foremost Earth scientists," and praised the book as "brilliantly argued" and "the product of 40 years' research and breadth of scholarship." What does Plimer's book say? Here is Sheehan's summary: Much of what we have read about climate change, [Plimer] argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modeling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as "primitive."… The Earth's climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. Despite this crucial relationship, the sun tends to be brushed aside as the most important driver of climate. Calculations on supercomputers are primitive compared with the complex dynamism of the Earth's climate and ignore the crucial relationship between climate and solar energy. To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable—human-induced CO2—is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. In response, this is Sheehan's conclusion: "Heaven and Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence." This cannot be interpreted as anything but a capitulation. It cedes to the global warming rejectionists the high ground of being "evidence-based," and it accepts the characterization of the global warming promoters as dogmatic conformists. The political impact has been manifested in a series of climb-downs as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's government has been forced to delay its plans for cap-and-trade controls. On May 4, the government announced it would postpone the onset of the scheme until mid-2011, a year later than originally planned. On June 4, this delayed emission trading scheme passed the House of Representatives despite a vote against it by the opposition. But it now faces almost certain defeat in the Australian Senate. Whereas the Labor government controls 32 votes in the Senate, the opposition Liberal-National coalition controls 37 and is committed to vote against it if the Rudd government will not grant more time to consider the outcome of the Copenhagen climate conference in December and US Senate deliberations. This itself is a compromise position, because many of the coalition parliamentarians now want to vote unconditionally against an ETS in any form. There are 7 other votes in the Senate: five Greens who say the scheme doesn't go far enough but who could be induced to go along; one independent, Nick Xenophon, who has pledged to vote against the bill unless the government waits till after Copenhagen; and one other, Senator Steve Fielding of the Family First Party, who has decided to investigate the whole thing first hand. Fielding could turn out to be the single deciding vote. His story is particularly interesting. Andrew Bolt, who has been leading the charge against the global warming hysteria for years, notes that Fielding's investigation "could blow apart the great global warming scare." Fielding went to the US to assess the American evidence for global warming at close quarters. As Melbourne's Age reported on June 4: Senator Fielding said he was impressed by some of the data presented at the [US Heartland Institute's] climate change skeptics' conference: namely that, although carbon emissions had increased in the last 10 years, global temperature had not. He said scientists at the conference had advanced other explanations, such as the relationship between solar activity and solar energy hitting the Earth to explain climate change. Fielding has issued a challenge to the Obama White House to rebut the data. It will be a novel experience for them, as Fielding is an engineer and has an Australian's disregard for self-important government officials. Here is how The Age described his challenge: Senator Fielding emailed graphs that claim the globe had not warmed for a decade to Joseph Aldy, US President Barack Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, after a meeting on Thursday…. Senator Fielding said he found that Dr. Aldy and other Obama administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science. Telling an Australian you're not interested in the legitimacy of your position is a red rag to a bull. So here is what Fielding concluded: Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide and author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive…. As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct. What Fielding's questioning represents is just the tip of the kangaroo's tail. He speaks for a growing number of Australians who will no longer take green propaganda on trust. And that's what makes Plimer so influential—not just his credibility as a scientist, but the righteous certainty with which he dismisses man-made global warming as an unscientific dogma. He writes: "The Emissions Trading Scheme legislation poises Australia to make the biggest economic decision in its history"—Australia generates 80% of its electricity from coal, which would essentially be outlawed—"yet there has been no scientific due diligence. There has never been a climate change debate in Australia. Only dogma." Plimer is not a "skeptic," a term which would imply that he merely has a few doubts about the global warming claims. Instead, he rejects the whole myth outright, and this seems to have emboldened and liberated a great many Australians who were already chafing under global warming conformity. As Plimer puts it: [T]here are a large number of punters [Australian for "customers" or "gamblers"—in this case, skeptical customers who may or may not buy what the government's selling] who object to being treated dismissively as stupid, who do not like being told what to think, who value independence, who resile from personal attacks and have life experiences very different from the urban environmental atheists attempting to impose a new fundamentalist religion. Green politics have taken the place of failed socialism and Western Christianity and impose fear, guilt, penance, and indulgences onto a society with little scientific literacy. Australia is not that different from America. If a shift in public opinion against the global warming dogma can happen on one side of the earth, it can happen on the other—especially when the US edition of Plimer's book, scheduled for July 1, hits the stands. His role, Plimer says, is to show "that the emperor has no clothes." After three decades of relentless global warming propaganda, it's about time.
If as Ian Plimer says is true that solar variation is a major factor to Global warming then why does the solar scientific community(of which Ian is not an expert) says otherwise?
Why don't you put forth some facts, instead of hiding behind the intellectually dishonest shield of this fake consensus that you are spouting. Thousands of PhD's think global warmiing is a fabrication of the left, and the data in the last 10 years points to minimal warming. No computer model is smart or complex enough to boil nature's weather down to a single variable.
I was thinking that the Michael Jackson news, with respect to heart disease, should mean this to the denialists of climate data: "Michael Jackson had a heart attack, and he was really skinny. Ergo, there is no way in hell that being overweight and eating a diet high in fat is bad for my heart. Would you really want to spend money on a statin, or on higher cost, "healthier" food, based on some sort of sketchy left wing correlation between fat and heart disease? I think not."
For those with the rose colored glasses still on.... Its a hoax, a sham, a scare tactic designed to put fear into people.... ITS ABOUT POWER AND TAXES PEOPLE!!!
Oh okay. You know, I was basing my opinion on stacks upon stacks of global climate data and my knowledge of how CO2 interacts with sunlight, but this post of yours... it has changed my mind. I now see that most of the scientific progress since 1800 has been false. As soon as I stop typing this message, in fact, the science underlying semiconductor chips will cease to function and
Observation and understanding the process of how something works is still different from implementation. While we can observe that volcanoes throw a lot of fine particulate matter into the atmosphere that leads to a cooling affect how we do that though in a process that we can predict and control the results is a much more difficult process. I totally agree with you that we shouldn't close our minds to geo-engineered solutions but IMO that is a last case scenario if everything else is exhausted and we are facing imminent disaster.
So I suppose it doesn't bother you when lobbyist for the oil, coal and automobile industry have lobbied government to increase subsidies and other policies that benefit them?
