Global Warming

[Anahita]

Re: Global Warming

Myths of Global Warming
by Carlo Stagnaro

On sources...

According to a biographical note on the Istituto Bruno Leoni's webpage, Carlo Stagnaro is environmental Director of the Istituto Bruno Leoni, the Italian think tank that promotes extreme free market policy and privatizations. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php...Carlo_Stagnaro

and...

For a nice review of the junk science that is global warming, please refer to the following site.

"JunkScience.com is a website maintained by Steven J. Milloy, an adjunct scholar the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute - right wing think tanks with long histories of denying environmental problems at the behest of the corporations which fund them. Milloy is also a columnist for FoxNews.com."

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=JunkScience.com

[Anonymouse]

Re: Global Warming

On sources...

According to a biographical note on the Istituto Bruno Leoni's webpage, Carlo Stagnaro is environmental Director of the Istituto Bruno Leoni, the Italian think tank that promotes extreme free market policy and privatizations. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php...Carlo_Stagnaro

So? What is your point? You hate privatization and the markets? That is nothing new.

[Siggie]

Re: Global Warming

That's a good source mouse.
Anahita I haven't read your sources yet. I'm gonna be busy outlining a chapter I need to lead a discussion on for a seminar. I have read elsewhere though that the increase in temperature began before there was a big increase in emissions and that change in temp has not been shown to even be correlated to emissions changes. We already know that correlation does not imply causation, but correlation is definitely necessary for causation.

Further, attempts to confirm the idea that increased CO2 levels and other greenhouse gases, in the quantities we're producing in laboratory research, has not confirmed that theory. I read this a while ago and failed to note the source. I will see what I can dig up when I have some time to do it.
Looking at the activity of the sun has provided a much more reliable correlation to temperature changes.

The truth is that temperatures have been steadily rising since the little ice age, long before industrialization. The problem with picking a point in time to begin tracking temp change, is that it does not reflect the entire picture. It would not show what came before it. What if temps before then were much higher and then came a drop and just as temps began to rise again, is when we started keeping (accurate) records of temperature? We'd never know that temps had been at a higher level in the past when there wasn't industry.

The danger of thinking that we're the cause of the climate change is that it leads to misdirected responses. Instead of the focus being on how to prepare for the consequences of the climate change, we're spending time and resources on trying to cut emissions which in all liklihood won't stop the change.

Unfortunately what sells newspapers, magazines, and gets airtime on TV and radio is the wrong information.
Seems like we may have to wait for the next cooling trend to finally convince those like you that our emissions are not sufficient to produce this change.

I'll read and address your cited sources soon, but just looking at them (yet again) none of these appear to be from scholarly journals. Some self or otherwise appointed committee's report is not the same as a peer-reviewed journal article.

[Anonymouse]

Re: Global Warming

Global Cooling: Fear the Ice
by Bill Walker

The Ice Ages are not over. We’re still feeling the effects of the one that receded 12,000 years ago. I grew up on a farm in central Ohio, right on the terminal moraine. I spent my formative years toting glacier-dumped rocks from newly plowed fields, to put on the piles of rocks from the efforts of the previous century’s farm boys. So I have been meditating on the evils of Global Cooling since I was six or seven years old.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Global Cooling was all the fashion. Newsweek warned of it. Popular books warned of the return of the ice. Aircraft contrails, dust and sulfates from coal power plants, volcanoes, desertification, solar variation, galactic dust clouds, fires from global nuclear war (has everyone really forgotten Nuclear Winter? Or is that meme still happily cohabitating with Global Warming in millions of muddled minds?), etc., would all combine to freeze the Earth. No political careers were built on fears of a milder Earth.

Fashions change. As Michael Crichton points out in State of Fear, one year it suddenly became unfashionable to look at cooling factors in the Earth’s climate. Today’s academic climatologists are forced to publish within the paradigm that the Earth is warming, that this trend will continue regardless of natural events, and that warming is bad. Major media is even more constrained; Newsweek is not running any stories on the cooling effects of aircraft contrails or the dust clouds from the nomads who yearly expand the Sahara Desert.

The Earth may well have warmed a tenth of a degree or two, if you pick the right starting and ending year; climate fluctuates for many reasons. But the other package-deal premises of the Global Warming meme are completely without scientific basis. There is no scientific reason to believe that the minuscule greenhouse effect from 20th century fossil fuel burning can overcome the sun-shrouding effects of a major volcano or asteroid hit. We know that either of these types of events is going to happen sometime; we just don’t know when (maybe 2036, if you’re the betting sort). And either one will pitch the Earth right back into an Ice Age.

Ice ages are not fun. Even minor cooling events are hard on agricultural civilizations. (You may think you’re living in a silicon civilization, but a few months with no sunlight will radically change your food vs. RAM preferences). Yes, if we were all living in concrete domes with home Mr. Fusion units, maybe Ice Ages would just be long periods of good skiing. But for now, we still depend on solar power for our food.

In the April of 1815, the Indonesian volcano Tambora erupted and spewed over a million tonnes of sun-darkening dust. 1816 was the "year without a summer"; the northern United States suffered crop failures and frost damage. The year 535 was even worse, bringing a literal Dark Age to Europe and freezing the crops of millions. These famines were caused by relatively tiny events, nothing like the Yellowstone eruptions or the Chicxulub asteroid impact. Major events would shut off outdoor agriculture for years. Of course we can always use growlights, right? Sure… if you use all the electricity on the planet for artificial lights, you should be able to grow about as much food as the farms of… Rhode Island. Everyone else will starve (well, except for the Mormons, of course). And maybe a few cannibals.

During major Ice Ages, most of the world’s ecosystems were displaced. There were no California redwood forests in the Ice Age; they are a recent development nurtured by the (natural) post-Ice Age global warming. 18,000 years ago, deserts and ice sheets covered most of the world. There is absolutely no scientific reason to think that it won’t happen again.

There is also no reason to think that there won’t be inconvenient short-term warming effects. But we can’t predict them; we can’t predict the weather ten days in advance, let alone predict all volcanoes, ocean currents, hydrates, asteroids, interstellar dust clouds, nuclear wars, solar cycles, etc. etc.

The Kyoto Treaty and other "anti-Global-Warming" efforts are not scientific guarantees of "better" (better for whom? I live in Minnesota!) climate. They are just sacrifices to the thunder gods, in the hopes that they will grant us an unchanging world. That ain’t gonna happen. The one sure climate prediction is that climate will fluctuate.

Ironically, so far government interference with the energy markets has increased Global Warming. The antinuclear movement in the US alone has caused the burning of 400 million tons more coal. Was this a good thing? We don’t really know, but the evidence is that the CO2 released from fossil fuel burning is wonderful for ecosystems.

During the last Ice Age, CO2 levels fell to less than half of the modern level. They had recovered to .028% by the late 1800s. All our fossil fuel burning has raised the CO2 to a whopping… .038%. But we still have a long way to go to get back to Jurassic levels. Back in the good ol’ days, when the ecosystem was really seething with life, the atmosphere was .3% CO2, about eight times greater than today.

These high CO2 levels made life very easy for plants with the original "C3" photosynthetic system. In addition to their direct CO2 fertilization effect, higher CO2 levels also help in droughts. With enough CO2, C3 plants can close their "stomata" (pores) more, and lose less water.

As CO2 levels fell during the Age of Mammals (and Ice Ages), "C4" plants (e.g., grasses) have tended to gain on older C3 species. Today, it is estimated that the optimum CO2 levels for agricultural productivity in C3 plants (which include wheat and other important crops) would be at least .070%. So we have to at least double the amount of fossil fuel that we have already burned… or more, if we increase the area of Earth that is hospitable to plant life.

Much of the world is desert even today. In fact, there is less total life in the sea than on the much smaller land area of our planet. Most of the ocean is "desert," in the sense of having very low densities of life. This is because most of the ocean suffers from a severe mineral deficiency. Iron is the limiting factor on ocean life over most of the world ocean. A tiny amount of iron will cause a huge increase in plankton growth. If the oceans were privatized, sea farmers would fertilize with iron....And then we would really need to burn more fossil fuel to supply enough CO2. Fortunately, there is plenty left.

To Stop Global Warming

If one were really afraid of Global Warming, one would support:

1. Nuclear power
2. Privatization of lakes, rivers and oceans
3. Privatization of the world’s deserts, most of which would actually support CO2-absorbing crops if there were secure private property rights
4. Elimination of the FAA (aircraft contrails do have the net effect of cooling the planet)

Has anyone noticed any "Anti-Global-Warming" groups that support nuclear power? Private property rights in the Third World deserts? Ocean farms?

Neither have I. Maybe that means that they aren’t really worried about stopping Global Warming so much as they are about stopping Global Free Enterprise?

The fact is that we don’t know whether the world will cool or warm. If you feel yourself believing confidently in Global Warming, remember that you would have believed in Global Cooling just as strongly in 1975.

If Global Warming Happens

If the good ol’ boys that control the world’s governments (and fossil fuel companies, and "environmental" organizations) continue to slow down the adoption of nuclear power, then the CO2 levels will continue their slow rise. CO2 will never be the most important greenhouse gas (the main greenhouse gas on this planet is the sinister pollutant dihydrogen monoxide. DHMO, as it is commonly known, causes 95% of the greenhouse warming effect. Government water projects in the US have contributed to higher DHMO levels, and thus to Global Warming.)

However, CO2 levels might cause a slight warming over the next thousand years. (Or they might not; we don’t know whether they will overcome other factors). The terrible results of this would be that Minnesota, Siberia, Canada, and other real estate would become "SantaMonicaformed," so that people from California could live there. This would of course cause the collapse of real estate prices in California.

The other effects of a mild warming would be pretty benign. Both agriculture and wild ecosystems would be more productive. Rainfall would increase. Sea levels would rise, but the centers of the continents would be more livable. (And people have been building dikes for centuries. If the sea goes up a few feet, New York could just build dikes like the Dutch. Just don’t put the Corps of Engineers in charge of watching them…).

If Global Cooling Happens

Global Cooling, unlike warming, can happen as suddenly as the collapse of the California real estate market. If a large asteroid or volcano strikes, there will be no growing season in that hemisphere that year. Personally, I plan to stock up on these, just in case. (I’m already fully prepared if Global Warming hits Minnesota… I’ll just take off one of my parkas).

Whether the Earth warms or cools, the only way to produce the wealth and technology to adapt to changing climate is through the free market. Shutting down the economy through treaties and regulations is a guarantee that we won’t have the resources to handle Nature’s little surprises.

[Quarteria]

Re: Global Warming

I hate to reference him again, but, it looks like this may be needed:

When Did Nature Get So Whiney?
Friday, September 12, 2003
By Dennis Miller
August 23, 2003


Hey, get this ... I want to talk about environmentalists. You know, the full-timers. The ones who make their living off it.

You get the feeling this isn't about preservation for them, it's about self-preservation. Some of their stances have now rocketed right past obstinate and into arbitrary.

What about Alaska? Is Alaska just off limits forever? We got Alaska for like four bucks in Mallo Cup (search) money — the Russkies were in yet another vodka stupor, they had no idea what they were doing. We called it Seward's Folly, but now all of a sudden people act like it's Valhalla. Why? Because the caribou (search) live there? Are you kidding me?

I didn't even know what caribou were, so I researched it. Caribou are large North American reindeer. In other words, reindeer who couldn't make the show. We have now given one of the only 50 states we have to a herd of Simu-Bullwinkles!

You know, we have to be more specific about we mean when we say “the environment.” Air quality? Yeah, count me in. Caribou? No. Uh-uh. For the foreseeable future, we're going to need oil products because I don't like the idea of hydrogen cars. I'm not sure I want to be cruising around a mall parking lot filled with a thousand mini-Hindenburgs.

When did nature get so whiney? We're not allowed to do anything to nature anymore, except look at it. It's like porn with leaves. And where's this delicate balance I always hear so much about? Every time I watch "Animal Planet," I see a rabid harp seal popping penguins down his gullet like they were maitre d'Tic Tacs. To me, nature always appears more unbalanced than Gary Busey with a clogged eustachian tube (search).

And then there's global warming. I didn’t even know the details on global warming so I looked it up. There are a lot of vying statistics, but I think the crux of it is the temperature has gone up roughly 1.8 degrees over a hundred years. Am I the only one who finds that amazingly stable? Hey, I'm happy it's gone up. I'm always a little chilly anyway.

Then people ask me if I'm worried about the effects of global warming on my kids. Well, obviously I love my kids and I want them to live to be a 100. So that's another 1.8. My kids’ kids? Three point six. I'll just tell them we moved to Phoenix.

Got that?
Dennis Miller, Fox News

"There's a lot of differing data [about global warming], but as far as I can gather, over the last hundred years the temperature on this planet has gone up 1.8 degrees. Am I the only one who finds that amazingly stable? I could go back to my hotel room tonight and futz with the thermostat for three to four hours. I could not detect that difference."Quotes

[Anonymouse]

Re: Global Warming

That was hilarious and a true piece of work by Dennis Miller.

[Anahita]

Re: Global Warming

So? What is your point? You hate privatization and the markets? That is nothing new.

You assume lots.

I have my own business, Anonymous. It isn’t markets, per se, that trouble me the most. It is the fact that industrial capitalism (as it currently operates) is NOT SUSTAINABLE. Either capitalism makes MAJOR changes (and SOON) or goes (because otherwise it destroys the planet and humanity.) If markets (business, regulation) don’t change for the benefit of the planet and humanity, nature will change them. And even business IS (finally!) getting concerned about global warming.

I don't agree with everything in this book (below), but it is a much better alternative than what we currently have going on (and he's 'thinking outside the box'--that's important if we are to avert an overt catastrophe). Hawkens advocates many kinds of feedback loops (I don't remember if he actually calls them that, but that's what they are) that will steer economics towards what is good for the planet and life here.

The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. (1993) Paul Hawken:

“…we still must face a sobering fact. If every company on the planet were to adopt the best environmental practices of the “leading” companies—say, Ben & Jerry’s. Patagonia, or 3M—the world would still be moving toward sure degradation and collapse...we have a design problem [with business], a flaw that runs through all business… To create an enduring society, we will need a systems of commerce and production where each and every act is inherently sustainable and restorative.” (preface)

“Ecologists are worried about irreversibilities. When species are lost, no change in price or technology will bring them back. The global economy has already exceeded carrying capacity—that point beyond which further growth will decay and effectively destroy its host.” (32)

...or the "host" Earth will destroy the global economy...

And the meek shall inherit the Earth...

“The distinctions between our private lives and corporate rights has become blurred and confused.” (105)

---------

“Environmentalists usually assume business is the enemy and vice versa. If Hawken is right, and he’s got a good track record, the environmental perspective is the only way business will prosper, and business my be the only way to achieve a healthy planet. This goes beyond the revolutionary to the essential.” –Rocky Mountain Institute

“The Ecology of Commerce is so stunningly visionary yet eminently practical that liberals and conservatives embrace it alike. Hawken looks at things with fresh eyes. His vision is neither left nor right, but way up front.” –Eric Utne, Ed. UTNE

[Anonymouse]

Re: Global Warming

You assume lots.

I have my own business, Anonymous. It isn’t markets, per se, that trouble me the most. It is the fact that industrial capitalism (as it currently operates) is NOT SUSTAINABLE. Either capitalism makes MAJOR changes (and SOON) or goes (because otherwise it destroys the planet and humanity.) If markets (business, regulation) don’t change for the benefit of the planet and humanity, nature will change them. And even business IS (finally!) getting concerned about global warming.

Oh please, that's just socialist tripe. I do not assume anything other than what's in front of me, and what's in front suggests that global warming is junk science. There is no conclusive evidence of anything except in the minds of proponents of this ideology. Global warming is not an undeniable law, and there is no way people can act like soothsayers and predict anything. I repeat, there is absolutely no piece of conclusive evidence to support the global warming thesis. Everything that exists is either conjecture, shoddy, or manipulated at best. The whole environmentalism movement and global warming have now become the trojan horse of the discredited Marxists, socialists, and other leftist socialistic types who have a natural hatred of capitalism and the markets. The one good thing Bush did was scrap Kyoto, and rightfully so. The earth itself has gone through so many climate changes before the advent of industrial capitalism, so it's silly to blame industrial capitalism for what is naturally the earth's inherent fluctation of climates and changes.

I don't agree with everything in this book (below), but it is a much better alternative than what we currently have going on (and he's 'thinking outside the box'--that's important if we are to overt catastrophe). Hawkens advocates many kinds of feedback loops (I don't remember if he actually calls them that, but that's what they are) that will steer economics towards what is good for the planet and life here.

The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. (1993) Paul Hawken:

“…we still must face a sobering fact. If every company on the planet were to adopt the best environmental practices of the “leading” companies—say, Ben & Jerry’s. Patagonia, or 3M—the world would still be moving toward sure degradation and collapse...we have a design problem [with business], a flaw that runs through all business… To create an enduring society, we will need a systems of commerce and production where each and every act is inherently sustainable and restorative.” (preface)

“Ecologists are worried about irreversibilities. When species are lost, no change in price or technology will bring them back. The global economy has already exceeded carrying capacity—that point beyond which further growth will decay and effectively destroy its host.” (32)

“The distinctions between our private lives and corporate rights has become blurred and confused.” (105)

---------

“Environmentalists usually assume business is the enemy and vice versa. If Hawken is right, and he’s got a good track record, the environmental perspective is the only way business will prosper, and business my be the only way to achieve a healthy planet. This goes beyond the revolutionary to the essential.” –Rocky Mountain Institute

“The Ecology of Commerce is so stunningly visionary yet eminently practical that liberals and conservatives embrace it alike. Hawken looks at things with fresh eyes. His vision is neither left nor right, but way up front.” –Eric Utne, Ed. UTNE

If it were up to everyone, they all think outside the box. Such useless references are exactly that, useless.

[Anahita]

Re: Global Warming

Ye heard it said that, “Minds are like parachutes. They only function when open.”

But I say to you that if you are thinking about jumping out of a aeroplane, BOTH the ‘pilot’ and the ‘co-pilot’ will advise you not to jump without a chute. If you still do what they advise against, you CLEARLY do so at your own peril.

Per---Ye have heard that it was said to the ancients, Thou shalt not kill; but whosoever shall kill shall be subject to the judgment. Matthew 5:21



Sayin': give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right;
Sayin': let's get together and feel all right. Wo wo-wo wo-wo!

Let them all pass all their dirty remarks (One Love!);
There is one question I'd really love to ask (One Heart!):
Is there a place for the hopeless sinner,
Who has hurt all mankind just to save his own beliefs?

Let's get together to fight this Holy Armageddon (One Love!),
So when the Man comes there will be no, no doom (One Song!).
Have pity on those whose chances grows t'inner;
There ain't no hiding place from the Father of Creation. –Bob Marley

"I've got ways to make you sing my songs-- Ones I ain't written yet… I've got ways to make you strange, drug you up and drag you home. I've got ways to track you down in all of the places you like to go

I've got ways to make you crazy. I've got ways to make you run.
My daddy is coming for you.

I've got ways to make you hear me just by whispering your name…
I've got ways to make you swear you won't want your old life anymore" –Kathleen Edwards

[Anonymouse]

Re: Global Warming

When substance fails, quote lyrics!