Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 10/15/2010 2:32:29 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
When British Foreign Secretary William Hague visited the U.S. last week, he placed combating climate change near the very top of the world’s To Do list.
“Climate change is perhaps the 21st century’s biggest foreign-policy challenge,” Hague declared in a New York City speech. “An effective response to climate change underpins our security and prosperity.” The danger was no longer just distant thunder, he suggested, warning that the recent devastating floods in Pakistan heralded the sort of extreme events that will become more common in a warmer world. “While no one weather event can ever be linked with certainty to climate change,” he said, “the broad patterns of abnormality seen this year are consistent with climate-change models.”
William Hague is not a holdover from the left-leaning Labor Government that British voters ousted last spring. He’s not even from the centrist Liberal Democrats who are governing in a coalition with the Conservative Party of Prime Minister David Cameron. Hague is one of Cameron’s predecessors as Conservative Party leader.
His strong words make it easier to recognize that Republicans in this country are coalescing around a uniquely dismissive position on climate change. The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones.
This change has proceeded in two stages. First came a hardening of Republican opposition to cap-and-trade legislation intended to limit the emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to climate change. Most congressional Republicans had always opposed such legislation, but that position wasn’t monolithic: In 2005, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and five other Republicans voted for a cap-and-trade bill that he co-sponsored. Several GOP governors also acted on climate-change issues.
This year, when Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., spent months negotiating bipartisan cap-and-trade legislation, he could not attract any Republican co-sponsors — not even McCain. And when National Journal recently surveyed the 21 GOP Senate challengers with a serious chance of winning this fall, each opposed cap-and-trade (including Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois, who voted for it in 2009).
Even many climate-change activists prefer alternatives to cap-and-trade, such as a carbon tax. But virtually all of the serious 2010 GOP challengers have moved beyond opposing cap-and-trade to dismissing the scientific evidence that global warming is even occurring.
Senate nominees with tea party roots, such as Nevada’s Sharron Angle, have expressed these views most emphatically. But the pattern of repudiation extends to more-measured nominees such as Ohio’s Rob Portman and California’s Carly Fiorina who pointedly insisted, “I’m not sure,” when asked whether climate change was happening. Of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers who have taken a position, 19 have declared that the science of climate change is inconclusive or flat-out incorrect. (Kirk is the only exception.) With sentiments among rank-and-file Republicans also trending that way, it’s no coincidence that two Republicans who affirmed the science — Rep. Michael Castle in Delaware and Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska — were defeated in Senate primaries this year.
Just for the record, when the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences last reviewed the data this spring, it concluded: “A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.” Not only William Hague but such other prominent European conservatives as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have embraced that widespread scientific conviction and supported vigorous action.
Truth is not subject to voting, consensus, social climbing, pandering, purchase and sale or journalism.
Hague, don’t be a tard. You’re better than this.
I poop on that article.
Most of the Conservative politicians around the world are establishment/ruling types. Their position reflect what is the most politically correct. They also lack a strong conservative media to counter the left
Also, "just for the record", a top physicist-emeritus has recently resigned, publicly proclaiming that GW is the biggest fraud in recent years.
That's true actually, but it's just the usual weasel words. The change isn't anthropogenic. It's natural, just like it was in 1000 AD.
In the same way, the resignee was saying that the concept of anthropogenic Global Warming is a fraud. Which it is.
Good point, which reminds me:
Oh wait, AlBore already thought of that scam from his private jet & energy-sucking mansion. Damn.
You could have written the same article 30 years ago about the Soviet Union’s inevitable eclipse of the United States with another group of conservatives standing in opposition to that conventional wisdom. Frum, they name is clueless.
1) Citing a list of European politicians who support cap-and-trade is not a big selling point. Most of them are socialists and they support political correctness and the restriction of free speech, freedom of religion, and other liberties which we cherish. In other words, they can be dead wrong on other issues, so they can be dead wrong here, too.
2) You can’t decide a scientific issue by marshalling public support for it. Just because you can rile up a bunch of people, including politicians, about concern for the environment doesn’t mean that your basis is scientifically sound. The minority opinion in this case happens to be correct.
3) Most people aren’t denying that the earth is getting warmer. In general, it’s been getting warmer since the last ice age. The questions which most skeptics have are these:
a) What’s causing the warming? How much is caused by man, how much by natural forces, such as cycles of the sun’s radiation or magnetic field?
b) Is there really anything we can do to significantly change the amount of warming or the rate of warming? Prove it, since so much money, misery, and loss of liberty are at stake for the proposed regulations. For all the pain these regulators want to cause, what is the improvement they hope to achieve?
c) The earth has been warmer in the past than it is today. Is a warmer earth really a bad thing? How much warming is bad? And if we’re talking about a couple of degrees in a hundred years, shouldn’t we consider the option of adapting to it rather than trying to stop it? What is the trade-off? Especially considering that most of the warming is caused by natural forces beyond our control.
4) Citing computer models as a basis for one’s conclusion does not instill confidence. We’ve seen from the Climategate e-mails and other files that there was a lot of fudging behind the scenes to get the results they wanted. Michael Mann’s hockey stick has been blown out of the water. Weather is very complex, and man has not yet figured out what all the factors are which contribute to it, or to what degress each factor plays a part. The models are only accurate when they are run against the data which was used to build the models in the first place. There is no reason to believe the models when they are extrapolated into the future.
I had friends in the World Trade Center who are no longer around to express their view on this statement. My guess though is that they would consider the foreign attack that raised temperatures inside those buildings by 1400 degrees F a bigger foreign policy challenge than the possibility that global temperatures may rise one degree over the course of a century. Perhaps I'm wrong, and we can no longer ask them, but that is how I feel and I suspect they would have agreed. My bet: none of them died praying that particulate from the terrorist fire would cool the earth or even that the other emissions would have no effect on global temperatures.
“...they would consider the foreign attack that raised temperatures inside those buildings by 1400 degrees F a bigger foreign policy challenge”
Yeah...but Muzzies aren’t as much fun to fight against..they are prone to beheading their critics.
Shh! There are Dems lurking on our boards. They'll never accept the truth if you point out the personal down side to objectivity.
Nothing new under the global warming sun?
Nothing new under the global warming sun?
Just for the record, I've read a few of those studies purporting to show human-caused global warming (or the more inclusive "climate change"), and found few, if any, that actually demonstrate effects on the climate caused by human activity. Studies abound, however, that describe some kind of observation, and then include the phrase "because of climate change" in the discussion, even when the climate has no conceivable bearing on the observation. I've a feeling that the majority, if not all, of the studies reviewed by the NAS fall into this category.
Blaming everything under the sun on "climate change" is scientific laziness. It does not prove that human activity is responsible for anything other than pollution (which we've been working to mitigate for years). It saves the scientists publishing their studies from having to do the next set of experiments determining why whatever they observed is occurring. Sometimes, pinning down the actual "why" is incredibly difficult...
No, we just will no longer tolerate that ****ing lie... and we are going to get in your face when you try to push it down our throats.
LLS
I’m not denying climate change. But I’m extremely skeptical about man’s role in the change.
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