Posted on 05/29/2008 10:06:12 PM PDT by The_Republican
I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.
Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems -- from ocean currents to cloud formation -- that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.
Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. "The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity," warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, "is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."
If you doubt the arrogance, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue.
But declaring it closed has its rewards. It not only dismisses skeptics as the running dogs of reaction, i.e., of Exxon, Cheney and now Klaus. By fiat, it also hugely re-empowers the intellectual left.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
All you have to do is look at the motivation of the turds pushing this issue. More control over your life coupled with the draining of your wallet. Gore has made millions from this hoax.
“can’t be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere,”
Why not, it is what trees and plants use to survive and provide O2.
If we pumped all that CO2 into the atmosphere and it was never converted into anything and just floated around...yeah, that would be bad.
But, God, in His infinite wisdom decided to create a life-perpetuating cycle wherein that CO2 is taken in by plant life which converts it into oxygen which is a necessary component for non-plant life to ingest and (what are the odds???) is then converted back into CO2!
But was it sufficient enough for your transgression?
it's amazing to see seeimgly intelligent public figures that have been hornswaggled by this absolute Bravo Sierra.
a retarded rhesus monkey could see through this scam
There are trace amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I believe less than half of one percent.
you cannot breath in China and India yet America is always attacked and regulated.
how about the UN saying no gas cars in China at all - they have to embrace the new technology.
People and animals breath in air and exhale CO2... If the liberals take over and liquidate a couple of BILLION people that will make for a lot less CO2.. Course the average volcano will produce as much or more CO2 than many BRILLIONs of people.. add 2 volcano's, three volcano's.... like that.. There are several volcano's erupting in degrees at any given moment planetary wise.. Oh! trees(plants) LOVE CO2... They "breathe" it in and emit Oxygen.. Negating the effects of people breathing by a wide margin.. But we still have the Volcano's......
An oxymoron.
I'd like to think you already know the answer to that.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them (i.e., our rights) under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
1) They typically have no idea what the actual percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is,
2) They don't know that H2O is the most potent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere,
3) They don't know that methane (CH4) is a also a more more potent greenhouse gas than CO2,
4) They are so ignorant and stupid that they do not only not know what an El Nino is(let alone what causes it and its affects), that when it is explained to them, they are still too stupid to understand that the El Nino affect is far more powerful on global weather patterns (and hence global climate change) than anything mankind could do,
5) They are generally socialists masquerading as envirotards,
6) They generally have no education on climatology or meteorology and got most of their information from the discredited Al Gore film,
7) They are always ignorant of the fact that 99% of earth's weather is directly affected by solar activity.
I could go on, but my experience from trying to have an intelligent debate with any of these retards is that facts don't matter to them. They see oil and any petroleum product as bad, they have succeeded in preventing new drilling in the U.S., and they seem to have no problem with the U.S. sending $1 trillion a year to overseas regimes, most of which would like to see the U.S. reduced to a third world state.
The truly sad part of their madness is that the U.S. has at least 5 trillion barrels of recoverable oil in oil shale & tar sands in the continental U.S. alone. If U.S. oil companies were allowed to recover this oil, it could potentially supply ALL OF THE WORLD'S OIL NEEDS FOR THE NEXT 500 YEARS!!!
Like I said at the beginning, this is madness.
Excellent opinion piece by Krauthammer. Printing it out to give to office staff.
That says it all.
I want more green...(ARGH!)
What amazes me is people believe Al Gore who has no scientific background yet his word is taken in blind faith.
If I see anything green in my refrigerator that shouldn't be I toss it out.
That's because they fact not fancy.
When CO2 gets to .04% of the makeup of the Earths atmoshpere, I’ll start to worry. But we’d have to do a lot more work to get there.
Yep, CO2 isn’t even 1% of the atmosphere. We’re talking about destroying capitalism in order to remove one-hundreth of 1% of the air in the atmosphere which is where the ‘greenhouse gases’ exist. Irrational? Sounds like it to me.
Further, the basic scientific theory behind blaming CO2 for global warming is the "radiative forcing theory" and from Wikipedia itself: "The relationship between carbon dioxide and radiative forcing is logarithmic so that increased concentrations have a progressively smaller warming effect."
It seems to me that CO2 is not the real culprit here, if there even is a real culprit. It seems to me the real culprits are the global warming fanatics who spread fear and misinformation in order to advance their goal of returning all of civilization to the dark ages.
A policy highly to be recommended about the population at large...
Well, if it’s the green i can fold and put in my wallet...then i will agree with you....
You're arguing against yourself. This cycle functioned as such for millions of years, but now the burning of fossil fuels is introducing many millions of tons of additional CO2 into the cycle each year. It's not a stable situation.
Excellent point by CK.
“Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. “The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity,” warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, “is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.” “
Actually they go hand in hand. Socialism is using environmentalism as a way to gain central control of our lives, and similarly environmentalism is using socialism to dictate people’s lives. This is the way for marxists to take over the country through the back door.
I tell you this global warming crap is way worse than opening the borders and giving amnesty to everybody. We have to rise up and fight them every inch of the way.
Evidence please? At most we are talking about 1 trillion and the issue of "recoverability" is a matter of the cost per barrel of extraction and the amount of water available. It takes 3-5 gallons of water to extract 1 gallon of oil from oil shale. Moreover, the cost per barrel may be higher than net capital investment of switiching to plug-in hybrids powered by wind and sipping the cheap oil of which there are probably 60 billion barrels in the US.
But it IS good. It would be BAD if there wasn't any CO2 being pumped in the air. All the plants would die. Pumping more CO2 into the air ensures healthy, lush green forrests producing lots of oxegen for us to breathe and burn, converting it back once again to CO2.
CO2 is NOT a pollutant. It's necessary element of the earth, a building block of all life.
What is shameful is that these so called "global warming" scientists have managed to convince the sheeple that co2 is a pollutant when it is NOT.
Wrong. increased co2 provides for the spreading of more abundant green growth. When levels fall too low, growth is inhibited. The more co2, the greener the earth becomes. It's self regulating.
Evidently not, since the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is increasing at a significant, not to say alarming, rate.
It is very interesting, though, that the CO2 concentration shows such a strong annual signal, decreasing sharply during the northern summer, and increasing during the northern winter. This raises a lot of questions in my mind which I never see addressed. It certainly seems to imply that land vegetation takes a dominant role in the consumption of CO2, but we are told otherwise. By the same token, it seems to imply that we should look to land vegetation to redress this seasonal imbalance. Hence my proposed "kudzu solution". But who listens to me?
That's only half of the story. The atmosphere on Venus is also 95% CO2 and it's hot enough there to melt lead!
So if a 95% CO2 atmosphere doesn't have any effect on the temperture of either of those two planets what effect will a 0.038% CO2 concentration have here on Earth besides nothing?
However, a better site for for this topic is:
Fortunately, most of the deposits in the U.S. are in oil shale as opposed to the tar sands in Canada. The Canadians have led the way with the extraction technology for heavy oil and the U.S. will benefit from their experience. In the Green River formation, it is estimated that only 1-2 gallons of water will be needed to extract 1 gallon of oil.
As for the capital costs, the Canadian experience is showing that although the initial Cap-ex costs are high, the maintenance and expense costs decline over time.
What needs to be kept in mind are several points: 1) This is the beginning of a relatively new technology, and as new advances are made, more oil will be recovered, 2) If even only 400 billion barrels are recoverable from the Green River formation in Utah, at long term costs of less than $30-40 per barrel, not only will this be profitable for the oil companies, but 400 billion barrels of oil is more than the estimated reserves of Saudi Arabia, 3) The oil companies seem to be committed to reducing the atmospheric release of as much CO2 as possible. In fact, there is discussion of sequestering some of the CO2 in the Permian Basin (eastern New Mexico and western Texas). The CO2 could also conceivably used in an enhanced oil recovery scheme as well:
Happy reading!
My thoughts as well!
"The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."
Charles Krauthammer :
... For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).
Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.
Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself.
Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect.
Nailed It!
This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for the perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author all 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of the good stuff that is worthy of attention. You can see the list of articles I pinged to lately on my page.
You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about). Besides this one, I keep 2 separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson and Orson Scott Card.
I'll give you a great deal, and you'll feel so good about saving our mother, earth.
Charles Krauthammer : "...Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems -- from ocean currents to cloud formation -- that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.
Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation."
The following is a simple exercise anybody can recreate with a simple calculator, found on your computer Windows (Start-Programs-Accessories-Calculator; View-Scientific). Don't worry about your school math, I am very rusty myself. The following is indeed very simple.
If probability of an event is 1/2. And a probability of another event is also 1/2. Then a probability of these two events happen simultaneously is 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4 (for example 2 coins both falling with a tale side up).
Now, lets take a climate model having 50 parameters (these models are complicated) with each parameter known to at least 99% (not a bad knowledge, isn't it?!). Probability of it being true is .99 multiplied onto itself 50 times. On calculator type .99 then button x^y then 50 then hit = The result is 0.6050, or 60.5%.
If this model has 100 parameters, then probability falls to 36.6%.
50 parameters known to 98%. The model's probability to be true is 36.4%.
Only 10 parameter known to 95% - The model's probability to be true is 60%.
You can play with numbers varying a number of parameters and their known probability.
Do we really know all variables in climate models so well? Even with the best knowledge, accounting for multiple factors reduces the confidence in the result. In reality many variables are extrapolated, assumed, etc. I'll take such chances if I play lottery, any time. But when we are talking about curtailing industrial progress and wasting trillions of dollars of our large but limited resources, I need more certainty.
Besides, if we are thrown back into 50th - we'll survive. Inconvenienced a lot, but we'll survive, People in the developing world will be hit much harsher. But caring about poor is never a concern for the so enlightened environmentalist luddites.
Cato Scholar Comments on Warner-Lieberman Climate Security Act
Global Warming on Free Republic
“The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity,” warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, “is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.”
The Global Warming BS is a symptom of Socialism, IMHO.
How is this about carbon footprint when the issue is Peak Oil?
Very well & simply explained, thanks!
As far as peak oil is concerned, the reality is that were are at least 500 years from peak oil, although most of the "easy" oil has been found. In the last few years, Canada has gone from having the smallest proven reserves of oil in the world to now having one of the largest proven reserves of oil due to their successful extraction of oil from their tar sands formations! The real truth is that the obstructionists don't want any oil drilling at all in the U.S. They have managed to convince a large segment of the population that increased CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to a great environmental catastrophe. So even though most Freepers don't buy the CO2/Global Warming idea, it is the main successfully used argument of the emotional obstructionists.
In my mind, there is a great danger to allowing the enviro-fascists to control the debate. If they win, not only will it lead to the destruction of American manufacturing and energy production, but will eventually lead to a massive world war with China, Japan, and the U.S. as the major combatants over oil resources. Such a scenario is completely unnecessary, but possible, if we allow the liberals continued control of the dissemination of information on this issue.
That is all correct except this is Peak Oil now.
Charles Krauthammer's right - environmentalism's the newest horse to ride.
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