Posted on 05/25/2002 11:28:01 AM PDT by grundle
At any given time, the temperature is either going up, or it's going down. It never stays the same.
30 years ago, all of the major environmentalists and environmental groups were 100% sure that global cooling was on the way. They were just so sure that it was coming. Their proposed "solution" was to have the government set limits on economic growth, limits on the use of natural resources and fossil fuels, and other government restrictions on economic activity.
We ignored their advice. Since then, the world GNP has more than doubled, and we burn a lot more fossil fuels today than we did 30 years ago. But the global cooling never came.
Now they are worried about global warming. But their proposed "solution" is the same. They want the same kinds of government controls now that they wanted 30 years ago.
Since the temperature is always either going up or going down, the radical doomsayer environmentalists will always either be scared about global warming, or scared about global cooling. They will always be scared about one of the two. And they will always use this as an excuse to try to have the government impose more and more restrictions and controls on people's lives.
In the real world, economic growth and capitalism have actually been very good for the environment. The richer a country is, the better its environment is. And in the real world, the countries in Eastern Europe, which adopted the massive government controls on the ecomomy that the radical left is so fond of, became the worst polluted area that the world has ever had.
Studies of tree rings in fossils of very old trees show a very strong correlation between increased sunspot activity, and global warming. Global warming is caused by the sun. The doomsayers have been pretty silent about this.
Right now, Mars is experiencing global warming. The doomsayers haven't really offered much comment on this, either.
For a lot of the radical environemntal doomsayers, the real goal has nothing to do with the environment. Instead, the real goal is to have as much government control of the economy and people's lives as possible. The doomsayers hate capitalism. They hate private property rights. They hate economic freedom. They hate economic growth.
The people who supported communism and socialism in the past, are the very same people who have embraced the ideas of the radical environemntal doomsayers today. In both caes, the real goal is to have the government do more and more to control people's lives.
A rich, prosperous society is always much better able to deal with environemtnal catastrophe than a poor, third world country. In the news, we often read about floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurriacanes, etc., in third world countries, and thousands of people get killed. That's because poor societies can't really deal well with these kinds of things. But when that kind of weather happens in the U.S., the death toll is always much smaller. That's because a rich society can better handle these things.
If sea levels are going to rise along U.S. coasts, it will happen very gradually over many decades, and there will be plenty of time for us to deal with it. And even then, it will be only by a few meters, at most. The scenarios in the movie "A.I." where skycrapers were covered in water is not going to happen.
According to computer models, the Kyoto Treaty won't stop global warming. Without the Kyoto Treaty, the temperature is predicted to rise 2.1 degrees Celcius over the next 100 years. But with the Kyoto Treraty, that same amount of warming will happen over 106 years instead of 100. So the Kyoto Treat gives no real benefit.
But the cost of the Kyoto Treaty would be enormous. And since a richer society is better able to deal with environmental problems, the Kyoto Treaty would ultimately make the environment worse off.
It's precisely because we IGNORED the adivce of the doomsayers 30 years ago that things got better. A rich, growing, prosperous capitalist economy made it easier and easier to protect the environment. The doomsayers predicted that before the year 2000, most people in the world would die of starvation, the pollution would be so bad that everyone would have to wear a gas mask, and there would be no oil, copper, gold, or aluminum left. Their "solution" was to have the government set limits on economic growth, and limits on the use of natural resources. We ignored their advice. The world GNP got bigger, and we increased our use of natural resources. But it's precisely because of economic growth that we could afford to invent and use technology to make things better. Obesity rates keep going up. The air and water have gotten cleaner in all the rich countries. Known reserves of oil and other natural resources is bigger now than 30 years ago.
The doomsayers say that we need to "conserve" resources because they don't understand the function of prices. When prices are controlled by the free market, then if a resource starts to become scarce, its price will rise, and people will voluntarily conserve.
We could end water shortages simply by allowing the price of water to rise to the free market rate. People would respond to higher prices by using less water. Suppliers would respond to higher prices by increasing the supply of water, such as by using desalinization, which now costs about $3 for 1,000 gallons.
But the doomsayers don't like my idea of letting the price of water rise. Instead, they prefer a law that outlawed toilet tanks that hold 3.5 gallons, and set a limit at 1.6 gallons. The doomsayers also like laws that make it illegal for people to water their lawns and wash their cars and fill their swimming pools. This is because the doomsayers love having the government control people's lives.
Government mandated reclying of paper doesn't save trees. Paper comes from tree farms, where the trees are grown specifically for the purpose of making paper. So when people recycle paper, the tree farmers plant fewer trees. But the doomsayers like government mandated reclying of paper, because they like to have the governemnt tell people what to do.
In fact, governemnt mandated reclying wastes more resources than it saves. It's bad for the environment. But the doomsayers like the idea of having the government tell people what to do.
All the garbage that the U.S. will make over the next 100 years would all fit in one square landfill that's less than 20 miles on a side. But the doomsayers want to scare people into believing that we are running out of landfill space.
Capitalism and econoomic growth are good for the environment. In rich countries, environemntal conditions are getting better and better. Once a country's per capita GNP reaches about $4,000, people can afford to start protecting the enviornment. And the richer they are, the better off the environemnt becomes.
It's only in the communist areas that the environmental conditions got worse. In areas that had huge amounts of government control over the economy, things really did get worse.
Capitalism and private property rights and economic growth are good for the environment. Excessive government control of economic activity is bad for the environment. But the doomsayer environmentalists want more and more governemnt control of the economy. Thus, their real goal isn't to protect the environment. Their real goal is to make the government bigger.
Wealth is the single best way to protect the environment. Rich, first world countries have much better environments than poor, third world countries.
If environmentalists really did want to stop global warming, there are ways to do it that are much better and cheaper than the Kyoto Treaty. Planting billions of trees to absorb carbon dioxide is one way. Seeding the ocean with iron to absorb the carbon dioxide is another way. But neither of these ways involves massive increases in governemnt control over people's lives. And neither of these things would be a threat to capitalism. That's why the doomsayers prefer the Kyoto Treaty instead. They like the Kyoto Treaty because it gives them an excuse to increase government control of people's lives.
Earlier this year, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory announced that quicklime can be used to remove carbon dioxide from the air, and the cost equivalent is only 20 cents to remove 100% of the carbon dioxide that comes from burning one gallon of gasoline. This quicklime process is far more effective at getting carbon dioxide out of the air, and far less costly, than the Kyoto Treaty. If supporters of the Kyoto Treaty were truly interested in reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, then they would have expressed great joy at this announcement. Instead, they were silent. Why were they silent? Because this process with quicklime takes away their excuse to use the Kyoto Treaty as an excuse to have the government take control of the economy. This is proof that the radical environmentalists aren't really interested in getting carbon dioxide out of the air. Instead, their real agenda is to have the government take control of the economy. That's why they were silent about this quicklime process. They aren't interested in a real world workable solution, which is what this quicklime process is. Instead, they want the Kyoto Treaty, which won't solve anything. Let there be no doubt about it. Their true goal is not to help the environment. Instead, their true goal is to have the government take control of the economy.
I believe the true goal of Kyoto was to encourage first world factory owners and corporations to close down all first world factories and reincorporate in China and India, which are exempt from Kyoto. Europe and North America were to become nice green giant parks, while the Third World countries were to get all the ugly factories. And this would have the added benefit of not only providing jobs for Third Worlders at the expense of the current factory workers, it would devastate the lives of the First World workers, who (as all good leftists know) are all a buncha racistsexistxenophobic Archie Bunker types anyway. People so retrograde deserve to starve, right? Plus, if the First World is then dependent on the Third World for all manufactured goods, that could only helpin the current effort to empower the Third World and enableit to form a OWG via the UN. But more likely, the sort of peoplewho support Kyoto are blind to the implications of no manufacturing in the EU or US : They just think it's possible to keep their standard of living by shoving all those ugly factories where they won't have to see them. Continent-wide gentrification!
There is no difference in the philosophy.
.02 cents per mile driven, .50 cents increase in gas tax, 55mph highway speed limit. $3500 surcharge on SUVS, light trucks, and sportcars.
All in the name of reducing CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS?
GO BILL SIMON
And Triton, Neptune's moon, is experiencing unprecidented and rapid warming. Triton is about 1.7 billion miles thataway:
(This was the subject of my very first post on FR!)
MIT researcher finds evidence of global warming on Neptune's largest moon
JUNE 24, 1998
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- We're not the only ones experiencing global warming. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher has reported that observations obtained by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based instruments reveal that Neptune's largest moon, Triton, seems to have heated up significantly since the Voyager space probe visited it in 1989. The warming trend is causing part of Triton's surface of frozen nitrogen to turn into gas, thus making its thin atmosphere denser.
While no one is likely to plan a summer vacation on Triton, this report in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature by MIT astronomer James L. Elliot and his colleagues from MIT, Lowell Observatory and Williams College says that the moon is approaching an unusually warm summer season that only happens once every few hundred years. Elliot and his colleagues believe that Triton's warming trend could be driven by seasonal changes in the absorption of solar energy by its polar ice caps.
"At least since 1989, Triton has been undergoing a period of global warming. Percentage-wise, it's a very large increase," said Elliot, professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and director of the Wallace Astrophysical Observatory. The 5 percent increase on the absolute temperature scale from about minus-392 degrees Fahrenheit to about minus-389 degrees Fahrenheit would be like the Earth experiencing a jump of about 22 degrees Fahrenheit.
Triton is a simpler subject than Earth for studying the causes and effects of global warming. "It's generally true around the solar system that when we try to understand a problem as complex as global warming -- one in which we can't control the variables -- the more extreme cases we have to study, the more we can become sure of certain factors," Elliot said. "With Triton, we can clearly see the changes because of its simple, thin atmosphere."
The moon is approaching an extreme southern summer, a season that occurs every few hundred years. During this special time, the moon's southern hemisphere receives more direct sunlight. The equivalent on Earth would be having the sun directly overhead at noon north of Lake Superior during a northern summer.
Elliot and his colleagues believe that Triton's temperature has increased because of indications that the pressure of the atmosphere has increased. Because of the unusually strong correlation between Triton's surface ice temperature and its atmospheric pressure, Elliot said scientists can infer a temperature increase of 3 degrees Fahrenheit over nine years based on its recent increase in surface vapor pressure. Any ice on Triton that warms up a little results in a big increase in atmospheric pressure as the vaporized gas joins the atmosphere.
Scientists used one of the Hubble telescope's three Fine Guidance Sensors in November 1997 to measure Triton's atmospheric pressure when the moon passed in front of a star. Two of Hubble's guidance sensors are normally used to keep the telescope pointed at a celestial target by monitoring the brightness of guide stars. The third can serve as a scientific instrument.
In this case, the guidance sensor measured a star's gradual decrease in brightness as Triton passed in front of it. The starlight got dimmer as it traveled through Triton's thicker atmosphere and then got cut off completely by the moon's total occultation of the star. This filtering of starlight through an atmosphere is similar to what happens during a sunset. As the sun dips toward the horizon, its light dims because it is traveling through denser air and because the sun's disk gets "squashed."
By detecting that Triton's atmosphere had thickened, astronomers were able to deduce that the temperature of the ice on Triton's surface has increased. "This pressure increase implies a temperature increase," Elliot wrote. "At this rate, the atmosphere has at least doubled in bulk since the time of the Voyager encounter." Like the Earth, Triton's atmosphere is composed mostly of molecular nitrogen, but its surface pressure is much less than that of the Earth--about the same as that 45 miles high in the Earth's atmosphere.
In their Nature paper, Elliot and his colleagues list two other possible explanations for Triton's warmer weather. Because the frost pattern on Triton's surface may have changed over the years, it may be absorbing a little more of the sun's warmth. Or changes in reflectivity of Triton's ice may have caused it to absorb more heat. "When you're so cold, global warming is a welcome trend," said Elliot.
About the same size and density as Pluto, Triton--one of Neptune's eight moons--is 30 times as far from the sun as the Earth. It is very cold and windy, with winds close to the speed of sound, and has a mixed terrain of icy regions and bare spots. Triton is a bit smaller than our moon, but its gravity is able to keep an atmosphere from completely escaping because it is so cold. Its composition is believed to be similar to a comet's, although it is much larger than a comet. Triton was captured into a reverse orbit by Neptune's strong gravitational pull.
Other astronomers who participated in this investigation are MIT research assistant Heidi B. Hammel and technical assistants Michael J. Person and Stephen W. McDonald of MIT; Otto G. Franz, Lawrence H. Wasserman, John A. Stansberry, John R. Spencer, Edward W. Dunham, Catherine B. Olkin and Mark W. Buie of Lowell Observatory; Jay M. Pasachoff, Bryce A. Babcock and Timothy H. McConnochie of Williams College.
This work is supported in part by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.
Look what the emissions from even a few explorer crafts' retro rockets did! And you don't think we're affecting the climate here!? </sarcasm>
The real "benefit" of recycling paper is that less paper goes to landfills. In some areas, where landfill space is at a premium, this may be a good thing. On the other hand, growing trees, turning them into paper, and landfilling them effectively sequesters the carbon the trees absorbed from the atmosphere. Recycling paper has no such effect.
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