| before we make huge changes in our policies and way of life, it would be best to have more concrete evidence. And this is where it seems to me the Bush report fails the test.
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Posted on 06/03/2002 10:54:03 PM PDT by Pokey78
However, you fail to take into account that the data that had been collected in the 70's was incomplete, and that computer modeling has advanced quite a bit since then.
It is unfortunate that climatology has been hijacked by the environmental left and politicized to the extent it has. There is a nutural variation in climate within historical times (remember Vinland in Canada...I don't think they grow grapes in Labrador now). Periods of global warming have occurred before industrialization, and periods of cold (the "Little Ice Age" of the Middle Ages) have occurred as well.
It is quite likely that we may beginning a warming period INDEPENDENT of what man does. It might be that man's contribution accellerated the cycle by 1%. (Big deal.)
The thing to do is to begin to use real science, NOT bogus reports, anecdotes, and what-ifs. A responsible conservative would make a decision based on FACTS, not on what we WISH.
Rush Limbaugh has no science training. His comments on global warming are simply the political position he takes based on what he wants the answer to be. This is no different than the attitude of the Catholic Church to Galileo's studies.
It is foolish to take a scientific position based on political preference. If you are finally proved wrong, you look like an ignoramus.
Actually, what is really alarmist is the coverage this is getting. When I heard Rush start on this yesterday, he didn't sound that irrational, and mentioned the fact that this report did not recommend any of the Kyoto lunacy, etc. I didn't listen to all of his comments about it because I was driving and sometimes I find his voice a little grating and distracting, and in any case, he didn't seem to be saying anything especially revealing.
But in general, I think there's a lot of hysteria going on about something that is, as you point out, not really cause for it.
You probably did not hear him call our president "George W Algore." That was the moment that I turned him off with a vow of not listening again. (I've been having a hard time kicking the habit of almost 14 years) I wished that there was some sort of gauge or dial right on his desk that could show the number of listeners who switched him off at that moment yesterday.
This is where the difficulty is with decent analysis of the environment. There were no issues of industrial pollution, smog from cars, other manmade factors affecting the environment during these early extremes. At some point, pollution causes the extremes in climate to be even worse, causes disease, causes permanent change to the environment.
In Chaos Theory in Math even small changes in input can cause large, unpredicatable changes in the future...or not. It has to do with unforseen interactions. We really don't know how, in the long term, anything new is going to affect the environment, or the economy, or society, or anything else.
I need to do some reading on this issue and see who the people are who are proposing the theory. If I remember correctly (and it has been a number of years since I was in school...ha!) the process of an ice age onset actually begins with increased temperatures in certain areas of the ocean. I know this sounds strange, but the increased tempreatures in some currents indicate changes which are precursors to lowered air temperatures.
As I said, I need to do some research on this. The assumption that global warming is untrue simply because we don't want it to be true is not scientific, nor rational, nor conservative.
Just curious.
If I find something definitive by a non-political scientist, I will post it as a separate article.
If the process of warming has begun, we cannot reverse it with any technology currently available. We could, however, make sure that a rise in sea level wouldn't totally incapacitate the country.
I just think the glass is too big!
| before we make huge changes in our policies and way of life, it would be best to have more concrete evidence. And this is where it seems to me the Bush report fails the test.
|
I think Dubya wants to give everyting to everybody, and you just cannot do that.
I have no vested interests in Intellicast.
That's not a fact. Depends what measurement techniques one uses.
No there is not.
That statement can be made with a straight face only if the effects of natural processes can be separated from the products of human activity. In addition, the total dynamics of the interaction of atmosphere and the oceans must be studied and understood.
The reality is that atmospheric thermodynamics is the least understood natural process remaining.
Of course, for the controllers, no amount of ignorance is a bar to continuing to do their thing.
I don't want our President to give anything to anyone. One of the arguments given why he should be elected was that he is an outsider, and didn't have to play the IOU game in Washington...remember that?
That's my personal standard for the Presidency...it's more important than politics, or loyalty, or getting re-elected. If global warming is real, steps have to be taken. If it's priorities...well, some people think the environment is more important than the economy, some don't. But to make good decisions, it needs to be articulated whether the decisions are made to favor the environment, or the economy, or election chances
Agreed. That said, as I understand it this report has ascribed a cause to the warming (assuming there IS warming - different measurement techniques produce different results). The way I read it, Rush/Hannity are upset because the report claims human actions are to blame for global warming. The science is clearly too uncertain to make such a call. Am I wrong?
For the record, I tend not to believe that global warming, if it's occurring, is necessarily caused by human activities, and I tend to think that natural actions of the earth would tend to ameliorate some of the effects if it were occuring for any cause.
I do wonder about all those weather stations that are located at airports....no trees and lots of black pavement!
A Paleo Perspective on Global Warming
The statistics seem pretty convincing that warming has been underway for some time, and that this is a warmer period than the previous interglacials.
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The guy who is failing the test here is you. That is because you are expressing high levels of certainty about what this report contains when it is obvious that you have not read a word of it. To those who have actually cracked the cover of the thing, your statements that Bush is advocating "huge changes in our policies and way of life" sound like the rantings of a madman. Go read the damned thing, will you? There's nothing like that in there. No Kyoto, no banning of SUV's, nothing of the sort.