What Democrats Won't Tell You About Climate Change

How can people be so stupid

The sun and its effect on the oceans is what drives the climate. CO2 as a climate driver is a sick joke. How can so many of you be so stupid to believe this.

You are all like a bunch of little kids having a sleep over and wanting to stay up at night telling scary stories.

There is not one shred of actual empirical evidence to support the theory of enhanced greenhouse warming. It can't happen, and it isn't happening.

When you look beneath the surface of most of the people pushing this nonsense you see that they are much more interested in political outcomes than this baloney that will have absolutely no impact on the climate.

Get a life and leave us alone.

Sam of CT @ May 08, 2008 18:27:59 PM

Haywood not fooling you

in response to the person contesting Haywood's assertion that we'll have to reduce our consumption - he is right considering on an oil based source. However, one also has to understand the underlying economics here. Virtually every other source of alternative fuels cost more to produce than oil. Wind power cost 6x more than oil to produce energy. Hydrogen, the 'panacea' everyone is waiting for, costs more in energy to produce than you get out of it! Biofuel production costs more than oil, results in less energy per unit and has the added disadvantage of bringing up food prices. Indeed, there are reports of parts of the Amazon being torn down in order to grow biofuel crops. We're already thinking that fuel prices going up currently is a crisis. Wait until the alternative / biofuel fuel bill comes due. This is not to say that we shouldn't look towards the future but to make decisions based on emotion rather than firm science makes no sense. As someone aptly pointed out in another post, the temperature of the earth has actually gone down in the last 10 years, and we are in the beginning stages of a global cooling period. If you think that global warming will give us problems with food supply wait till the cooling starts...

wpryan of FL @ May 08, 2008 12:20:44 PM

So Fran...

Are you saying that even though "Climate change" may be a scam, we still will benefit from the fruits of the panic? Whjy not let reality dictate whether those measures and technologies are necessary, and not some cooked-up crisis?

scott of IL @ May 08, 2008 10:30:36 AM

Climate Change

In the end, whatever one makes of the exact contours of the climate chaneg challenge or the precise antropgenic contribution, there can be no doubt that most of the human activities that are the focus of GHG mitigation are activities which we ought to reduce, substallially redesign or eliminate, ewither becaue they are harming us now, or will harm us in the foreseeable future.

The International Energy Agency says that 'peak oil' will be upon us by 2013. They might or might not be right, but that day will come at some point in the not too distant future. Well before we get anywhere near the point when RARs of crude oil are confined to difficult to get at low quality high cost to recover oil, the traders will start sharpoly escalating the price. Any society that is still dependent on crude then will be in a lot of economic trouble. And if then is less than 25 years away, as it surely is, any community that is arguing about how much man is contributing to global warming instead of decarbonising is simply inviting economic ruin. It's worth recalling that the price shock inflation of 1973 was caused by a dip in production of just 5%. So do we really need to dot the i's and cross the t's to go ahead? Of course not.

Is there a good reason for preventing deforestation without believing in global warming? Of course. What about acid rain or increasingly acid seas? Heck yes. What about cleaing up particulates and toxic aerosols? Yes again. Coal plant emissions and coal mining in general? Yes. Reducing waste? Of course.

Imagine, 25 years from now, having decided that we need to get moving, we'd made it our business to meet ambitious GHG reduction targets. Cities were now much more densely populated, and relatively cheap, clean, efficient public transport was so widely available that most people didn't think it worth having a car, and simply rented one when they needed it. Virtually all the cars were zero emissions. Road accidents were major news, because they were so rare. Nearly everybody could get to work within 40 minutes and most of them within 30. The air was clean. The US was no longer buying oil from the middle east and in fact was using 10% of what it does now. Power, though more expensive per unit was cheaper because residences and businesses were far more efficient. A combination of nuclear, solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, hydro, OTEC and biomass supplied almost all the world's energy needs. The third world, freed from the burden of buying masses of crude, is now not much less wealthy than we are and can trade with us on something like fair terms.

In the midst of all this we discover that our fears about global warming were somewhat exaggerated and that we only got modest climate mitigation benefits out of the programs. Would there be room for buyers' remorse? I think not.

Fran

Fran Barlow @ May 04, 2008 11:50:35 AM

Haywood / CEI fooling you

Steven Haywood is disingenuous to suggest, and you are foolish to repeat, that reducing emissions "in our current electricity infrastructure" means reducing household consumption to the juice of a hot water heater. One of the main ways we're going to reduce emissions - one of the cheapest, near-term solutions - is to change our electricity generation to low-carbon sources (natural gas, wind, nuclear, even coal with carbon storage).

So you can run just about everything in your house about the way you do today (those appliances will also use the juice alot more efficiently, but you'll still have the same hot water and fridge and tv and stereo).

You'll also have a similar car - it's just you're car will be a biofuels-burning plug-in hybrid or something.

Don't let the professional smoke-screeners for big business scare you...

Brian of DC @ May 03, 2008 18:21:56 PM

Basic Math

CO2: 380 ppm (as measured near active volcano, will use number anyway to make point), effect measured by experiments meant to show it as a green house gas: no more than 5 degrees difference between CO2 and normal air at same volume (even at induced temperatures of 50c) so 380 parts per million times 5 degrees difference = 0.0019 degrees maximum difference in air temp attributable all CO2 (man made or otherwise).

If CO2 levels somehow jumped to 760 ppm (100% increase - not likely any time soon), that would give us 0.0038 degrees max.

Not exactly earth ending stuff. :-)

If global warming over the past 100 years is, what, 1 degree or so, then I am wondering why the Global Warming activists are not focused on the other .9981 degrees of it.

Ed Sanford of FL @ May 03, 2008 13:19:48 PM

Keep asking

We don't know whether coastal cities are going to flood or not. Or when it might happen. Or how many. Or how deeply. Or what will have caused it---if it happens.

We don't know whether the current food shortage is going to get better or worse due to weather and what grows where--and how well. But these are certainly questions that should not be dismissed by 6 billion people who have supposed "intelligence".

Daniel David of NM @ May 03, 2008 10:51:27 AM

rate of climate change

Simply looking at climate change from the past and noting that the earth goes through periodic warming and cooling phases is not a sufficient argument for not doing something about the change that is occurring now. It is important to understand that the rate at which our climate is changing now is significantly faster than the earth has ever experienced in its entire history.

Humans are not insignificant; in fact, the human species has a greater ability to change and manipulate the environment of the earth more than any other organism on the planet. Humans are polluting the world's oceans, lakes and rivers with nitrogen loaded compounds (fertilizers), creating dead zones in regions like the Gulf of Mexico; we are polluting the earth's atmosphere by burning fossil fuels (the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is the highest it has been in millions of years); we are over fishing the oceans and destroying forests around the world to name a few changes that we have made to the earth. To suggest that these activities do not influence to earths environment or climate is ignorant and arrogant.

Josh of MN @ May 03, 2008 10:45:40 AM