Knowing which way the weather man blows

Revere, and you have a copy of it....400 world scientists who DO have Dr. in front of their name sent their input to the summit and their data was summarily dismissed because it didnt fit their mold. In fact it was ignored to the point of not even being put into the record.

But lets say you are right. Okay fine. If everyone has to comply with new standards and it even includes immediately, then I have absolutely no problem with it. I do absolutely have a problem with it when China, India, Indon and others who are polluting so badly now that their shit in the air spreads all the way across the planet into the US. It prevents us from passing our own Clean Air Act and then they tell the US to clean up right now, but we dont have to because we are a developing nation. Please, are we that stupid? Do we continue to ship jobs overseas because we raised the minimum wage to 7.25 an hour? How about making yet another business group non-viable due to yet another lefty ideal that believes that global warming is caused by only MAN! .

Think not and I have written about it before Alaska, Jesus H. Christ Alaska doesnt pass the CAA? Hawaii is borderline. Canada too. Its not our cars Revere its the shitty coal burning. Very low quality coal at that in those places aforementioned. But then again, is it necessary to do anything?

You know, the second that someone tells me to reduce my carbon footprint when they are spewing it at some 1000 times per person more than I am, then tell me that I have to comply immediately and they dont for forty years then forget it. The party is over. We are a consumer society, they produce it and pollute the air and send it to us. Global warming IS a cycle and it might be added to by man by 1.5 degrees. If that is the case then lets get the playing field leveled first and return the manufacturing jobs to the US. At least we will get to pollute our own air. Anyone wants a picture of this satellite run? Please email me at memphisservices@bellsouth.net. MODIS is the satellite name. Conceived under Reagan, developed under Bush 1, launched in Clintons next to last year and then bang the data comes in under Bush 2. WE meaning the EU and US are not the big polluters... its Asia. Its not a discussion, its a fact. They emit so much carbon that I truly do not know how they live there. The air has to be like smoking 5 packs of cigs a day.

Our businesses have gone in the US. The reason they left in the first place was the pollution control stuff. Oh, I agree about global warming. It is warmer. But it would seem that its starting to tip back towards the colder side already, just as it has about every forty years for the last 150 of recorded data. But it absolutely kills me that they are ready to throw in with the eco-nuts based upon 150 of actual data and only ice data on either side of the argument. It just doesnt make sense. The Greenland ice is melting and the Antarctic is getting colder. But ice still calves off. So are we so sure that we are willing to risk the farm based on limited data.. That ice is and continues to melt but not to where it was 1000 years ago when the tip over towards cold began. They farmed in Greenland up until that time, so it must have been the Vikings in those souped up longships or their Knorr's putting pollution into the air. I simply will not accept without definite proof that we really need to do anything because if we do and we are wrong its going to get mighty cold for a lot of people in short order and they will be green when the rest of the world is bundling up and watching them turn brown....literally.

Revere buys into it, we agree to disagree. The truth is not incontrovertible and its not a consensus when that many scientist types were simply shuffled out the door either. They would have you believe the opposite happened. FAR FROM IT!

I wonder if he's going to put the "Huckabee 2008" sticker next to or atop of his weathered "Bush/Cheney" sticker?

MRK,

How odd of you to adopt the precautionary principle with regard to H5N1, yet have what seems to be the opposite viewpoint with regard to global warming. Look, as you know I agree with you re H5N1, but your arguement re global warming is just silly. Your equivalent arguement re H5N1 would be that until it is "proved" that H5N1 is pandemic capable, it isn't worth preparing for.
I've read Mark Lynas "Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet" and I highly recommend it to you. The stakes could not be higher.

It is not helpful quibbling about who is to blame for the planet warming up at a RATE that is ABSOLUTELY unprecedented. That time has well and truly passed. What we need now is political will and compliance by business and consumers to reverse the trend as fast as possible.

We may have passed the tipping point already, but we don't know that yet, so let's do what we can. Hence the precautionary principle.

For pandemic - prepare NOW.
For global warming - reduce greenhouse gas emmissions NOW.

With arguments like those mustered by Chris Allen, well, since it's obvious that his argument is wrong, it follows that global warming must be happening. Mark me as totally convinced.

RobT. MRK's position is really quite rational. When H5N1 hits, the global population will be decimated 5 or 10 times (compounded of course!). So we don't need to worry about Global Warming, just try to survive bird flu, and (if you are one of the 1%-25% of survivors) you will see that Global Warming will go away.

bar,

I don't think you are proposing to me that MRK endorses the benefits of a severe pandemic event. I hope not! I get from MRK that he cares, and cares deeply, that we don't go through the horror of an H5N1 pandemic at current CFR levels, or anything approaching the current CFR. Maybe the best we can hope for is that there is a reassortment between H5N1 and a current human flu subtype so that the CFR is attenuated. That's called bleak optimism.

But regardless, if you take in the rate of population growth ie the time it takes to double the world population, a pandemic will only delay the rate of global warming until the population builds up again.

The real issue is how we live, and how we impact this closed system we call home...earth.
The climate change sceptics say it is because the sun is changing, not the increased greenhouse gases. OK, let's see the data.

No RobT, just suggesting that MRK is pragmatic. Prepare for the outcomes you can affect, factor in the data on outcomes that are inevitable.

the second that someone tells me to reduce my carbon footprint when they are spewing it at some 1000 times per person more than I am, . .

MRK, please give me a non-trivial example of where on planet Earth the net per capita production of GHG is 1000 times that in the USA? e.g. China has a population about 4 times that of the USA, and produces less GHG than the USA. Chinese net GHG production could rise more than 400% and they still would not be producing as much per capita GHG as is the USA (or Australia, for that matter).

I personally subscribe to the notion that pollution should be curtailed by a tax. It is a dirty mess in the air, on food and it undoubtedly has negative affects on my health. So if some industry wishes to reduce my amenity, then it should be made to factor a pollution cost into the profit equation.

bar/Rob.... emails to me please and I'll send you a copy of the very pretty and embarassing to the Clinton Administration MODIS satellite run. It takes a year for it to process all of the data as it takes soundings of the atmosphere of all the GHG's. There are one shitload of them out there guys. But again, if the earth wasnt so much warmer 1000 years ago they couldnt have farmed in Greenland.

To me its like Pelosi standing on the same ground they farmed until about 1000 AD. Then suddenly and without warning it got cold. So cold there are records of Swedish priests standing in front of physically moving glaciers (you could see it apparently) and throwing the holy water and reading from the scriptures. And like most prayers they went unanswered.

Bar and I cross the swords every now and then but indeed if BF comes in it takes us out, no GW or GHG's. If we add another 1.5 billion in 20 years, the economic system collapses. Those people are going to be had by people that are bigger drains on the system than we are. I dont say that racially based its just that poor people have bigger families. As education goes up the population in a family goes down. Those that are productive dont have time to hump I guess. In Africa the size of a guys pecker is denoted by the number of goats and kids he has in many places. China isnt going to be able to enforce their two kids rule and by definition that means that the currently 40 day supply of food in the world will slip to about 31 or so days if we can keep production up.

Volcano's are known to have been in eruption at 1000 AD. Baektusan Korea, the Kamchatka trio in off and on manner and in fact nearly all of the Russian volcanoes were going off at that time. So was it the aerosols of sulfur that lead to global cooling? Was it by Viking SUV's I doubt it.

But, I can safely say that we should do something about it because its not healthy. I am also as they say pragmatic enough to say prove it first and not just take a lot of conjecture on it. In 1975 we went into the COLDEST winter on record since 1775-76. General Washington found sentries who had frozen to death on duty. So boys its not all what its cracked up to be and they cant prove it and they KNOW it. We naysayers keep asking for proof and not a lot of flaky data thats only 150 years old. That is NOT an era or epoch by any standard. Again they know it.

Now you guys want that picture? Its in jpg format or gif. Small so you have to use photoeditor or something to blow it up. Mary in Hawaii was stunned by it and she is a big environmentalist. For the true facts so am I. I plant trees in the bottomlands and was the first to prove that California Redwoods can grow in the bottomlands of the Mississippi River. Cypress and redwoods are very closely related. One uses the mist and rain, the other uses pure Mississippi River water and the nighttime dew thats out about 10 months of the year.

Taxing pollution? Not unless the Chinese do it too and IMMEDIATELY upon approval of any program that the world ascribes too. You know though really, if its not BF it will be something else. That will cull us back like a bad dream and really to coin a phrase...WE ARE VIRUS.

Yup. Send those emails on in here and I'll let you decide who is doing the polluting on this planet. We cant cut much more and have jobs. But like Supari, those countries want their cake and to eat it too.

MRK points out that Inhofe's list comprises "400 world scientists who DO have Dr. in front of their name".

Yup. Creationists make that claim too. It would be better if the "skeptics" focused on improving their evidence and not preening their credentials.

the second that someone tells me to reduce my carbon footprint when they are spewing it at some 1000 times per person more than I am, . .

CO2 Emissions (NOT all emissions): Nation Master shows that for CO2 emissions per capita, in rank order, the US clocks in 5th, after Quatar, UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait.

India is at position 113, China at 80, with a minuscule proportion per cap. of US use. In absolute terms, India emits about 1/5 of what the US emits; China a bit more than half. In rank order by country it is second, after the US. This last number surprised me, I though it would be a bit below half. The numbers, moreover, are from 2003.

Ecological footprint (hectares per person), from the Living Planet Report, 2006, shows the US in the top category (along with a few EU countries and Australia), using more than 5.4 hectares per person. Indians use less than .9 hectares; the Chinese between .9 and 1.8.

liv. planet

nationmaster

That said, I would support an anti-Kyoto stance, if not for the same reasons as RK (supposing he is against.) I recently read Annex B of the Kyoto prococol - emissions standards, lists reduction targets in % of emissions, etc: the nitty gritty beyond the fluff. It is a Kafkaesque document that makes no sense. My criticism - of form, language, construction; scientific; political, etc. would take several pages.

kyoto accounting manual **PDF**

Even if you believe in God, his logic makes no sense. He's going based on the premise that God would not allow evil in the world... It's the basic predictament of theodicy.

It's essentially the same as saying "Surely God would not allow thousands of people to die in a war." It's not a matter of religion getting in the way of science, it's just bad theology.

Ana, Agree about Kyoto.

The problem is that there are corporate like entities whose raison d etre is the generation of cachet for personal gain. Primary examples are those "charities" with emo posters showing starving children that skim 95% of charitable contributions as "collection expenses" while the directors live a first class lifestyle on the proceeds.

Another example is the green movement, and also (I suspect) the "global warming" movement. The suspicion arises because some real scientists seem to be suppressed by shouts of denialist!!.

Proof either way about the causes of GW is not as simple as IPCC has painted it. The fact is that political appointees to IPCC control the final reports, and in documented cases have ignored the findings of world renowned scientists who were given the responsibility of generating the preliminary reports on which those final reports were supposedly based.

That is why I am not prepared to unreservedly accept the certainties that I seem to find on blogs such as effectmeasure.

Bar, Ana-but you know Revere comes up with some really good stuff and I DO have to take it into account. Some of it is pretty funny stuff. Some I think is left wing bias. Some he has converted me a bit on.

Greenlandic ice is melting.That we know. But now once again one of those nasty little satellites apparently has picked up a thermal bloom under the ice and its indicative that a volcano or volcanic activity is melting the ice underneath the northeast end of the sub-continent. This would account for the acceleration of the calving of the ice there and dump more and more icebergs into the sea.

The Intl Ice Patrol noted some 14,000 bergs last year. It hasnt opened this year. The temps are minus 22 in most places from NE Canada into Greenland. I will be very interested to see if this halts or slows the calving of the bergs into the sea. If not then I would say we might have a problem as the only thing that could heat that much ice to melt status would be something volcanic. Always an open mind.

And this from Dr. William Gray-Eminent hurricane specialist.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/weather/2008/04/expert-were-bra.html

The Russians by the way say we have peaked and are going to have a helluva 2008-09 winter.