Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

[onmyknees]

I'm inclined to think this is all one big plate of steaming bullshit. While I like to think of myself, and most folks I know as conversationalists, that's not to be confused with a climate alarmist. First we get hit with the right hand....convince everyone that polar bears are aimlessly swimming around the Arctic Ocean looking for small blocks of ice to crawl up on. Then comes the left hook.....Green Energy, and all the bullshit that comes with that. GM receiving billions for electric car development ( did you hear the one about GM recalling all it's electric cars?) , then comes all the Solyndra's and the rest of the solar panel hoax, and billions more poured down the a green rat hole. Then the hideous windmills that littler the landscape from Pennsylvania to South Dakota that can barley produce enough energy to keep the ice cream frozen. Yet we have more clean natural gas than any country on earth, but try to get a pipeline built so we can convert the coal plants....And folks like Trish wonder why we're skeptics? BTW...what ever happen to Al Gore???????

[trish]

I'm inclined to think...

We know what you're ideology INCLINES you toward, but it's not thinking.

...windmills that littler the landscape ... that can barley produce enough energy to keep the ice cream frozen.

Did you know, my illiterate friend, that last spring wind provided 40% of Spain's power. I should think that would keep the GOP's tea sufficiently iced; were we capable of repeating Spain's success.

The key words in your post are INCLINED and SKEPTIC. They are both chosen to deceive the reader into believing you put more thought into the issue than you have. INCLINED makes us think that you carefully weighed the evidence on both sides of the issue__ perhaps putting all the evidence for on one side of the see-saw and all the evidence against on the other side and then because the balance was so delicate, placing a marble on the incline to see which way it would roll. What belies the word usage is the conclusion: climate science is a steaming plate of shit. Well gee, if it’s one steaming plate of shit why be skeptical? Skeptical connotes a measure of restraint__a withholding of judgement. It admits the possibility that the truth may lie in either direction. To claim in the same post that climate science is “one big plate of steaming bullshit” and then claim you’re a climate science “skeptic” is a ludicrous abuse of language. It’s like saying, “I thought about eating that big steaming pile of shit but in the end I was inclined not to.” Really?? We’re suppose to believe such a judgment involved a moment of “thought.” Obviously your mind was made up from the start, influenced as it is by right wing swill. You were never a climate science skeptic and your inclinations are determined by the gradients of political punditry.

Then asking what happen to Ah Gore. Sheeesh! Whatever happened to Smokey the Bear? They’re both mere spokesmen. Gore isn’t a scientist and Smokey isn’t forest ranger. Why such attention to surface details??


http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v...geo1327.html#/

and

http://www.nature.com/news/three-qua...an-made-1.9538

[russtafa]

these politicians are just after our money and this is one of their thieving schemes along with their paid scientists to grab our money

[trish]

Guess who else is just after your money? (Hint: You are a consumer. Who do who pay for the goods and services you receive?) Would you characterize the money making schemes of a corporation as "thieving" just because their bottom line is profit?

Did you know that grants do not increase a researcher's paycheck one iota? The grant money goes to the university. The researcher draws his usual salary from the university. The university uses the grant money to also pays for the graduate students, lab technicians, machinists, electricians and other experts etc. that the experiment requires; i.e. the researcher is a "job-creator.". The bottom line for a researcher is never monetary profit, the bottom line is to secure more accurate knowledge.



http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v...geo1327.html#/

and

http://www.nature.com/news/three-qua...an-made-1.9538

[Stavros]

It is true to say that if climate change and global warming are issues for everyone then everyone has to pull together, and if China and India go their own ways it won't work -that is obvious, but at least by making the issue important it doesn't just throw it all away, and the Chinese people are also increasingly aware that the costs of industrialisation and urbanisation are traffic gridlock and skies with strange colours and air that just aint right -at some point it could be the people there who force the government to act, but that I admit is a tough call.

We are feeling our way through to alternative and mixed-energy solutions to the decline of oil; solar energy works at the local level for housing and small villages in poor countries: it can't power a town or a city, but it does work -President Carter demonstrated that it worked when the White House ran on the solar panels he installed to show that there are alternatives to 'America's addiction to oil' which at least two other Presidents after him railed against (both were called Bush). Solar is one option, it might not be cheap to install, and the anti-planet Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition here has withdrawn subsidies home owners could claim to convert to renewable energy, but it does work and in the long term is practicable and cheap. There is nothing wrong with mixed energy solutions, they use them in Brazil and Germany, but as I said before, the argument about carbon taxes is diverting attention away from the global condition and narrowing it to a domestic issue of taxes -none of which invalidates the science.

[russtafa]

in Australia this carbon tax will bring down the labor government in which our PM said here will be no carbon tax under the government i lead

[Ben]

these politicians are just after our money and this is one of their thieving schemes along with their paid scientists to grab our money

And we should remember that corporations are private governments. So, in that sense CEOs and other senior executives are politicians. Albeit private.
When gas prices go up is that a conspiracy??? Speculation drives up the price of gas. Again, is that a conspiracy?
It should be noted that corporations are serving their own interests. By design they're out to serve their own narrow interests. Whereas (public, as it were) politicians have to serve what's called: dual constituents. Politicians, as it were, have to respond to the public. But they also serve and have to serve the dominant institutional structure in our society: corporations. (Corporations write the legislation that is passed by Congress.
When we talk about government conspiring to "grab" money from us, well, we have to realize who overwhelmingly controls our government. I mean, look at what Bush/Cheney set out to do: privatize government. Obama has continued along that same path. And this has been going on, again, for close to 30 years.
Mussolini coined the term Fascism. Which is a merger of State power with corporate power. It's happened.)
Just curious: was the Apollo program a scheme to "grab" money from the American taxpayer? What about the Cold War? Or the supposed war on terror? Where the combined military budget -- when you factor in Homeland Security and the Department of Energy -- is upwards of $1 trillion. Is that a conspiracy? And should we just do away with taxes???
And we should also understand that when you go to the store and buy something, well, that's a tax.... What?!?!? you're thinking -- But it's a charge by a corporation. So they can raise revenue, as it were. It's a tax. But we don't think of it as such. But it is.

[Ben]

I'm inclined to think this is all one big plate of steaming bullshit. While I like to think of myself, and most folks I know as conversationalists, that's not to be confused with a climate alarmist. First we get hit with the right hand....convince everyone that polar bears are aimlessly swimming around the Arctic Ocean looking for small blocks of ice to crawl up on. Then comes the left hook.....Green Energy, and all the bullshit that comes with that. GM receiving billions for electric car development ( did you hear the one about GM recalling all it's electric cars?) , then comes all the Solyndra's and the rest of the solar panel hoax, and billions more poured down the a green rat hole. Then the hideous windmills that littler the landscape from Pennsylvania to South Dakota that can barley produce enough energy to keep the ice cream frozen. Yet we have more clean natural gas than any country on earth, but try to get a pipeline built so we can convert the coal plants....And folks like Trish wonder why we're skeptics? BTW...what ever happen to Al Gore???????

Cigarette companies in the 60s knew full well (as they commissioned their own studies) that cigarettes were harmful. But they hid it for decades. They lied to the public.
In the 90s oil companies commissioned their own studies and concluded that global warming is serious and poses a serious threat. But they understood that they're going to have to carry out a campaign of disinformation to, well, serve their own narrow interests.
Plus right-wingers are being rational in denying global warming. I mean, they've an economic model that would be hurt, as it were, if they acknowledged that global warming is real and serious.
Because the absolute free movement of capital would have to stop. U.S. corporations couldn't engage in the utter free movement of capital. Ya know, setting up factories in China to employ cheap Chinese workers and then putting all that stuff on massive ships that pollute a helluva lot and add to global warming.
And, too, right wing economics approaches the so-called "science" of economics as a hard science. Like physics. (In reality economics is a soft science.) So, they've spent decades devising their economic model. And perfecting it. And, again, thinking this is a hard science like physics.
So, they believe their model can and should work. And nothing should impinge on it, as it were. And then comes along the science of global warming. And this poses a profound THREAT to their economic model. And hence, well, they'll resist it. And condemn it. Because it goes against their rational model. Something they've perfected for a long time. I mean, that bastard John Maynard Keynes stood in the way of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Gary Becker.
So, global warming does pose a serious threat to this rational economic model devised by the likes of Hayek, Friedman etc. etc.
It's rational to defend your science, your economic model, your religion --

[Stavros]

In the 90s oil companies commissioned their own studies and concluded that global warming is serious and poses a serious threat. But they understood that they're going to have to carry out a campaign of disinformation to, well, serve their own narrow interests.
Plus right-wingers are being rational in denying global warming. I mean, they've an economic model that would be hurt, as it were, if they acknowledged that global warming is real and serious.
Because the absolute free movement of capital would have to stop. U.S. corporations couldn't engage in the utter free movement of capital. Ya know, setting up factories in China to employ cheap Chinese workers and then putting all that stuff on massive ships that pollute a helluva lot and add to global warming.

I can't agree with this Ben. One of the consequences of oil companies acknowledging the human role in global warming, has been the development of renewable energy businesses, even though there is no reason why petroleum companies should do this -and its not like the level of investment in it bares comparison with the development of an offshore oil field.

So what disinformation are you talking about? I don't get that.

As energy companies their interests are only narrow in the sense that they must discover more oil and gas each year than they produce (the resources to reserves ratio), to meet market demand. Oil prices are not controlled by the independent companies like Exxon Shell Total and BP, and government taxes particularly in the UK make up most of the price of gasoline for motorists. As I suggested in an earlier post, oil companies have been able to reduce emissions and be 'green' because they could afford all the modifications to refneries and oil rigs that are required; chemicals firms, power plants contribute more greenhouse gases than the oil companies. None of the existing companies is hurt, as it were, if they acknowledged that global warming is real and serious, because there can be non overnight change to the way we use energy; there is already a transition taking place, uneven and disjointed, but over the next 50-75 years it will transform the energy profile of society, and it is all part of the challenge of managing the decline of petroleum, climate change, population growth, the depletion of water resources, and so on.

I am not suggesting you lay off the oil companies, but they are the easy target (as are banks and bankers), and in this case the arrows are falling wide of the target.

[trish]

The release of fossil carbon dioxide is the largest contributor to global anthpogenic heat imbalance. This fact points the finger at our use of coal, oil and natural gas as energy sources. Currently the bulk of our energy comes from coal. China is bringing online scores of new coal plants on a monthly basis. But oil is not innocent and American’s still burn a lot of it to run their factories, heat their homes and fuel their cars. Oil provides more than 40% of the world’s energy. It’s no longer a secret that oil corporations have funded anti-global warming cranks. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...imate-sceptics Though coal and China might be the bullseye, oil corporations are not wide of the target.