60 minutes = $188 million in new debt

[yodajazz]

I don't remember what the topic of this thread is about but I got a strange observation about environmentalists in my area. I am sometimes preached to by people I meet at events about the horrors of climate change and they tell me what I should do to save the planet. Then they drive home in their SUV while I take the bus home.

No group of people is immune from having members who are hypocrites. The major debate is which hypocracy, is greater than another. It's wanting others to do things, you are not willing to do yourself. Does anyone see a contridiction in someone who believes in the rights of the unborn, but is against public education, or against teachers collective rights? Dont they have an essential function in society? And taking away a high school music or sports, is losing lifeline to youth, to find more positive identities. I remember a click of boys that hung out in the school auto shop. Having that outlet, gave them more positive view of the whole education, or at least themselves. So defining the "innocent" as the unborn, but not the resulting youth as same, is a big hypocracy, in my book.

[Faldur]

I don't remember what the topic of this thread is about but I got a strange observation about environmentalists in my area. I am sometimes preached to by people I meet at events about the horrors of climate change and they tell me what I should do to save the planet. Then they drive home in their SUV while I take the bus home.

Spot on, Copenhagen climate summit 1,200 limos and 140 private planes. Al Gore's personal residence uses 20x the national average of energy consumption. If these people are so sold that the end is near why don't they act like it?

[muh_muh]

gimme a list of all the actual scientific books, papers and or journals (actual science not pop science) youve read on biology and climatology

still waiting

[trish]

I never tell anyone what they should do about global warming. I don't really give a shit. But denying it exists and that a primary cause was and is the rapid release of nearly half the fossilized carbon on the planet is simply being an anti-science contrarian for the purpose of saving political face. Go ahead and drive and SUV. I don't care. But don't tell me you don't believe in the basic tenets of well accepted climate science because you're being scientific and skeptical. BTW... I, when I'm not walking, I drive a Prius.

It's been 23 hours since I last posted. That's an additional 152 billion pounds of fossilized carbon dioxide released by humans into the atmosphere.

[Faldur]

still waiting

Don't hold your breath sport.. not wasting my time

[Yvonne183]

The problem I have, is with the people telling me how I should live my life. A lot of these people telling me how i should live are rich millionaire types who in no way follow the same lifestyle that is needed to save the planet. I don't want rich Hollywood people telling me how i should live while they ride limos, use a lot of fossil fuels making a movie especially when it comes to special effects like blowing things up, racing cars around and all those generators outside the trailers of the actors, spewing toxic gas into the air.

Let's say I agree, climate change is a danger to our lives, but the problem lies in that the people that seem to be preaching to me how to live, mainly the rich people, don't give a rats on how they pollute and destroy things. I may not know anything behind the science of climate change but I do know when I'm being hoodwinked by people. I know a scam when i see one, and to have filthy rich people preach to me how i should live and they live a very wasteful lifestyle, I won't believe anything they say. If there are people who truly believe the earth is in an eminent danger then it should be these people who are first to give up their polluting ways.

My opinion. The climate change people are just another form of imperialism. The rich and wealthy making sure the others are kept down. I feel this is especially true where Europeans tell the poor African countries what they can and can not do on their own lands. As in the use of DDT to save human lives. It's not up to the Europeans to dictate how Africans should live. Climate change defenders are no different than the religious zealots of times past, using their tool to keep the masses in their place. As I said,, climate change could very well be true, but by looking at the lifestyles of the rich who preach this danger to others, one can't help but be skeptical.

The rich tell us,,,, Do as I say not as I do.

[muh_muh]

Don't hold your breath sport.. not wasting my time

so as expected the answer is none

[trish]

I certainly empathize with anyone who rebels at being told what to do and how to behave. Especially by hypocrites. So against who, besides Al Gore, are you rebelling? I’m not up on which Hollywood stars are mouth pieces for environmental causes these days. There’s plenty of monied hypocrites telling you not to worry about global warming as well. They will tell you it’s not caused by burning fossil fuels or that it’s not happening. At the same time they know differently because their own company scientists tell them the numbers. There’s simply too much money to be made. It’s just like all those wealthy tobacco CEO’s who claimed smoking wasn’t a danger to your health in spite of all the in house evidence that it was. At the same time there were movie stars telling you that smoking was harmful to your health even though they smoked in public and private. The behavior of rich hypocrites cannot be used as evidence for or against the scientific hypothesis that they may or may not espouse. If there is any moral to be drawn, it’s simply don’t trust the rich.

So instead of looking at the people behind the ad campaigns for and against climate science, look at the people behind the science. They aren’t rich. They’re largely nerdy professors who make a reasonable but not an exorbitant salary teaching undergrads, helpfully directing the research of graduates and working on their own experiments, models and calculations. They [] formulate climate models and propose explanatory hypothesis. They run calculations, perform experiments and check their proposals against the data. There [are] two kinds of progress. Various hypothesis can be shown to be incorrect, while other hypothesis may gain more and more support. So what have they been finding. There is no increase in solar activity, cosmic ray activity, solar or extrasolar activity that can account for the discernible rise in the mean temperature anomaly observed since the industrial age. Such activity would have been detected by various monitoring satellites th[at] have been orbiting the Earth since the late sixties. One I’ll mention in particular is the SOHO satellite orbiting the libration point between the Earth and the Sun. It has been monitoring solar emissions in a wide range of spectral frequencies, as well as monitoring the solar particle ejecta and the solar wind for more than a dozen years. There is nothing there that accounts for the current rate of global warming. The hypothesis that volcanism might account for global warming has been eliminated. It’s true th[at] volcano[s] spew a vast amount of geologically sequestered carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: 0.3 billion tons per year in fact. But human beings dump 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. The chemistry and thermodynamics are well understood. We can calculate the effect of dumping that much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and run climate models based on the calculations. The models so far quantitatively match the collected data up to the predicted confidence levels.

It is the consensus of climatologists around the world that we are living through an energy imbalance driven by in part by the burning of fossil fuels. Most of these nerds will practice conservation, conserve their energy consumption, drive hybrids, and even sometimes get a little preachy with their friends. But by and large they’re too busy to go around telling you how to live and what to drive. [Though they are sometimes consulted to supply the science that is to inform public conservation policies] There is a scientific consensus on global warming and its principle cause. There is no consensus on what to do about or if anything can be done [] to stop or reverse it. We have already taken a large portion (somewhere between 30% to 50%) of the carbon dioxide that was fossilized for millions of years in the Earth’s crust and released it into the atmosphere. There’s no known way to put that genie back in it’s bottle. So maybe Al Gore will tell you buy a hybrid. Maybe BP will encourage you to buy a fleet of SUV’s. I’m sure you can find peacocks in Hollywood who will suggest you put windmills in your backyard and other’s who will tell you put a fracking well in your back yard. I’m not telling you to do anything. Do what you want. I will suggest that you cannot judge the merits of a scientific claim on any grounds other than science. The perception that the corporate executives of big oil are as greedy as flesh eating bacteria and the perception that Al Gore is an overweight pompous hypocrite are both irrelevant. Don’t get hoodwinked either way.

[robertlouis]

Excellent post yet again, Trish. Read the academics, not the celebrities, to get to the salient facts.

And it isn't just the stars in their SUVs. It's everyone who owns a car that they either don't need or which is bigger than justified by their minimum requirements.

[Faldur]

Excellent post yet again, Trish. Read the academics, not the celebrities, to get to the salient facts.

And it isn't just the stars in their SUVs. It's everyone who owns a car that they either don't need or which is bigger than justified by their minimum requirements.

And so the leaders of this movement to save the earth flying around in there private jets and living in there lush mansions is just to be accepted. After all they are above us right? Here to save the planet, disregard there lifestyle choices. Right.. not buying into it.