Posted on 06/11/2007 2:24:12 PM PDT by GFritsch
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey has launched a campaign against what he calls Al Gore's "bad science" and "harmful" proposals to fight global warming. Armey says the former vice president's popularity in Hollywood makes his ideas more dangerous than ever.
Dick Armey's group Freedom Works is vigorously opposing Gore-recommended proposals to enact price controls on gasoline and mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions. The former Texas congressman says when the "beautiful people" in Hollywood embrace an idea, they almost always infuse that idea with a "romantic error."
"While everybody's out here right now celebrating Al Gore's new celebrity status, ... they're not questioning the real validity of the science by which he comes to his conclusions, which in itself is one thing," he notes, suggesting that even more so, important questions need to be asked, such as: "What's the cost of all this? How many people might lose their jobs? What is the cost at the pump of artificially creating shortages of energy?'"
Armey says the "hysteria" Gore has created over global warming has replaced "serious, adult science" in environmental analysis. And he laments that even President Bush apparently has been swayed by that hysteria generated by Gore and other global warming alarmists. Gore, says the former Texas lawmaker, has given a new definition to "shortsighted and self-serving" political behavior.
"Al Gore and Hollywood have made this eco-evangelical zeal such a sexy thing right now and [made it] such safe political ground to be with the beautiful people that ... this president apparently has decided 'I, too, will want to be celebrated for my 'enlightenment,'" he remarks.
Armey is critical of the president's plan to bring together 15 major nations to agree by the end of next year on a global emissions target for reducing greenhouse gases when the Kyoto Treaty expires.
At first I thought Gore to be simply a useless blithering idiot. Now I can see how dangerous his ill-conceived theories are.
The 'romantic error' is that this narcissist is in love with himself.
Well Bush has not bought into it the way Armey’s old pal Newt has.
It has nothing to do with “romantic errors”, it’s all about the money. He could care less about global warming. If there wasn’t money in it for him, he wouldn’t be involved.
Armey was my Presidential choice before Fred became a likely candidate. Thompson - Armey sounds like an ideal ticket right about now :)
-Eric
Actually, President Bush was very clever to bring in countries like China, S. Korea and Brazil into the mix. These growing countries do NOT buy into the global warming craze. The standards proposed will be way weak.
And this will ensure that the Euro-greenies won't dominate the stage anymore on this as they have up to now.
Somebody is lying out their teeth!
I’ll buy that ticket.
If h20 is 90% of the “problem”, we should attack that first. Cut off LA from using Owens Valley water. Turn the desert back to the desert.
Not only that, there are two fundamental problems with Al Gore's sea level theory
1 Antarctica has been getting COLDER in recent year while the rest of the planet warms up.
2 Even if the entire Arctic Ice Cap melted the change in sea level would be ZERO since the Arctic Ice Cap is a floating cap.
But don't let facts get in the way of a good scare...
To any of our relatives who may have been made inordinately fearful by the great propagandist Al Gore, you can set your hearts at ease. If you have watched his movie and believe it, it is only because you didn't have sufficient information at the start to see how out of touch with scientific reality he is.
The core of his argument is this: because global temperatures are increasing at the same time that there has been a sharp increase in atmospheric CO2 at the same time that there has been an increase in human activity that produces atmospheric CO2, it is, therefore, the human activity that has caused the current increase in global atmospheric CO2 and the increase in global atmospheric CO2 has caused the current increase in global atmospheric temperature.
All his dire predictions rest on this weak reed.
In his "documentary", he shows that there is a correlation between global temperatures and quantity of atmospheric CO2. What he fails to show, though, is that increases in global CO2 lag behind the warming events by about 800 years. He also fails to show that changes in solar output track almost exactly with changes in global average temperature on a much shorter time scale.
The driving mechanism, therefore, is increasing or decreasing solar output that has a variety of effects on the Earth and other planets that result in the warming or cooling of their respective atmospheres. On Earth, increasing atmospheric temperatures result in a centuries-long warming of oceanic water. The oceans are unable as they warm to retain as much dissolved CO2 and release it into the atmosphere. The reverse is also true: the move of the solar cycles to lesser output over the centuries results in a cooling of the oceans and a decrease in atmospheric CO2.
The current increase in atmospheric CO2 started a bit before the Industrial Revolution but really picked up in the last 50 years, though there have been periods in the past of much higher atmospheric CO2. If we look back 800 years before the Industrial Revolution do we see a period of global warming that lasted several hundred years? The Medieval Climate Optimum, also known as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), lasted between about 900 to 1200 AD. The average global temperature during this period was at least a couple degrees F warmer than the average global temperature at present. It was a period of clement weather, of growth of cities and agriculture and travel, of people being able to farm more crops farther north throughout a longer growing period than before this time.
Following the MWP, there was a period of rapid cooling that coincided with a dramatic decrease in solar activity. It was only in about 1880 that the Earth started to recover from this period of global cooling and all the disasters that accompanied it. From about 1880 to 1940 there was an increase in the global average temperature of about 1/2 degree Celcius. Following 1940 there was another period of cooling for about 30 years leading many scientists to believe that we were heading into another ice age. From then until the present the change in global average temperature has been scarcely distinguishable from natural variability.
They had reason to worry since we are in the longest and coolest of the 5 most recent interglacial periods. Based on natural cycles, it looks as though we are overdue for another turn-down in global temperature and the ensuing ice age. Given that we are now just passing the peak of solar activity for the current solar cycle, there is an increasing number of scientists who believe that the next decade will see more rapid cooling.
More information can be found in a number of places. Here are a few that will have many links to others:
The Great Global Warming Swindle: available as an MPEG4 download at http:// video.google.com/videosearch?q=The+Great+Global+Warming+Swindle
The series of articles by Alexander Cockburn in The Nation: http:// www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05122007.html
CO2 Science: http://www.co2science.org
The Competitive Enterprise Institute: http://www.cei.org/sections/section.cfm? section=1
The Science & Environmental Policy Project: http://www.sepp.org
Gayle Moore at Stanford University: http://www.stanford.edu/~moore/ Boon_To_Man.html
Climate Audit: http://www.climateaudit.org/
Junk Science: http://www.junkscience.org
Folks who are in the forefront of promoting global warming nightmare scenarios are the same people who were claiming back in the 1970's (see The Apocalyptics by Edith Efron) that the U.S. was floating in an ocean of industrial carcinogens that would result in an epidemic of cancer by the present day unless we accepted their radical restructuring of Western industrial and social policy. What they really seemed to want is a source for their own raw materials without the competition of other advanced industrial societies in the Third World. Some have even said that it was better that millions should die of malaria than be “riotously reproducing.” Thanks, William Ruckelshaus, EPA administrator, for the death of millions in Africa and the impoverishment of billions by your single, unilateral, stroke of the regulatory pen.
These are the same people that are willing to spend trillions of dollars to keep the world from getting another half a degree warmer over the next one hundred years as though that would have anything but a beneficial effect. A small fraction of that money could provide safe drinking water for everyone in Africa. But what can you expect from people who’d sentence millions to suffer and die from malaria in order to maybe make bird egg-shells stronger? From people who live and play in air-conditioned cars and houses and boats and planes, could we expect anything less than spending more money than nearly every small country on earth makes in a year to air-condition the planet for their own comfort and convenience?
There are a lot of people trying to cash in both financially and politically on the Chicken Little scheme of anthropogenic global warming. Like the tulip mania of past centuries, it will have little effect other than the wasting of resources and the ceeding of economic control to political types who have already demonstrated over the past century of attempts at planned economies that they are utterly incapable of running anything except into the ground.
Very true! It is a floating cap so ther would be no sea level change. But that is basic science and basic science has no place in the liberal moonbat mind.
Did you watch the debate?
Did you watch the debate between Newt and John Effing Kerry?
RED China has already said it will not follow the rules. Just recently Rush was reading an article on his show regarding RED China basically kiss their @$$, that they were a developing country and developing countries do not have to follow those rules.
No. I only read Newt’s green manifesto someone posted here. I cannot in good digestion, watch John Kerry ever again.
The Euro-weeny greenies can't just demonize the US anymore over global warming.
Now they're forced to deal with China.
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