FACTBOX: presidential candidates on climate change (McCain: I know that climate change is real...)

McQueeg will pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate just to screw us all.

no I highly doubt that. he’ll probably pick a governor.

Good article here. Nails it:

http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2008/20080303154249.aspx

Hey Juan, let me tell you a little story......

Chicken Little and "Echochondriacs"

One day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when -- KERPLUNK -- an Enviro-Nut fell on her head

"Oh my goodness!" said Chicken Little. "The sky is falling! I must go and tell President Bush."

On her way to the White House, Chicken Little met Nervous Nelly.
Nervous Nelly said that she was going into the woods to hunt for worms.

"Oh no, don't go!" said Chicken Little. "I was there and the sky fell on my head! Come with me to tell President Bush."

So Nervous Nelly joined Chicken Little and they went along and went along as fast as they could.

Soon they met Crotchety Bobby, who said, "I'm going to the woods to hunt for seeds."

"Oh no, don't go!" said Nervous Nelly. "The sky is falling there! Come with us to tell President Bush."

So Crotchety Bobby joined Nervous Nelly and Chicken Little, and they went along and went along as fast as they could.
Soon they met Lucy Goosey, who was planning to go to the woods to look for berries.

"Oh no, don't go!" said Crotchety Bobby. "The sky is falling there! Come with us to tell President Bush." So Lucy Goosey joined Crotchety Bobby, Nervous Nelly and Chicken Little, and they went along as fast as they could.

Then who should appear on the path but sly old Owl Gore
"Where are you going, my fine feathered friends?" asked Owl Gore. He spoke in a polite manner, so as not to frighten them.

"The sky is falling!" cried Chicken Little. "We must tell President Bush."
"I know a shortcut to the White House," said Owl Gore sweetly. "Come and follow me."

But wicked Owl Gore did not lead the others to the Oval Office. He led them right up to the entrance of his Carbon Trading Pit. Once they were inside, Owl Gore was planning to turn them into Liquid CO2!

Just as Chicken Little and the others were about to go into the Owl's pit, they heard a strange sound and stopped.

It was President Bush's Special Hunting Dogs, growling and howling.

How Owl Gore hustled his fat butt, across the meadows and through the forests, with the hounds close behind.

He ran until he was far, far away and never dared to come back again.

After that day, Chicken Little always carried an umbrella with her when she walked in the woods.

The umbrella was a present from President Bush to protect Chicken Little From any Enviro-Nuts falling from Green-Trees.

A nd if -- KERPLUNK -- an Enviro-Nut fell, Chicken Little didn't mind a bit. In fact, she didn't notice it at all.

The End

As usual, Dr. Keyes proves to be far ahead of his time.

This is the following week’s column he mentioned in the previous post:

Debunking the gashouse gang

Alan Keyes
September 30, 2000

Just how likely is it that increasing levels of carbon dioxide resulting from human use of fossil fuels will cause a significant increase in global temperature — and that such an increase will be seriously harmful to human society? You may have the impression from the media and Al Gore that this awful scenario is a scientific certitude unless we “take action” to prevent it.

A survey of what reputable scientists are actually saying on the question, however, suggests that it is quite likely that no one on earth knows just “how likely” these bad results are. In fact, I think it is quite unreasonable for anyone to be confident that we face a human-induced global warming that will, on balance, be harmful rather than beneficial for humanity or the environment, much less that such a warming would be catastrophic.

First, what is the basis for the scientific claim that global warming is underway as the result of the real increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide that have been measured over the past century and more? As Dr. S. Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics points out, most such predictions are based on computer simulations of the climate.

Have you ever stopped to think how difficult it would be to develop a set of rules that would describe the behavior of the global climate over a century or more? Would this task be more or less difficult than developing rules that would accurately predict the weather in your hometown a week from now? Here are just some of the difficulties that the computer models face.

It is always difficult to describe the real world in terms of a set of rigid rules, but this is particularly true when attempting to describe a situation with many causes that act and react upon each other. The global climate is, to put it mildly, one of the more complicated systems that scientists attempt to model. Very roughly speaking, for each causal factor in the real world, a quantitative rule of behavior is added to the model which describes its effect on each of the other factors involved. The possible combinations of such causes and effects multiply dizzyingly. Dr. Baliunas and her colleagues have noted that a sophisticated computer model of such climate parameters and their interactions would have to track millions of distinct cause-and-effect relationships. Computers do not even exist today that are powerful enough to handle the calculations that would be required. In addition, very slight differences in the original situation or the rules governing the model can lead to widely differing model results. The longer into the future the model is run, the more widely its results can vary from those of another model which expressed its rules slightly differently.

Imagine trying to calculate the path of a ball rolling down a rocky hill. Now imagine trying to calculate global weather patterns a century in advance!

It is important to note that the difficulty of modeling the global climate system does not result merely from the enormous complexity of the system, but also from the fact that the physical processes themselves are incompletely understood. For example, depending on their height, clouds can exert a warming or cooling influence on the atmosphere. Yet, the formation and behavior of clouds remains somewhat mysterious.

The “greenhouse” effect of carbon dioxide in isolation from all other factors is fairly simple to calculate, while the actual result of increased carbon dioxide in dynamic interaction with all the other factors in the earth’s climate is dauntingly complex. Is it any wonder that models constructed by advocates of the global warming theory would have tended to overemphasize the warming effect of carbon dioxide? Or that the warming predicted by their models for the period of the most rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide has continually exceeded the actual recorded warming by significant amounts? In models, it is sometimes easy for a scientist to find what he is looking for — after all, he is in some respects the creator of the world he is studying.

Connected with the difficulty in understanding the effect of carbon dioxide in climate change is the fact that other factors are known to affect global climate — above all, the sun. In the rush to a spurious scientific consensus that human production of carbon dioxide threatened the earth, the possibility that the principal cause of global temperature change is the sun’s varying output of energy was dismissed as “junk science.” Now it begins to look as if the sun is an important cause of the modest warming that has in fact occurred over the past 150 years. The Sunday Times of London reported over the weekend that new research, based on data provided by the European Space Agency, is to be released this week at one of the first conferences bringing solar researchers together with scientists investigating global temperature. The Times reports that the new research shows that “earlier computer models severely underestimated the sun’s impact” on global temperature — and that global warming “is caused mainly by the sun.”

Whether or not the study is as reported, the scientific community is beginning to take seriously the possibility that the sun plays a major role in climate change. And what happens if scientists find that the sun is responsible for much or even most of the modest warming the world seems to have experienced during the past century? Partisans of coercive energy conservation schemes like the Kyoto protocol might find this very inconvenient. For how in the world would we legislate reductions on solar emission?

Perhaps more important than assigning responsibility for global temperature change in the years ahead is the question of whether such change will help or hinder human life. Is a slightly warmer atmosphere — whether caused by man or by the sun — such a bad thing? There is good reason to conclude that we have little to fear, and perhaps much to gain, whether we or the sun is the cause of warming. In Senate testimony last month Robert Mendelsohn, Yale Professor of Forest Policy, reported that his ongoing research indicates that currently predicted levels of warming by 2100 are likely, on balance, to provide economic benefits in the Unites States of between 14 and 23 billion dollars per year. He noted that the critical factor in these predictions, which represent a modification of earlier predictions of significant cost from warming, is that “adaptation matters.” That is, “Empirical research indicates that households and firms will respond to climate change and reduce damages and enhance benefits.”

Perhaps the most important potential effect of the undeniable increase in carbon dioxide will be its dramatic enhancement of the productivity of farming. Carbon dioxide is the most important plant food and a significant increase in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide is very likely to be an important enabler of a second Green Revolution, as Drs. Keith and Craig Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change have argued. Elevation of carbon dioxide may be, in effect, a global, equitable and un-bureaucratic nutritional program for the world, with proportionally greater effect in precisely those areas that now suffer most from low agricultural productivity.

Breathless predictions of melting icecaps, rising oceans, inundated coastlines and super-storms around the world, meanwhile, look increasingly unfounded. If the models were correct, we should already be well along toward such dangers and they are simply not occurring. This might be partly explained by the failure of the earth to warm as rapidly as the models have predicted, but then this means that the models may well continue to overstate the warming we face. Even predictions of the increased spread of malaria and other infectious diseases turn out to be based on simplistic assumptions that temperature is the dominant factor in their spread. But this is simply false; as Dr. Paul Reiter of the Centers for Disease Control points out, the United States is largely free of such diseases because of its systems of hygiene and health, not its temperature, and the coldest centuries of the past millennium were some of the most afflicted with these same diseases.

The scientific debate surrounding global temperature change and human generation of carbon dioxide is vast. The citizen’s duty is not mastery of a difficult and complicated scientific literature, but a general supervision of the use society makes of the claims of science, including the insistence that political agendas posing as science be filtered out. In the case of global warming, it is clear enough that much of the supposed science of the past decade has actually been political activism by other means. Perhaps the tide is turning now, but it is still important that — in the face of ongoing alarmism and fear mongering — we spread the word that the issue of global warming is much more complicated, and much less alarming, than the gashouse gang has let on.

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/keyes/000930

380 out of 1,000,000 molecules in the air are CO2. Round it to the nearest 1/10 and you ZERO!

I think people need to exhale less. Bad for Mother Nature.

Round it to the nearest 1/10 and you ZERO!

Thereby equaling the brain cells of the global warming cultists!

Well, all three Democrats agree.

“no I highly doubt that. he’ll probably pick a governor.”

Your tagline says it all. His pick has best not be Crist.

What’s your point?

You’re right. Look at the crap that Algore is spewing on the ‘net in the name of “Glo-bull warming”!

“The only thing I am sure of is that if we give complete control of energy production and usage to politicians we will have surrendered virtually all freedom for virtually nothing.”

I'm still trying to figure out how SUV’s here in Oklahoma can cause the ice caps to melt on Mars. Everything I know about climate change can be summed up as the phrase “naturally occurring cyclic events.”

When I was a teenager, the climate scientists were expecting the ice caps to extend down into the lower 48. Oh, that's right, the model needed some more development. STILL DOES!

To solve the problem, you must know all the variables, and how they interact. We do not yet know all the variables, not to mention how they all interact. /preaching to the choir

“cap and trade” this!!!

If the lack of sunspots holds, we may just be going into a sunspot minimum, which WOULD result in a Global Cooling cycle.

McCain is in la-la land. I'd like to hear some "common sense conservatism" from him on this.

That's true in many respects but he won the republican party nomination and the alternatives are worse. At least he supports the troops and would be tough on terror.

cap and trade say that the government sets a limit. How is that letting the free-market resolve this issue (i.e, the hoax)

Yes, that’s true, but that doesn’t mean he can’t come to his senses on the climate change scam.

If he’s going to be President, this is going to be a huge issue.

Enviro-wacko policies are at the root of many of our economic woes NOW.

I would if they hadn't told me the debate was over and consensus had been reached. True science does not need a consensus. E=mc2. F=ma. You get the idea.

What is your take on global warming?

Before you answer notice I said man-made global warming in my original post.

Hell, Airbus Johnny, I live in Indiana. Let me tell you about climate change. It changes daily. Sometime hourly. But however often it is: change is the only constant.

Maybe if he didn't live in a desert, he'd know these things.