Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 12/21/2009 11:07:23 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Without a scintilla of evidence that rising temperatures threaten the extinction of life on the planet, anyone who expresses common sense doubts about the Doomsday prophecies of climate alarmists is dismissed as a "skeptic," an "extremist," or a heretic in the religion of environmentalism.
No one needs to apologize for being a scientific ignoramus on climate change when the world's leading publicist for global warming, Al Gore, is not a scientist either.
Yet some blindly accept Gore's claim in An Inconvenient Truth that melting ice caps and rising sea levels will drown New York City and Shanghai under 15 feet of water, despite the scientific consensus being a rise of a mere 0.18 to 0.60 meters over the next century.
The sulphurous smog that regularly blots out the Beijing skyline is a daily reminder that everybody values clean air and water.
When you feel that every breath might be your last, you know that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced. I accept the weight of scientific evidence that the average daily temperature of the Earth has heated up about 1 C over the past century, and that the cause is man-made.
How could we believe otherwise when the media in the 1970s promoted global cooling as the greatest threat to Planet Earth, leading to a "New Ice Age?"
But as we have witnessed at the events in Copenhagen, the debate is no longer about clean air and water. It's about "saving the Earth" with the alarmist notion that scientists can predict weather patterns 10, 20 or 100 years from now.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spent a couple of billion dollars studying long-range weather forecasting and concluded with what any TV weather girl could have told them: Nobody can predict the weather beyond two weeks and even then the forecast is sometimes wrong.
Yet the world's political establishment gathered in Copenhagen is prepared to spend trillions of dollars on a global warming theory based on computer models of weather forecasting, a disputed "hockey stick" graph, and the study of tree rings.
Credibility is at the heart of "Climategate," the e-mails leaked by a whistle-blower who hacked into thousands of scientific papers at the Climatic Research Unit in the UK.
The e-mails suggest that some scientists were doctoring research data to fit their own global warming theories.
A recent Rasmussen poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe it "somewhat likely" that the climate warmists were cooking the books in advance of the Copenhagen summit.
The Earth's atmosphere has gone through cycles of global warming and global cooling since time began. There's some evidence that if it gets too hot, the Earth will shift on its axis by a tiny fraction, restoring the fragile balance of temperature.
Weirdly, the climate bullies have turned the Tilt-a-World theory around to suggest that global warming will spin the Earth in a lopsided orbit, leading to the apocalypse.
Instead of explaining climate science in a way global warming dummies can understand, the media pander to the lowest audience IQ.
No wonder the Climategate whistle-blower is being hunted down with more manpower than the US is spending to find Osama bin Laden.
The Copenhagen crowd seems to be divided into several camps:
Eco-terrorists screaming "Stop the world! I want to look at it."
Developing world shakedown artists trying to use global warming as a pretext for a massive redistribution of wealth from richer to poorer nations.
Green industry "visionaries" who smell big money in greenhouse gases.
Responsible statesmen who see the need for a measured reduction in the world's overwhelmingly carbon economy to avoid catastrophe.
But they also want to ensure that poor Chinese kids are not freezing without electricity and children in India are not horribly burned by kerosene lanterns due to a lack of coal.
Of course, this takes money. But to paraphrase the legendary US Senator Everett Dirkson, "A trillion here. A trillion there. Pretty soon you're talking about real money."
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The author, an Emmy Award-winning TV news correspondent, is a copy editor with the Global Times. barrycunningham@ globaltimes.com.cn
We have to do something about the weather! We can't have it change like that whenever it wants. Right now it is clear and beautiful outside. Who knows? Tomorrow it might be overcast! Overcast! This is OUTRAGEOUS! I'm super super serial!
What is the matter with these people? CO2 is NOT, NOT, NOT the same thing as pollution!!!
(We’re surrounded by idiots, you know.)
The first stimulus would have been enough money to provide loan guarantees for 100 new nuclear plants in the USA. That would have allowed us to remove our oldest and dirtiest coal plants and convert their steam generators to NG.
6 or 7 million jobs when all is said and done. The fact that they were loan guarantees, a large part of the money would not have gone down the rat hole.
The Commies got it pretty much right!
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