Posted on 06/03/2002 10:54:03 PM PDT by Pokey78
I know I'll be excoriated as a Bush toady for saying this, but I don't actually get the notion that the Bush administration has done a palpable U-turn on global warming.
Check out this story.
"Last year, the White House described climate change as a serious issue after seeking opinions of the National Academy of Sciences but was undecided about how much of the problem should be blamed on human activities," the Associated Press reports.This year, in a report to the U.N. no less, the administration argues that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability."
Wow. What a change. And no one is claiming that the Bush administration has shifted actual policy. It's also a grotesque distortion to say that most conservatives completely rebut the notion of some human effect on global warming. Certainly Bjorn Lomborg acknowledges it.
My own view of this weird little summer story is that it's a major Howell Raines coup. A reporter finds some tiny and insignificant change in the wording of administration policy, and Raines puts it on his front page. Drudge takes the bait and Rush follows.
Chill, guys. It seems to me that the Bush administration has long held the sensible skeptical position (which does not preclude taking human impact on global warming seriously).
The difference between them and Al Gore is that they don't take this as a certainty or buy the notion you have to throw the economy into reverse to prevent it.
Or something like that.
Anyhow, some guy who wrote a book called Dying Planet , which I read in college, described the "global warming leads to global cooling" in that fashion (more or less ).
FWIW.
There's also the idea that an increase in temperature leads to increased evaporation from the oceans, which leads to increased cloud cover, which reflects back more of the sun's rays.
I still think some of the increased surface temperatures are caused by many weather stations being located in high pavement, low vegetation areas such as airports, but that's just MY uninformed opinion. ;-)
The reverse would also be true...global cooling (an era we left in the late 19th centruy) would then eventually lead to global warming.
It is possible that the climatic variations are cyclical and that man has simply aggravated the situation which was going to occur anyway.
I agree with the President's position, that more studies and reasearch need to be done, but meanwhile we should have policies and technology which let us adapt if the situation worsens. Outlawing hairspray and automobiles isn't going to reverse a trend which may have been instituted in the 19th century by the heavy use of coal as a fuel.
I still say that politicizing science is a dangerous thing, in that it becomes difficult to determine the correct method of dealing with an actual problem.
It is just like the tree ring problem. I want to see different sets of data so that I can see how much each set of data skews the final result.
Most of the 'evidence' is derived from computer generated models which are heavily biased towards the waccko side of the equation.
(Amelia, somehow I get the impression that your opinions about science are anything but uninformed.) In the Boston area, the summary of daily temperatures would support your hypothesis. Boston is on the ocean, which should have a moderating effect on the temperature. Yet, its daily high temperture and daily low are affected by the man-made environment. Go just a few miles in any direction, and there is more cooling. If the average temperture were done right, the correct temperture (for evaluation purposes) would have to be done in a rural area. And the difference between a rural and urban average temperture in areas with proximity would be one good gauge of the effects of development on temperature.
The problem with the existing terms of debate for both conservatives and liberals is we always missed the logical fallacy that the environuts were passing off. Namely that the Globe is warming THEREFORE we must sign Kyoto treaty.
Bush's approach on this put the debate against signing the treaty on much better footing that the old construct. It basically says OK so if global warming is caused by the minor amounts of man's actions what possible changes can man make (given that we have hundred years of carbon release) that would reverse the trend ? Its impossible to prove even with logical fallacies that anything will reverse the trend short of a complete ban on all releases.
But we must do something cry the environuts. Yes, Bush says we will study on how best to adapt to the coming changes. And oh yes, we conservatives will need to employ you scientists who have formerly worked for the environuts to come up with recommendations as to how best to adapt.
Bush has accepted that we lost the first argument but has retreated to a firmer place and at the same time has opened the opportunity to hire away the paid scientific shills.
Good analysis. That said, if true this is a risky play. I think we've seen the same strategy with gun control fail time and again, because liberals will continue to redefine the argument. In this case, the next brainwashing for the public could very well be, "We must do something, since we know humans are causing global warming." If we lose THAT argument, where do we go from there?
Bush's report STATES that the current models are questionable and long term studies are necessasry to accurately determine any environmental climate change.
That's my opinion as well.
Its really the same argument as before because the nuts not only have to continue to model changes in the environment they also have to model the affect of their proposed changes. They will now be challenged on both fronts which are the rate of warming if any, the amount attributable to humans and the amount attributable to any proposed changes. But the added ingredient is doing the cost/benefit justification. It is this added ingredient that the global warming argument has avoided because of the fallicious argument that says Global warming, therefore Kyoto treaty.
For example the forumula might look like this
1. Assuming global warming is going to raise temperature by 1 degree over next 50 years. As assumption that will be challenged.
:2. Man accounts for 10% of the total. An assumption
3. We can change man's affect by les than 1%.
4. The affect of the change by 1% will postpone the the warming trend by 10 years.
The cost is 1 trillion dollars per year.
Or we can use the trillion dollars to do x ?
You can get the info from The Weather Channel. You just need to input the zip code for each place.
There ought to be somewhere that has a HISTORY of temperatures, but I'm not sure where that is right now.
Agreed. And having Rush Limbaugh treated like Sister Souljiah will warm up the soccer moms and take the wind out of the enviro wackos' sails.
How are the Sierra Club, NRDC, et al supposed to raise money and mobilize their base if both parties are the "same" (even though Dubya will take no explicit action)? Great smokescreen by the Bushies and the NYT fell right in. Rush's rant was probably requested by Rove.
He's clearly ratings driven -- people listen to him because he is there because his ratings are high because people listen to him because he is there because ... and round and round it goes.
There are very few humans who could keep their sense of humility after making a success for over a decade getting paid mega-dollars to tell millions of people how great they were.
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