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.
Bush is saying don't do anything and deal with it and Gore says go hog wild and cut everything we use and make business and Americans pay 5 trillion dollars and make the US a Green nation !
Big, Big difference that doesn't fit in Rush's box !
No .. Rush does not have to suck up to President Bush ..
Heck I don't have a problem with Rush questioning issues
But what he did today/yesterday by calling the President .. George W. AlGore went waaaaaaaaaaaay over the line .. especially when it was obvious he quoting the NYT word for word ... THE NEW YORK TIMES!!! ... Rush should know better then that
And then when a female caller voiced how upset she was at Rush's comments .. he dismissed her views/opinions because she was a soccor mom .. To me Rush sounded like such a sexist pig
I have always enjoye listening to Rush but lately I just find him very annoying and I don't know what his problem is but I wish he'd knock it off ....
People who hated when he said anything good at all, about Bush, now adore him and say how great he is. Many , and I'm one of them, stopped listening to him daily, about 4 years ago, when he was boring and stale as all get out. I now put him on rarely and shut him off VERY quickly . He flip flops more than Bush is being accused of, has NOT been all that topically current in years, and IS losing / getting more and more listeners angry as all get out at him and then loudly and borigly complains ad nauseum about them.
What are you going to be posting, when Rush does a complete about face and starts to tell his listeners ( and he SHALL ! ) that they HAVE TO reelect President Bush ?
I started listenng to Rush in 1989... avidly. He's changed a very great deal since then ; not for the better.
LOL .. oh yes he has
You want a certain , no lose bet ? Bet that Rush ( who fancies himself as a " king maker " and the unofficial head of the GOP nominating, vote getting leader / Grey Emmiance of the 20th / 21 rst century ) WILL campaign daily , on radio, for President Bush's re-elecion. It's sure thing.
Someone quoted Dubya as saying he thought the mistake his father made was not spending his political capital after the Gulf War. He may be right. Well, Dubya is not making that mistake, he is spending his political capital like it is going out of style.
When did you start to lesten to him ; what year ?
From Newsweek, April 28, 1975:
If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% bewteen 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the Univ. of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during the warmests eras - and that the present decline has taken the plant about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
The article continues:
Climantologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Artic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting artic rivers (probably conceived by some left wing Harvard professor), might create problems far greater than those they solve.
This article is almost identical to today's articles except "cooling" has been replaced with "warming". I guess they couldn't sell the cooling idea and hadn't yet corrupted millions of our youth through the indocrination of the public school system they acheived in the late 1970's.
Some people see a partially filled glass, as 1/2 empty; some see it as 1/2 full. FR's unappeaseable political naifs see such a glass are perminently empty !
If the scientific data proves that some warming is occurring, the intelligent thing to do would be to determine why, if there is anything that could be done to reverse the process, and what steps need to be taken to protect the safety of the country.
I would like to see the scientific data and a discussion of methodology for collecting it. For some reason, Rush Limbaugh does not seem to me to be well-versed in the sciences, and therefore his statements that there is no global warming have no more weight than the nut-case envirals who scream that there is.
The thing is, if there IS global warming, you want solutions that are conservative and pro-US. If there IS global warming occurring, shouting real loud that it isn't true isn't going to solve anything.
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