Posted on 02/20/2003 12:55:44 PM PST by countrydummy
Greens just can't make up their minds!
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=\Culture\archive\200302\CUL20030220a.html
Environmental Says Blizzard Consistent with 'Global Warming' Trend By Marc Morano CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer February 20, 2003
(CNSNews.com) - The record-breaking blizzard of 2003, which left more than two feet of snow in some areas of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, was "very much in line with the predictions of climate models" that predict human-caused "global warming," according to an environmentalist in Washington.
When asked whether predictions of "global warming" have been altered by the unusually cold and snowy winter, including the recent blizzard, Melissa Carey, a climate change policy specialist with the Environmental Defense Fund, said the climate change models actually predict this type of weather.
"It's very hard to link one event for sure, but certainly, increased extreme events like this are very, very much in line with the predictions of climate models, definitely," Carey told CNSNews.com.
"One thing climate change models predict is more increased precipitation and more extreme precipitation events like flooding or blizzards," she added.
Carey believes that the earth's climate is changing for the worse.
"Our system is becoming out of balance. That means we may have much, much hotter summers, and we may have much, much drier winters. We may have an increased frequency of extreme storms like hurricanes and tornados," she added.
Carey sees human activity as the cause of climate uncertainty. "It's not all about warming, it's really about the changes in our climate and our environment that go along with the increases of the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere," Carey explained.
The world is facing dire consequences if no policy action is taken, according to Carey.
"The CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions generated by the very first automobile that rolled off the assembly line here in the U.S. are still in the atmosphere. They accumulate over time," Carey said.
But Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the free-market environmental think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, accused Carey of "selling a lie" about "catastrophic man-made global warming" and the "myth of a stable climate."
Horner believes environmentalists will attribute any adverse weather event or patterns to man-made climate change in order to further their policy goals.
"It's always getting hotter or colder or wetter or drier. Whatever happens - and weather always happens - it's clearly evidence of global warming to them," Horner said.
"Climate is inherently unstable. It is always changing. This supposed 'balance' that man upsets is mythical," Horner explained.
"To insist otherwise is to view the entirety of man's presence not as part of the environment but as a pollutant," he added.
Horner believes the only consistent belief among environmentalists is that man is at the center of any weather-related changes.
"First, man caused cooling, then warming. The darned climate kept changing, but the insistence that man simply must be ruinous didn't," Horner said.
Greenhouse Gases Decline
This week's mammoth snowstorm coincided with the U.S. Energy Department's release of greenhouse gas emission figures for 2001 - showing that for the first time since 1991, the amount of emissions dropped. Greenhouse gas emissions are composed chiefly of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.
The 1.2 percent decline was due to a 3.5 percent drop-off in economic growth, the mild winter and higher electricity costs, according to the Energy Information Administration, a statistical arm of the Energy Department.
But the concept that lower economic growth is the proven path to decreased emissions is a two-way street, illustrating the problems with international treaties like the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, according to Horner.
"The way to reduce CO2 emissions or greenhouse gas emissions is a poor economy and high electricity costs," Horner said.
The Kyoto Protocol calls for steep reductions in the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, which some scientists believe could lead to global warming.
"We reduced [greenhouse gases] 1.2 percent, but we'd have to reduce them 17 percent under the 'first step' agreement that is Kyoto," Horner said.
Horner sees this latest government-released data as a warning to avoid what he sees as economically damaging climate change treaties.
"If you want to comply with Kyoto, you need to reduce economic growth and jack up electricity costs," Horner said.
"We need 15 times higher energy costs and an economic slowdown that is 15 times worse [than 2001's], and then, we will get down to the Kyoto prescribed emission levels. This is all you need to know," he added.
'Market-Based Mechanisms'
But Carey, who praised the Kyoto Protocol as "the best international framework that we have to deal with [emissions]," maintains economic growth and emission controls can coincide.
"When our economy is really growing, emissions tend to go up. When it's not growing so fast, emissions tend to lag accordingly," said Carey.
Carey believes the U.S. can achieve both economic growth and reductions in greenhouse gases with "market-based mechanisms."
"The solution would be for our Congress to enact a law, such as the McCain/Lieberman Cap-and-Trade plan, that's an economy-wide cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Carey said.
A "cap-and-trade" concept enables the government to set mandatory limits on total industry greenhouse gas output and lets companies earn and trade "pollution" credits.
But Horner dismissed the McCain/Lieberman cap-and-trade program.
"The Congressional Budget Office reports that a cap-and-trade program is the equivalent of an energy tax, raising the costs of energy to consumers and producers alike," Horner said. The McCain/Lieberman proposal would be five times as costly as an energy tax due to its inefficiencies, according to Horner.
"So let's be less mean to the seniors and the poor and just propose the energy tax," he said sarcastically.
E-mail a news tip to Marc Morano.
Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.
Rose Correira President Alliance for America www.allianceforamerica.org
The Kyoto Protocol calls for steep reductions in the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, which some scientists believe could lead to global warming.
"We reduced [greenhouse gases] 1.2 percent, but we'd have to reduce them 17 percent under the 'first step' agreement that is Kyoto," Horner said.
LOL:
Mankind's impact is only 0.28% of Total Greenhouse effect
" There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, (the Kyoto Protocol) would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures -- one-twentieth of a degree by 2050. "
Dr. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia,
and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service;
in a Sept. 10, 2001 Letter to Editor, Wall Street Journal
"We need 15 times higher energy costs and an economic slowdown that is 15 times worse [than 2001's], and then, we will get down to the Kyoto prescribed emission levels. This is all you need to know," he added.
"The solution would be for our Congress to enact a law, such as the McCain/Lieberman Cap-and-Trade plan, that's an economy-wide cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Carey said.
For "one-twentieth of a degree by 2050", cheap at any price, and I've got some Colorado Sea Side estates I'll sell yah cheap.
Seems as though there is room for substantial doubt as to any negative effect human created CO2, Methane etc. may have on our Climate future, other than the certain negative effects imposed by enviro-nazis on the basis of their pseudoscientific bovine emissions.
At least these folks believe so:
Petition Project: http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p357.htm
During the past 2 years, more than 17,100 basic and applied American scientists, two-thirds with advanced degrees, have signed the Global Warming Petition.
Specifically declaring:
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
Signers of this petition so far include 2,660 physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, and environmental scientists (select this link for a listing of these individuals) who are especially well qualified to evaluate the effects of carbon dioxide on the Earth's atmosphere and climate.
Signers of this petition also include 5,017 scientists whose fields of specialization in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and other life sciences (select this link for a listing of these individuals) make them especially well qualified to evaluate the effects of carbon dioxide upon the Earth's plant and animal life.
Nearly all of the initial 17,100 scientist signers have technical training suitable for the evaluation of the relevant research data, and many are trained in related fields.
Despite the findings of the EPA judge, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus banned DDT in 1972. Ruckelshaus never attended a single hour of the seven months of EPA hearings on DDT. His aides reported he did not even read the transcript of the EPA hearings on DDT. Ruckleshaus was a member and fundraiser for the Environmental Defense Fund -- a group who -- according to a deposition in a federal lawsuit -- conspired to discredit the scientists who defended DDT.
Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing."
DDT should be hailed as one of the greatest achievements in public health. Instead, unscrupulous activists have made it the poster child for the environmental apocalypse.
Let's hope that in the 21st century our society comes to realize that genocide by junk science is no different than genocide by the gas chamber.
I remember that too. I also remember learning that CO2 came out of your lungs when you exhaled. IOW, every human being (and animal) is a source of constant CO2 emissions. The truly conscientious environmentalist would have to stop breathing in order to cut CO2 emissions.
If the statement to which I referred were true, the hundreds of millions of years of accumulated volcanic and dinosaur contributions of CO2, SO2, and Methane (phew!) should have screwed up the atmosphere most royally.
This luddite dogma the left spouts is a religion (pagan at that) and is qualitatively no different from what the Vatican used to put Gallileo under house arrest, nothing but enforced ignorance.
To the environmental left, the former effect is desirable since it helps reduce the human population. The latter statement deserves much more investigation than it will ever get in the general press or academia.
I think everybody grew up hearing about paper thin eagle eggs and other nasty effects traced to DDT and the relationship between cancer rates and toxins in the environment is a possibility. Maybe the ban was a good thing but I find myself becoming more and more skeptical of anything these people advocate. On many issues they are proven liars.
True at least for the rabid darwinists. There are many darwinists who defend the theory without understanding it. Since they are confused, they may or may not buy global warming. The political link with darwinism seems to be usually leftist but occasionaly ultra-right (as in Nazi).
Surely that would mean that we are experiencing, you know, Global Warming.
And I believe that if my Grandma had wheels, she'd be a Corvette.
Ev-i-dence!...we need ev-i-dence please.
Yes... And there are trillions of tons of that mind numbing pollutant being poured into the atmosphere daily by a sensationalist media catalyst fed by these "Born Again Pagans!"
Save the planet! Discredit EnvironMentalists!!!
Actually they're not, eeriegeno: the primary products of combustion are CO2, as stated, and water. Carbon monoxide is a product of incomplete combustion, and it's a very minor player.
I just finished shoveling 18 inches of global warming.
Tell that to the grass and trees in my front yard. They have been converting CO2 to O2 since they were little seeds. I'm sure they have removed some of that CO2 from the atmosphere by now.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.