Have you had a bellyful of ignos chortling over this year's extreme winter conditions disproving “global warming?’ That’s why the preferred term is “climate change.”We had snow fall in forty-nine states last week, breaking century-long records in places. That’s an example of what we can expect as we load carbon into the atmosphere and oceans. The weather can go all crazy on us.
And we are seeing warming. You can look it up. Or look around you. Here in Houston you can find White Wing Doves North of I-10. That wasn’t so 20 or 30 years ago. Some years back I was surprised to see Turkey Vultures circling over Western New York. Things are changing, and not on a geologic time scale. Predictions are for more and stronger storm systems, but don’t expect The Day After Tomorrow.
They get it at the Pentagon. Military planners briefed Congress last week on climate change as a national security issue, and are planning to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 34% by the year 2020.
posted by Julia B. @ 1:35 AM
4 Comments:
Judge Hoarse,
The right wing always seem to find support from the public often on issues that are not in their best interests, (see: "What's the Matter With Kansas?")
Why would Christian Conservatives care about bonuses for wall street fat cats; why would Reagan Democrats oppose minimum wage increases; or elders insurance reform?
This climate change issue is particularly baffling because it effects everyone and those on high who oppose policy changes brought by the reality community only do so in the interest of corporations, such as cap in trade.
The attempts at obfuscation by the right are very successful for some time now exactly because it is climate change and not global warming that we are experiencing. The recently late Michael Crighton wrote a piece of shit called, "State of Fear" in 2004 that purports to prove climate change is a hoax, and does so persuasively to the point that I felt obliged to check his facts from on-line sources. If I hadn't tid-bits like the fact that arctic ice is melting but antarctic ice is growing might have turned me into a useful idiot.
I hate to seem elitist, but if the great unwashed got to determine the authority of scientific findings for the last 300 years, we'd still be debating gravity on a flat earth.
LD
With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore," the tycoon told members of his Trump National Golf Club in Westchester in a recent speech. "Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn't care less. It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America's stupidity." The crowd of 500 stood up and cheered
Mr. Trump,
I don't think any of that is true. If one were to see the modern Chinese industrial centers on an average day the air quality is staggeringly poor. They have made policy to head off disaster. Their problems with toxic pollutants and ground erosion (see Yellow River Damn)are enormous.
Both the Indians and the Chinese know there can't be 2 billion commercial and personal vehicles and 2 billion Frigidairs or 2 billion TV's, microwaves, etc.
This country's best interest is to transition away from dirty technology, and the rest of the world knows this too.
Travel overseas sometime and make those arguments that don't hang out at country clubs. It might reveal the truth after time that when all your friends say you are drunk it probably doesn't help to vomit on their shoes if you want to convince them to let you drive your Hummer.
The penatagon understands this and they offer a way for the nation and world to deal with the logistics.
I listened to retired Admiral Dennis McGinn as he spoke to the City Club Of Cleveland. He proposed a cogent comprehensive and realistic approach.
He offered sensible reasons to move away from a carbon economy, and offered strong rationale even for those who have been "unpersuaded by the science."
The time for change has come. We should not aspire to be the nation with the worst energy ethic, in the name of competition with China. People who now say we need relaxed environmental laws so that we can compete with China and India are the same ones who had their cronies in the Senate draft the legislation that made it profitable for them to export the very jobs they now claim to want to make our nation competitive with.
We use 25% of the world's fossil fuel. We have 3% of the world's reserves. With that kind of leverage the need to have a sustainable energy policy is a strategic and security imperative.
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