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Took 'em that long? Bunch of idiots screwing with the earth.
Once again I say we should kill the idoits that can't live withought the, "conveniences," that is destroying the planet.
Ahem, ^ get off your computer, get out of your house, get rid of all your posessions and go and live off fungus in a muddy hole in a forest!
Lol, wy not :)....well not the computer.
I was mostly talking about things such as cars and such, and I walk so you can't tell me to get rid of my car >>
Simple solution to solve some of the issue.
Set the price of oil to $400 per barrel in 5 years ($300 a barrel of tax) and just watch the SUV die and Hydrogen cars take over.
Use the revenue from the taxes to subsidize the new generation of photocells and no-friction windmills. (all that you need to make Hydrogen is electricity and water.)
Never gonna happen but it wouldn't it be nice.
We're doomed. It's all right. It was fun while it lasted.
George will, republican idea man, begrudgingly admitting that global warming is undeniable, but it will eat into the bottom line...
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/03/27.html#a7682
Solution? Its easy: we need about 4 billion less people sucking up resources and crapping out irritants. Avian flu anyone? Let er rip.
Better soltution? Invent cars that run on chinese people.
--Bill Maher
The science of fear .
[EDIT]^^ George Will did not admit any such thing on that video. Did I miss something there?
Last edited: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 at 2:09:05 AM
Michael chricton: author of jurassic park and expert on global warming.
heavy hitting fluff.
Science of fear...what science?
Crichton's scientific footnotes--which he promises "are real"--similarly misrepresent reality. In the text of State of Fear as well as in its 20 pages of citations, Crichton glosses over a high profile 2001 National Academy of Sciences report entitled Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Key Questions, which opens with the following passage:
Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. 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. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century. Secondary effects are suggested by computer model simulations and basic physical reasoning. These include increases in rainfall rates and increased susceptibility of semi-arid regions to drought. The impacts of these changes will be critically dependent on the magnitude of the warming and the rate with which it occurs.
The mention of "human-induced warming and associated sea level rises" is particularly interesting, because Crichton seeks to debunk concerns about rising sea levels. Crichton's footnotes also exclude statements by the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, which broadly agree with NAS. No wonder real life climate experts, of the sort that Crichton excommunicates from his "novel," have scathingly critiqued his depiction of their field and the level of understanding it has achieved.
As these examples suggest, Crichton's skewed reading of the scientific literature leads him into an utter abandonment of literary verisimilitude. For this author, at least, bad science fuels bad fiction. Nowhere does that shortcoming become more apparent than in Crichton's inability to capture human character. His environmentalists are total creeps, and not just that. They're nefarious schemers, who won't even stop at mass murder to achieve their greater goals. As one eco-terrorist puts it, shortly before Kenner silences him with a bullet: "Casualties are inevitable in accomplishing social change. History tells us that."
BC counters the links to scientific studies with one to a shitty author with a bone to grind. Nice.
Let's face it: Such writing is pure porn for global warming deniers, in much the same way that fictional accounts of UFO abduction skeptics converting into true believers titillate UFO fans.
In the end, State of Fear bears little resemblance to Crichton's most successful sci-fi thrillers, like Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain. Instead, it's far more reminiscent of Disclosure, Crichton's perverse attempt to address the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace by focusing on a case in which a woman harasses a man, rather than vice-versa. Similarly, in State of Fear the specter of a vast environmentalist conspiracy--a problem even less significant than sexual harassment of men by their female superiors--gets trumpeted while real concerns (climate change, for instance) get scoffed at. By the book's end, one can only ask: What planet is Michael Crichton living on? Because this one is clearly getting warmer
What planet is he living on? The same one all these global warming deniers are living on. Like I said, I could almost predict the responses to this info on global warming based on religious belief or in BC's case, worship of capitalism.
http://www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/crichton/
Last edited: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 at 2:26:33 AM
"I am willing to stipulate...etc. Let's assume....blah blah blah....now what? The solution is too expensive."
aka: you are beating me down with science, so I'll say perhaps it's happening, but the solution is going to be too expensive.
Nice tactic he tried to use first...uh, thirty years ago "they" said we'd be entering into a new ice-age. They were wrong, therefore "they" are wrong now. Astounding capacity to reason. Sounds like something you'd hear at a feed store.
Shortly after, he gets his ass handed to him, and he can't defend himself...because he has nothing but naked belief to bouy himself up.
G. Will gets a beat down. Head in hand. Sorry bc, you "climate loonies" are the new flat-earthers.
I've seen the media distort the truth too many times to take this current crisis dejour at face value.
The world is full of people who feel guilty about being alive. They insist on beating themselves about the head and see no reason why others should escape a similar fate. Notice how quickly people turn into matchmakers as soon as they are married.
@Nyra, get a grip, why do you think Greenland was named Greenland? The Vikings raised crops on it. Global warming is cyclical. Blame global warming on Napalms fart thread already! XD
@ KKB All of the evidence that we currently have is that normal climate change is gradual. What is happening right now is extremely rapid. From what we know of the history of the earth, rapid climate change always results in massive extinction. Even gradual climate change results in lots of species going extinct like the poor Mammoth.
@ Stink
In Regards to Jurassic Park
Michael Chricton is a moron
Elaine Graham PhD in Molecular Biology
^^ Cows, man...
The Vikings tried to trick people by naming the island covered in ice "Greenland" and the one that was fit for raising crops "Iceland."
Don't you remember that?
"The world is full of people who feel guilty about being alive. They insist on beating themselves about the head and see no reason why others should escape a similar fate."
Apparently among these people you count environmentalists and climate scientists.
Underlying this statement, I would wager, is the idea that earth is man's playground, or garbage dump as the case may be. Manifest destiny, or something like that.
The attitude of a parasite toward its host.
Last edited: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 at 5:29:24 PM
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(Time.comexternal link) -- No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth.
Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us.
The problem -- as scientists suspected but few others appreciated -- is that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. That's just what's happening now.
It's at the north and south poles -- where ice cover is crumbling to slush -- that the crisis is being felt the most acutely.
Late last year, for example, researchers analyzed data from Canadian and European satellites and found that the Greenland ice sheet is not only melting, but doing so faster and faster, with 53 cubic miles draining away into the sea last year alone, compared to 23 cubic miles in 1996.
One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that as the poles' bright white surface disappears it changes the relationship of the Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90 percent of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90 percent of the light and heat it receives, meaning that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.
This is what scientists call a feedback loop, and a similar one is also melting the frozen land called permafrost, much of which has been frozen -- since the end of last ice age in fact, or at least 8,000 years ago.
Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of decaying organic matter, thick with carbon, which itself can transform into CO2. In places like the southern boundary of Alaska the soil is now melting and softening.
As fast as global warming is changing the oceans and ice caps, it's having an even more immediate effect on land. Droughts are increasingly common as higher temperatures also bake moisture out of soil faster, causing dry regions that live at the margins to tip into full-blown crisis.
Wildfires in such sensitive regions as Indonesia, the western U.S. And even inland Alaska have been occurring with increased frequency as timberlands grow more parched. Those forests that don't succumb to fire can simply die from thirst.
With habitats crashing, the animals that call them home are succumbing too. In Alaska, salmon populations are faltering as melting permafrost pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals such as bushy tailed rats, chipmunks and pinion mice are being chased upslope by rising temperatures, until they at last have no place to run.
And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."
So much environmental collapse has at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions. The Bush administration, however, has shown no willingness to address the warming crisis in a serious way and Congress has not been much more encouraging.
Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get even mild measures to limit carbon emissions through a recalcitrant Senate.
A 10-member House delegation did recently travel to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to meet with scientists studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers to begin with," says Rep. Sherman Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said this opened their eyes."
But lawmakers who still applaud themselves for recognizing global warming are hardly the same as lawmakers with the courage to reverse it, and increasingly, state and local governments are stepping forward.
The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse emissions in their own cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine northeastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a program to cap greenhouse gasses.