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Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

Hunteroffortune said:
Yes, funny that the price of corn has now risen to great heights, so much for supply and demand. The free market is not free anymore.

Only in the sense that "demand" has been artificially boosted by diverting corn to a new market (ethanol). More corn will be put into production until supply meets demand, however there will be additional economic and ecological consequences, such as a vast increase in demand for water, fertilizer, pesticides and fuel for farm machinery and transport trucks to support corn production. There will also be a huge increase in demand for oil or natural gas to run the distilleries to make the ethanol.

Anyone want to explain how ethanol will save the environment or reduce CO2 again? This might be a good question to ask your elected officials.......
 
Eventually, this will run it's course.  The more the public gets force fed the enviro-hype, the less interested they will be.  The scientists should have been content to take their grant money and run with it, but they saw illusions of political grandeur and tried to push for actual power. 
And we all know that there is no way the nerds are going to be allowed to run the show.  :P
With enough time and resources, they will figure out that the human impact is negligible and get on with the next big thing.
(Wasn't California supposted to be in the Pacific by now?  And aren't we going to get exterminated by a meteor around 2033?) 
 
zipperhead_cop said:
(Wasn't California supposted to be in the Pacific by now?  And aren't we going to get exterminated by a meteor around 2033?) 

The Mayan's were only able to calculate their calendar up to April of 2012... The end is nigh!!!
lightingzapA.gif
 
Eventually, this will run it's course.

Not soon enough for me! >:(

I listen to CBC through most of the day.

On the early afternoon bit called Wild Rose Country we get a steady stream.
EVERY DAY!  Most of what is discussed on this talk show is framed in the
context of this carbon footprint culture and I'm getting damn tired of it.

The mothering tone is really quite enough on it's own - but the content!
All these little domestic tips are funneled through as though they were the
health and environment police.

What I'm beating around the bush at saying is, the GW thing has become
so pervasive, people believe it - due to repetition.
Very few people you run into actually have any knowledge of the subject.
Most people don't care. They just go with the flow.

Pure of heart, mind and soul now means, aware of ones own carbon.
You can't be a member of suburbia without some angst over your exhaust pipe.
Nice people don't exhale.  After all CO2 is now pollution.

We need a new crisis.

There won't be any rationality on GW until the MSM focus on something else.

Maybe I need to touch that dial -  ;)

Rant now over............

Sorry.


 
Reccesoldier said:
The Mayan's were only able to calculate their calendar up to April of 2012... The end is nigh!!!
Geez: if they were so good, couldn't they have figured out that May 2012 came next?  (stupid mayans!  Where's your civilization now?) >:D
 
Found this site today on the web:

http://liveearth.ca.msn.com/green/articles/article3.aspx

Also, they are showing Al Gore's tripe at Gagetown next week.  I asked if the Swindle movie were going to be shown as well.  I got no reply.
 
http://www.friendsofscience.org/

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/columnists/story.html?id=58e0c50c-1631-46ca-8719-778c0973526e

http://www.urban-renaissance.org/urbanren/index.cfm?DSP=content&ContentID=17580
The Deniers, Part XXV: They call this a consensus?  by Lawrence Solomon

http://www.urban-renaissance.org/urbanren/index.cfm?DSP=larry&SubID=163

Cap'n, try any of these links.  Especially the third one on consensus.

No. 2 is about how Al Gore had to disown his Global Warming mentor because his mentor thougt poor old Al went overboard.  Al, in a classic case of inversion, declared his mentor to be senile.  Fortunately for Al his mentor is dead and disinclined to argue.
 
Check these out.

This is a right wing jab but a fun read.
http://newsbusters.org/node/11461
The debate was won!-by the skeptics!

This is interesting.  A short list of prominent "converts".
http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idarticle=9469
All prominent scientists who were once GW activists -but now skeptics.

Same list , different source
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming051607.htm

A blog some of us would agree with,
http://georgereisman.com/blog/2007/03/global-warming-environmentalisms-threat.html

Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Global Warming: Environmentalism’s Threat of Hell on Earth
It is customary for old-fashioned religion to threaten those whose way of life is not to its satisfaction, with the prospect of hell in the afterlife. Substitute for the afterlife, life on earth in centuries to come, and it is possible to see that environmentalism and the rest of the left are now doing essentially the same thing. They hate the American way of life because of its comfort and luxury, which they contemptuously dismiss as “conspicuous consumption.” And to frighten people into abandoning it, they are threatening them with a global-warming version of hell.


I had to grin a bit when I read this.


 
And to frighten people into abandoning it, they are threatening them with a global-warming version of hell.

The Vikings thought differently about Canada when they arrived; it was so warm at that time they called the place "Vineland". Hardly a vision of Hell on Earth.............
 
Common sense is slowly seeping into the world........

http://torydrroy.blogspot.com/2007/06/even-some-leftists-doubt-global-warming.html

Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Even some leftists doubt Global warming

Alexander Cockburn in the leftist magazine The nation is very wary of Global Warming hysteria. It is quite interesting to read. he say the same thing as many on the right are saying. we must look at all science witha degree of scepticism. many on the left see global warming as a way to overthrow capitalism. That is why I call it envirnmentostalinism. (H/T to Newsbusters)
I wonder how long it will be until the other leftists get this man fired.

We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as "the mainstream theory" of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush, who signed on at the end of May. The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism by the weight of the global emergency. Amid the collapse of genuinely radical politics, they have seen it as the alarm clock prompting a new Great New Spiritual Awakening....

The marquee slogan in the new cold war on global warming is that the scientific consensus is virtually unanimous. This is utterly false. The overwhelming majority of climate computer modelers, the beneficiaries of the $2 billion-a-year global warming grant industry, certainly believe in it but not necessarily most real climate scientists-people qualified in atmospheric physics, climatology and meteorology.

Labels: environmentostalinism, left.the Nation
 
I think there's a conspiracy going on!

I can't seem to access the Google video link leading
to The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Anyone have any idea what's going on?

It's not available from YouTube either.

Court injunction?
Political pressure?
or just too popular?

Hmmmm

Added later: Apparently WAG TV has a copyright beef so it was
taken off Google video and YouTube. Maybe we can buy the DVD soon?
I was able to watch it in segments 1 through 9 last night.


 
Ross McKitrick, one of the original MBH Hockey Stick debunkers, offers to let the Global Warming true believers show their faith:

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=d84e4100-44e4-4b96-940a-c7861a7e19ad&p=1
Call their tax
Why not tie carbon taxes to actual levels of warming? Both skeptics and alarmists should expect their wishes to be answered
Ross McKitrick, Financial Post
Published: Tuesday, June 12, 2007

After much effort, G8 leaders last week agreed to "stabilize greenhouse-gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." This is the same wording as in Article Two of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed in 1992. In other words, after months of negotiations, world leaders agreed on a text they had already ratified 15 years earlier.

Global-warming policy is stuck in a permanent stalemate for very basic reasons. Important divisions of opinion still exist on the extent of humanity's influence on climate, whether or not the situation is a crisis, whether and how much greenhouse-gas emissions should be cut, if so how to do it, and what is the most we should be prepared to pay in the process.

With this stalemate in mind, I would like to propose a thought experiment about a climate policy that could, in principle, get equal support from all sides.

The approach is based on two points of expert consensus. First, most economists who have written on carbon-dioxide emissions have concluded that an emissions tax is preferable to a cap-and-trade system. The reason is that, while emission-abatement costs vary a lot, based on the target, the social damages from a tonne of carbon-dioxide emissions are roughly constant. The first ton of carbon dioxide imposes the same social cost as the last ton.

In this case, it is better for policy-makers to guess the right price for emissions rather than the right cap. Most studies that have looked at that the global cost per tonne of carbon dioxide have found it is likely to be rather low, less than US$10 per tonne. We don't know what the right emissions cap is, but, if we put a low charge on each unit of emissions, the market will find the (roughly) correct emissions cap.

Second, climate models predict that, if greenhouse gases are driving climate change, there will be a unique fingerprint in the form of a strong warming trend in the tropical troposphere, the region of the atmosphere up to 15 kilometres in altitude, over the tropics, from 20? North to 20? South. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that this will be an early and strong signal of anthropogenic warming. Climate changes due to solar variability or other natural factors will not yield this pattern: only sustained greenhouse warming will do it.

Temperatures in the tropical troposphere are measured every day using weather satellites. The data are analyzed by several teams, including one at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) and one at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) in California. According to the UAH team, the mean tropical tropospheric temperature anomaly (its departure from the 1979-98 average) over the past three years is 0.18C. The corresponding ing RSS estimate is 0.29C.

Now put those two ideas together. Suppose each country implements something called the T3 tax, whose U.S. dollar rate is set equal to 20 times the three-year moving average of the RSS and UAH estimates of the mean tropical tropospheric temperature anomaly, assessed per tonne of carbon dioxide, updated annually. Based on current data, the tax would be US$4.70 per ton, which is about the median mainstream carbon-dioxide-damage estimate from a major survey published in 2005 by economist Richard Tol. The tax would be implemented on all domestic carbon-dioxide emissions, all the revenues would be recycled into domestic income tax cuts to maintain fiscal neutrality, and there would be no cap on total emissions.

This tax rate is low, and would yield very little emissions abatement. Global-warming skeptics and opponents of greenhouse-abatement policy will like that. But would global-warming activists? They should -- because according to them, the tax will climb rapidly in the years ahead.

The IPCC predicts a warming rate in the tropical troposphere of about double that at the surface, implying about 0.2C to 1.2C per decade in the tropical troposphere under greenhouse-forcing scenarios. That implies the tax will climb by $4 to $24 per tonne per decade, a much more aggressive schedule of emission fee increases than most current proposals. At the upper end of warming forecasts, the tax could reach $200 per tonne of CO2 by 2100, forcing major carbon-emission reductions and a global shift to non-carbon energy sources.

Global-warming activists would like this. But so would skeptics, because they believe the models are exaggerating the warming forecasts. After all, the averaged UAH/ RSS tropical troposphere series went up only about 0.08C over the past decade, and has been going down since 2002. Some solar scientists even expect pronounced cooling to begin in a decade. If they are right, the T3 tax will fall below zero within two decades, turning into a subsidy for carbon emissions.

At this point the global-warming alarmists would leap up to slam the proposal. But not so fast, Mr. Gore: The tax would only become a carbon subsidy if all the climate models are wrong, if greenhouse gases are not warming the atmosphere, and if the sun actually controls the climate. Alarmists sneeringly denounce such claims as "denialism," so they can hardly reject the policy on the belief that they are true.

Under the T3 tax, the regulator gets to call everyone's bluff at once, without gambling in advance on who is right. If the tax goes up, it ought to have. If it doesn't go up, it shouldn't have. Either way we get a sensible outcome.

But the benefits don't stop there. The T3 tax will induce forward-looking behaviour. Alarmists worry that conventional policy operates with too long a lag to prevent damaging climate change. Under the T3 tax, investors planning major industrial projects will need to forecast the tax rate many years ahead, thereby taking into account the most likely path of global warming a decade or more in advance.

And best of all, the T3 tax will encourage private-sector climate forecasting. Firms will need good estimates of future tax rates, which will force them to look deeply, and objectively, into the question of whether existing climate forecasts have an alarmist bias. The financial incentives will lead to independent reassessments of global climate modelling, without regard to what politicians, the IPCC or climatology professors want to hear.

Policymaking in the real world is messy, and ideas that sound good in theory can come out hopelessly gummed up with extraneous provisions that dilute or contradict the original purpose. But as a thought experiment, I find the T3 tax clarifies a lot of issues.

In my view, the ideal global-warming policy is a carbon tax, and the optimal rate is zero. I like the T3 tax in part because I think it would result in this outcome over time. Yet those whose fears of rapid warming lead them to demand stronger policy measures, including an emissions cap, should, in principle, be able to support the same mechanism. Especially in light of the long stalemates over carbon-dioxide emissions policy, I doubt any other policy could command equal support from such polarized camps.

--- - Ross McKitrick is an economist at University of Guelph.
© National Post 2007

 
In one sense, it's brilliant!

I'd even go for that plan, but.............

I'm from Alberta  ;)

"Carbon tax"makes me feel twitchy.
 
It'll never work...

You can't explain all that in a 15 second sound bite for the ADD riddled public.

Too bad, it's a really really good idea. ;)
 
...best of all, the T3 tax will encourage private-sector climate forecasting. Firms will need good estimates of future tax rates, which will force them to look deeply, and objectively, into the question of whether existing climate forecasts have an alarmist bias. The financial incentives will lead to independent reassessments of global climate modelling, without regard to what politicians, the IPCC or climatology professors want to hear.

I think there's something to be said for this - only turn it over to the REAL experts on forecasting. 

We all know what a lousy track record the Meteorological community has when it comes to predicting the weather. The science community has done wonders with predicting fish stocks and whether or not margarine is good for you.  Politicians and Bureaucrats are non-starters.  Financial Planners and Fund Managers - few of them beat the market, most match the market. Actuaries and Insurance companies are good bets but on long odds - although most Insurance companies have long lives occasionally they screw up and end up being absorbed because they were over-extended.

In my humble opinion that leaves only one place to get good predictions.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you your local bookie.  I'd choose Jimmy the Greek or Ladbrokes to get an accurate bet on the future.  If anybody understands risk management it has to be them. It seldom pays to bet against the house.
 
No need to predict Kirkhill!( at least not for most of us. )

Temperatures in the tropical troposphere are measured every day using weather satellites. The data are analyzed by several teams, including one at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) and one at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) in California. According to the UAH team, the mean tropical tropospheric temperature anomaly (its departure from the 1979-98 average) over the past three years is 0.18C. The corresponding ing RSS estimate is 0.29C.
The tax rate is set by the thermometer.

Here's the real problem.

The tax would be implemented on all domestic carbon-dioxide emissions, all the revenues would be recycled into domestic income tax cuts to maintain fiscal neutrality, and there would be no cap on total emissions.

It just won't sell unless you can tie this money to some feel good redemption
scheme.  It won't "make the rich pay" enough.
 
Flip,

Predicting the future tax rate (and therefore the "CO2 warming rate") would matter to CO2 producers as it would greatly affect their expected rate of return on any given project.

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic in your second point, but I think that a scheme like this might gain some acceptance as it very much respects the "polluter pays" principle ... the twist, of course, is that CO2 production actually has to be shown to be "polluting."
 
Wise words from a wise man

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9deb730a-19ca-11dc-99c5-000b5df10621.html

Freedom, not climate, is at risk
By Vaclav Klaus

Published: June 13 2007 17:44 | Last updated: June 13 2007 17:44

We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.

In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.

Does it make any sense to speak about warming of the Earth when we see it in the context of the evolution of our planet over hundreds of millions of years? Every child is taught at school about temperature variations, about the ice ages, about the much warmer climate in the Middle Ages. All of us have noticed that even during our life-time temperature changes occur (in both directions).

Due to advances in technology, increases in disposable wealth, the rationality of institutions and the ability of countries to organise themselves, the adaptability of human society has been radically increased. It will continue to increase and will solve any potential consequences of mild climate changes.

I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”.

The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.

As a witness to today’s worldwide debate on climate change, I suggest the following:
■Small climate changes do not demand far-reaching restrictive measures
■Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided
■Instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants
■Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus”, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority
■Instead of speaking about “the environment”, let us be attentive to it in our personal behaviour
■Let us be humble but confident in the spontaneous evolution of human society. Let us trust its rationality and not try to slow it down or divert it in any direction
■Let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives.


The writer is President of the Czech Republic

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

 
A_Majoor, great post, Klaus is right on all counts. Here's another interesting one:

Global warming good for Canada, Yale study shows
MICHAEL HILL

Associated Press

June 14, 2007 at 5:25 PM EDT

GHENT, N.Y. — It's not in Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation, but there are some upsides to global warming.

Northern homes could save on heating fuel. Cities might stop losing snowbirds to the South. Canadian farmers could harvest bumper crops. Greenland may become awash in cod and oil riches. Shippers could count on an Arctic shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific. Forests may expand. Mongolia could see a go-go economy.

This is all speculative, even a little facetious, and any gains are not likely to make up for predicted frightening upheavals elsewhere. But still ... might there be a silver lining for the frigid regions of Canada and Russia?

“It's not that there won't be bad things happening in those countries. There will be — things like you'll lose polar bears,” said economic professor Robert Mendelsohn of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “But the idea is that they will get such large gains, especially in agriculture, that they will be bigger than the losses.”

Read it all at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070614.wgwwin0614/BNStory/National/home

 
John Galt,
Flip,

Predicting the future tax rate (and therefore the "CO2 warming rate") would matter to CO2 producers as it would greatly affect their expected rate of return on any given project.

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic in your second point, but I think that a scheme like this might gain some acceptance as it very much respects the "polluter pays" principle ... the twist, of course, is that CO2 production actually has to be shown to be "polluting."

I agree with your first para, Most of us thought will never have to worry about this.

To clarify, the idea of the tax revenue going to general revenues is problematic.
In Edmonton we have a surcharge per tire scheme that does b*gger all
for the environment. The surcharge was floated as a way to protect the
environment by paying for recycling.  Much like a deposit on your bottles.

If the tax revenue were used for something of clear and demonstrable
value, everybody can smile.  Greenspaces and tree planting come to mind.

Freedom, not climate, is at risk
By Vaclav Klaus

A_majoor, +1!
My fear of "Global Warming" has always been a fear of the ensuing tyranny.

and Hunterofortune +1 also! ;D

If GW actually exists - were the winners! - gotta love it.

Much better news than all that "tipping point" "irretrievable damage" hype.







 
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