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julianpenrod
Joined: 07 Mar 2002
Posts: 303
Location: west caldwell, new jersey, united states |
global warming seems used to distract from real situations
 Fri Jun 10, 2005 5:00 am
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Julian Penrod
4 Fairfield Avenue
West Caldwell, New Jersey 07006
(973) 220-1601
julianpenrod@comcast.net
June 9, 2005
Letters to the Editor
Dear sirs:
There can be many levels to an issue, and, unless you look at all of them, you cannot necessarily be said completely to understand it.
It seems there is hardly a week that goes by, these days, without some one or another purported warning about "global warming" being touted in the media, from unnatural heat, to the "ozone hole" in the Antarctic, to abnormally large icebergs calving off the ice shelves. It is a commonplace to hear school lessons, now, going into depth about the presumed ramifications of "global warming", and its supposed causes. There seem few, if any, who are not indoctrinated in the rudiments at least of the claim. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with politically motivated propaganda, the subject has never been generally exposed to the public in all its depth, despite the fact that there are crucial other aspects that go unacknowleged because of this, as well as insights that could help in reversing it, and point a decidedly accusing finger at many who, even as they warn about the situation, evidently continue to aggressively cause it!
Anyone who has any presumed background in the proclaimed essence of the claim are aware of the assertion that the chief culprit is the increase of carbon dioxide in the air, purportedly primarily due to excess use of gasoline and other such fuels in industry and transportation. In making just this one statement, though, many people apparently do not realize the literal multitude of associated issues they are not mentioning!
For example, and crucially, "an increase in carbon dioxide" refers to a rise in the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air, with respect to the other gases. The air is, primarily, composed of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide and water vapor, with a trace admixture of other gases. As one gas increases its presence, other gases may not decrease in amount in the air, but the proportion of each gas, in each gulp of air, can change! Carbon dioxide, for example, can be represented in parts per million. From 1973 to 1990, the concentration of carbon dioxide supposedly increased from 328 parts per million to 348. In that time, the amount of other gases didn't decrease, so carbon dioxide increased from a concentration of 328 out of every 1,000,000 molecules to 348 out of every 1,000,020. Carbon dioxide has risen in concentration from .033% of the atmosphere to .035%! And a greater presence of one gas can mean a lesser presence of another, such as oxygen! If there's .002% more carbon dioxide in every breath of air, there is less oxygen! Obviously, that's not a great deal, but that doesn't mean there can't be effects. If it can contribute to melting of glaciers, it can affect other things, as well. One of the most direct places where the air affects people is through breathing! If such a rise in carbon dioxide proportionate presence in the air can unleash wild weather, there is no reason not to assume that many may actually be succumbing to the effects of effective oxygen depletion!
The signs have been all around us, for everyone to see. Unfortunately, many have been disperse, and not related to each other. In some cases, they were only brushed off as isolated incidents, and, in others, they actually seem to have been officially denied to exist!
You need only think back about a decade, for example, to remember the brief time when oxygen bars actually ran neck-and-neck among yuppies with coffee houses, for popularity! Business types actually took time during and at the end of each day to replenish themselves with a shot of high concentration oxygen mixture! Without knowing it, they may have been acceding to the presence of a change in the gas balance of the planet!
It wasn't only there, though, that acknowledgement of lack of oxygen in the planet's air can be seen. Yuppies also claimed to succumb to a variety of ailments, involving lassitude, even extreme fatigue, and non-localized pain syndromes, throughout their bodies. The conditions were given names from "chronic fatigue syndrome" to fibromyalgia. And, while "chronic fatigue syndrome" received some shows of credence in the medical community, fibromyalgia was absolutely denied to exist, by all but a handful of practitioners, to the point of published reports on the subject apparently even being refused print by major journals! Importantly, though, in their manifestations both ailments bear significant similarity to oxygen starvation, suffered by many who try to climb mountains without proper breathing equipment!
And, as the evident proportionate depletion of oxygen in every breath of air has continued to decrease, the evidence of ailments and illness due to this lack appear to have accelerated!
Yuppie oxygen bars may have all but disappeared, but they seem to have been replaced by aggressive marketing of hyperbaric oxygen chambers and treatment! New Jersey Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment Center, for example, is only one of pages full of hyperbaric chamber services available through any search engine on the internet! These treatments are largely prescribed for "wounds that won't heal", but are suggested as being capable of handling everything from autism to ADHD, conditions that seem to run in sync with the purported increase of carbon dioxide, compared to oxygen, in the air! Since "wounds that fail to heal" are often the benchmark used to diagnose diabetes, a large number of people taking expensive treatment for the disease may actually be suffering from the fact that the concentration of oxygen in the air has diminished! Asthma may be linked to this as well. And "deep vein thrombosis", commonly depicted as resulting from long trips in confined quarters on airplanes, may also be blamed on this! There are evidently no records of "deep vein thrombosis" being caused by long plane trips before about 10 years ago - just as there are few, if any, records of autism or ADHD before about 15 years ago! - but, since planes seem to depend on ambient air for their ventilation, it seems likely that it is the decreased proportion of oxygen in the air that is to blame for any damage to circulation, not tight seats! E. coli, the bacterium so often implicated in human poisoning epidemics, is anaerobic, which means it grows well without oxygen! The fact that E. coli outbreaks were all but unheard of 20 or more years ago strongly suggests that the actual proportion of oxygen in the air may be as much as 5% less than it was at the beginning of the Seventies! Products such as Nature's Tears Eye Mist seem to be being touted heavily, now, to make up for the wear that an oxygen depleted atmosphere would have on eyes, and Palmer's Scar Serum seems to be gaining in popularity, because of its ability to coat over "wounds that won't heal", hiding the fact that the air is no longer conducive to healthy function of the body!
Another fact seems to point at least as definitively at the denaturing of the air as all the rest, if not more so! And that is the bald fact that, it seems to be becoming more and more difficult to keep anything in the air, anymore! A jet leaving Teterboro Airport in New Jersey couldn't even get lift! A Cessna, trying to make an emergency landing on a golf course in Florida, crashed into a utility pole. In late 2004, a plane used for aerobatics crashed in Texas. A two-seater plane, carrying an instructor and a student, crashed in New Jersey! In May, 2005, a small plane crashed in Portland, Oregon. Later in the month, a small plane crashed on Coney Island! A plane recently crashed into the ocean off Costa Rica, with American and Canadian skydivers aboard. And, today, a small plane crashed in Texas, near Houston! The last six months have seen no fewer than eight small and medium sized plane crashes! From Virginia to Illinois to California to Kentucky to Canada to Italy, small plane crashes have become unnaturally commonplace! And, since the number of planes in use hasn’t jumped by several hundred percent in just one year, this must be due to something pulling planes out of the sky, much more often! Regular “explanations” invoke pilot error and weather, fairly frequently, but mechanical problems seem the most widespread story.
It looks like it’s getting harder and harder to get anything in the air and keep them there!
That can be very well explained by a change in the gas composition of the air, making it different in its tendency to support a plane! And, since engines depend on oxygen to operate, a depletion in the amount of that gas in the air is consistent with the claim of “mechanical problems”!
The change in relative concentration of oxygen seems a definite reality, and it is in keeping with claims of industrial and car emissions, but they have been significantly targeted, in the last few decades, yet the change seems continually more pronounced. Importantly, though, a decrease in the relative concentration of oxygen, with respect to other gases, can have a similar appearance to a relative increase in carbon dioxide! “Global warming” devotees fixate on an increase of carbon dioxide from car and industrial emissions, when, in reality, the problem may be the relative decrease in the amount of oxygen! Nor are approaches to the idea of carbon dioxide increases necessarily effective or appropriate. Those who complain of “global warming” place their attention entirely on controlling of what they call “greenhouse gas emissions”, including carbon dioxide and methane, as well. A rise in carbon dioxide, they say, is the sign solely of too much being pumped into the air. What is largely overlooked is the fact that an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be as much, if not more, the result of a decrease in anything that would remove it from the air! Remove natural purifiers for the atmosphere and you can have a relative increase in carbon dioxide resembling what is seen, now!
If you add the fact that these purifiers can add oxygen to the air, as well as remove carbon dioxide, you can see that questionable policies with respect to them is worse than any increase in cars, trucks and industrial emissions! Yet, this is exactly, what’s being allowed to happen, while all the attention is focused on “greenhouse gas emissions” by cars and industry!
In the last few decades, in fact, the increase in industry and vehicles has not been large enough, apparently, to account for the increases in carbon dioxide in the air! It has been opined numerous times, for example, that heavy industry is no longer the mainstay of the American economy that it used to be, and cars and trucks have much more efficient engines, and better pollution control devices, than before! In the same time, however, enormous losses to the earth’s forests, a major control of carbon dioxide in the air and an important source of oxygen, have been recorded! Logging has resulted in huge decimation to the Amazon rain forest. Development in the United States alone seems to have removed at least 15% of woodland, since about 1975! Apparently criminally incompetent land use policies, and weather effects due to destruction of forests seem to have given rise to regular summer spates of monstrous fires, every year, eating up yet more woodland! With as much damage as woodlands have suffered, it is surprising that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hasn’t exploded even more than it has!
The apparent reason it hasn’t exploded seems to offer an answer to another bizarre and serious situation!
Aside from vegetation, the ocean is considered the largest controller of carbon dioxide, the churning of waves alone apparently acting to disperse the gas in the water. As other means of removing carbon dioxide disappeared, it may be that the oceans were literally pushed to the limits, being forced to tap their maximum ability to remove the gas from the air. They don’t seem to have failed greatly in that respect, but it also means that they have a much higher concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide gas in suspension. Alongside the oxygen that animals, fish and mammals, among others, depend on to live! Increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the water also diminishes that amount of oxygen in each breath a sea creature takes! Numerous observed “dead zones”, in which fish and crustaceans are all but absent, can be explained by this, as well as the frequent incidents of seals and whales beaching themselves, these years, as well as the large scale dying off of coral reefs, that has been reported! They may all be succumbing to everything from oxygen starvation, to toxicity of the water, from altered balances of carbon dioxide!
It is the unabated decimation of the world’s vegetation that seems the greater threat to the air than car and industrial emissions. Yet it is regularly and determinedly ignored! Politicians carve out lucrative bribery-driven deals with developers, to allow acre after acre of woodland to be raped, the environment suffers more, then apparent obligatory shills opine “global warming” due to “greenhouse gases”, and pointedly dismiss the importance of the forests! And, yes, they do seem shills, since they evidently characteristically disregard the evident crucial value of vegetation in protecting the atmosphere! Even if all the cars and factories were eliminated tomorrow, if there were too little forested land on the planet, it would take incredibly long for the carbon dioxide to get down to acceptable levels!
For all their claimed concern and education, those who emphasize “global warming”, and the solution of limiting “greenhouse gases”, all but admit their disingenuousness, and ulterior motives!
Because it is a truism that, rather than face the prospect of having to admit the total utter filthy truth about their abominations, the unscrupulous will always place the blame somewhere else. Even if they have to “take the heat” for a far less serious infraction, they will opt to do so, to avoid having to own up to their malignant depredations!
And just this seems to be happening!
The last few years has seen a decided change in reportage on the environment. Only a decade or so ago, news reports would talk only speculatively of “global warming”, depicting weather patterns that were bizarre even then as likely only “flukes”. As hurricanes began to become more and more numerous, and more and more intense; as each succeeding year resulted in new records for the number of tornadoes; as “weird”, “bizarre” and “insane” entered discussion, more and more, in talking about weather; eventually, it had to be admitted that something was wrong with the atmosphere! Eventually, even the apparent dodge of “El Nino” had to be scrapped, to take the rap for the depraved nature of the weather! The media, more and more, began to talk definitely of “global warming” being existent and ongoing! Now, even government is talking about “global warming” actively under way, and the Bush Administration has, evidently, even agreed to “take the fall” for altering documents on the effects of “greenhouse gases”, apparently to give the impression to “the rubes” that that is the cause of the aberrant weather! It’s here that the insightful have to take the lessons from the past and use them. There is, evidently, no case where government has fully leveled with the people, admitted the entirety of its corruption and “taken the licks” for its connivery! It was always one stall after another, one dodge after another, one excuse after another! For government to make a pronouncement is all but to automatically brand that assertion a lie! Even those who lend credence to the purported process of “global warming” will admit that government refused even to mention the term for decades! And the media took a consistently quizzical attitude. The sudden literal relenting on the matter, within only the last couple of years at most, then, says several crucial things. The first is that, just because so many in positions of money and power are willing to acknowledge “global warming” as being ongoing seems tacit proof that it is not! Just the very fact that government and the media seem so willing to blame “global warming” for what is being seen seems a patent declaration that the real situation is far more horrible!
And that raises the question of just what exactly is the real cause for the evident alteration in the nature of the atmosphere?
That the problem seems to involve, or include, a lessening of the oxygen in the ambient air, rather than a build-up of “greenhouse gases” seems established! That policies such as allowing the wholesale deforestation of the land by developers, with bribed politicians in tow, is evidently worsening the situation! With respect to the cause, those apparently willing to face up to the facts seem conveniently not to have access to the sophisticated equipment often used for experimental analysis. As a result, they often have to resort to figuring out what is happening, by what it’s doing.
Likely not the entirety of the problem, but evidently a significant part of it is something that the media, at least on the East Coast, seems loathe to acknowledge, the phenomenon known as “chemtrails”! In the past few years, a growing number of people have begun noticing that their skies are frequently befouled with strange, vaporous lines, stretching from horizon to horizon. Deposited by high flying jet aircraft, the trails can, at first, seem like contrails, except that they don’t dissipate! They form a wispy line in the sky, but they persist, for hours and hours. Generally, they will remain in the sky until they drift out of sight. In that time, though, they often will be joined by two, three, four or more similar trails, producing shapes from X’s, E’s, and H’s to complicated combination called “spiderwebs” or “grids”. While they hang overhead, too, they often tend to spread! They expand outward, side to side, until they are many, many times their original width! And, as they spread, they begin to interact with spreading trails left elsewhere! They collide, then combine. And, eventually, what could have started as a bright, blue day can deteriorate into a dim, dingy, pearlized murk! Many say weather often turns and becomes rainy, shortly afterward. Others say they experience everything from breathing difficulties to bloody noses afterward! Oily “rainbows” in the sky, speckles like dust and even a reddish, thread-like goo have also been attributed to these persistent trails being produced overhead! Speculations of what is being spread include barium iodide, for weather modification; aluminum chaff, to control radio transmissions or deflect shoulder fired missiles; and even virulent pathogens, to diminish unwanted populations! Facilitating the High-frequency Active Auroral Resonance Project - a gigantic system of radio transmitters, spread over acres of land, in Gakona, Alaska, apparently designed to use the electrical currents in the Northern Lights as a weapon - seems another purpose! Too, it appears, a purpose for the trails has been to distribute a volatile substance in the air, with a low thermal inertia, which is intended to take the place of water in weather causation and control! Whole websites now host information on these phenomena, from www.chemtrails.com, to www.chemtrailcentral.com, to www.carnicom.com.
It is generally accepted, by those who follow the subject, that the present condition of chemtrails being spread in massive numbers began in about 1997. It seems contemporaneous with the recent spate of abnormal weather incidents! The largest officially recorded “El Nino” event supposedly occurred in 1996! The recent pattern of multiple massive hurricanes regularly hitting the country began in 1998! The year 1997 seems to represent the quietest hurricane season in recent decades! Tornadoes springing up for the first time ever in Southern California; a hurricane, for the first time ever, hitting Brazil; unprecedented heat waves sweeping across Europe; record breaking strings of tornadoes in the nation as a whole; meteorologists admitting that they used to be able to predict ahead with confidence for up to three days, but now could do no better than six hours, all occurred since the beginning of chemtrailing! Abnormally high barometric pressures are being seen, along with record breaking low temperatures! Tornadoes have been seen pointing up from a cloud, not down toward the ground! Lightning has been seen in circles in the clouds! Birds, in evidently unprecedented numbers, are diving into the ground, while whole groups fall from the sky with their brains liquified. Planes seem unusually incapable of staying aloft!
Of course, chemtrails, themselves, may only be part of a much larger project! Means other than jet trails may be being used to inject foreign substances into the air! The sudden onslaught of persistent aerial trails, in fact, may not mark the beginning of a massive spraying project, it may represent a point at which atmospheric saturation has been achieved, so that any new materials being pumped out cannot blend in with the rest of them, and instead stand out against the background! And the purpose or purposes of the denaturing of the air may be something other than has been suggested. But the evidence is that something is indeed happening, and at least one outgrowth seems to be the utter perverting of the weather and alteration of the very air itself!
And, in its own way, the evident refusal of the media on the East Coast to make any mention of chemtrails is conspiracy to allow it to happen!
When government demonstrates utter depraved indifference to the welfare of the public, it is up to the people to pursue it, themselves.
They must flood editors’ desks at newspapers, television stations and magazines with letters and emails, demanding to know what is happening! Media desks along the East Coast must be ordered by the people, who are, after all, paying their salaries, to mention the subject of “chemtrails”, with the threat to respond to the cravenness implicit in ignoring the subject by boycotting the products they advertise!
The public must inundate politicians, from town councils to mayors to governors to Senators to the Oval Office with letters and emails, letting them know that the people know they are being raped, and with demands that government stop it!
The people must not allow themselves to be conned by the evident fraud of “elections” into thinking that the residents of government offices are actually “the choice of the people”, and not someone tapped by the rich and powerful to be the next rapist of the nation!
And no one should be swindled into trusting politicians, businessmen or the media. Even forces like Greenpeace and “opponents of global warming” should not be trusted, since they seem determined to divert attention from the true threat to the environment!
Most importantly, the people must involve themselves, deeply and determinedly, in politics around them, so that they can respond immediately and loudly to every case of connivery and unethicality they see!
Julian Penrod |
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KNOW-THIS
Joined: 14 Jul 2003
Posts: 3694
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Tue Jun 14, 2005 9:48 am
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If what you're saying was true, they wouldn't be going through so much trouble to stifle the evidence. The real propaganda that is being disseminated is from the polluting oil companies who fund these psuedo-science skeptics that don't want to suffer the costs of having to regulate their emissions. Even NASA is now saying that global warming indeed exists. Maybe I've misunderstood the point of your article but you seem to have placed the words global warming in quotes in the beginning of your post as if it wasn't real.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/22/1338256
Report: ExxonMobil Spends Millions Funding Global Warming Skeptics
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A new investigation by Mother Jones magazine has revealed that ExxonMobil has spent at least $8 million dollars funding a network of groups to challenge the existence of global warming. We speak with the author of the report, a member of one the organizations that receives money from Exxon and a journalist covering environmental and climate change issues.
Recent story:
http://www.hindu.com/2005/06/14/stories/2005061405881400.htm
Accused oil industry lobbyist leaves Bush team
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A former oil industry lobbyist accused of doctoring official U.S. policy papers on global warming to play down the link between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, has resigned.
Philip Cooney, who was chief of staff of the White House council on environmental quality, quit his job two days after a report released by a watchdog group, the Government accountability project, showed that he had deleted paragraphs and edited others drafted by Government scientists.
An older article:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/07/24/politics/main564873.shtml
W. House Guts Global Warming Study
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At issue is next week's huge government report on the state of the environment. Under heavy editing pressure from the White House, a lengthy chapter on climate change has been gutted.
In a draft of the report – obtained by CBS News – strong language that "climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment" was stricken by the White House; as was government research that suggests recent climate change is "likely mostly due to human activities."
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KNOW-THIS
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Tue Jun 14, 2005 9:57 am
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This is what has happened to the science field in general. It has been bought and sold like so many others.
http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2005/06/09/surveyed_scientists_admit_misconduct/
Surveyed scientists admit misconduct
One-third cite research tactics
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A third of American biomedical scientists have engaged in questionable research practices, according to survey results released yesterday that raise questions about the integrity of the nation's multibillion-dollar quest to understand the human body and cure diseases.
The same relates to the oil industry and global warming which they are directly connected to and they don't want you to know it and for obvious economic reasons.
quote:
The study, based on a survey of about 3,000 government-funded scientists, is the first broad, quantitative examination of misconduct that asked researchers to admit their own misdeeds. The scientists, who participated anonymously, were asked whether they had done any of 33 actions in the three years before the 2002 survey. Asked about the most serious misconduct, 0.3 percent said they had falsified data, and 1.4 percent said they had used another's ideas without gaining permission or giving credit. In addition, 15.5 percent said they had changed how they conducted an experiment or its results in response to pressure from a funding source, raising the prospect that companies are influencing scientific papers to support their commercial interests. The scientists also admitted a range of other misdeeds, such as circumventing the rules on using human subjects in experiments, and not properly disclosing ties with companies.
Ties like with Exxon......
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Tue Jun 14, 2005 10:12 am
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The most telling of all developments. The industry itself is even finally coming out from hiding from reality. They must realize that they have kids to that must live in the near future and deal with the consequences of our man made dilemmas? The point is that the evidence has become so strong and undeniable that the main culprits are now even slowly moving in to the final stages of admission of guilt.
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/opinion/11888445.htm
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Over the past few months many major American corporations have left their public denial behind and now acknowledge the reality of global warming.
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Some of America's largest energy companies, including Charlotte-based Duke Energy, have joined Bank of America, General Electric, Ford Motor Co. and others in implementing programs to reduce man-made climate change. Some are even advocating federal regulation.
Like most individuals, these companies are concerned about the negative effects of global warming. Rising sea levels, extreme weather, vanishing glaciers, changing ocean currents and worse air quality are likely to cause major disruptions for we humans who inhabit this planet. North Carolina is particularly vulnerable.
[/b]
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KNOW-THIS
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Tue Jun 14, 2005 10:57 am
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-06-12-global-warming-cover_x.htm?POE=NEWISVA
The debate's over: Globe is warming
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Don't look now, but the ground has shifted on global warming. After decades of debate over whether the planet is heating and, if so, whose fault it is, divergent groups are joining hands with little fanfare to deal with a problem they say people can no longer avoid.
The Larsen B ice shelf, on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, has shattered and separated from the continent as a result of warming.
National Snow and Ice Data Center
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General Electric is the latest big corporate convert; politicians at the state and national level are looking for solutions; and religious groups are taking philosophical and financial stands to slow the progression of climate change.
They agree that the problem is real. A recent study led by James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies confirms that, because of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases, Earth is trapping more energy from the sun than it is releasing back into space.
The U.N. International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that global temperatures will rise 2 to 10 degrees by 2100. A "middle of the road" projection is for an average 5-degree increase by the end of the century, says Caspar Amman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
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Swamp Gas
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 4254
Location: On a Hill in the Lowlands |
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Tue Jun 14, 2005 1:09 pm
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Sore Throat has laid to rest any skepticism in the "Accelerating Global Climate Change" threads, if one takes the time to read them
The Energy Companies and the governments DO NOT want to lose profits by monitoring greenhouse gases, geo-engineering, and pollution.
Rush Limbaugh, George W Bush, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Dick Cheney, and Bill O 'Reilly say there is no global warming.
"Nuff Said?
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Thu Jun 16, 2005 8:26 pm
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http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkzOTcmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTY3MDgwMDcmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxNA==
Science, Bush-style
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JUDGING by his position on global warming, it wouldn't be surprising if President Bush believes the Earth is flat and the Moon is made out of green cheese.
That's how far removed from scientific reality Mr. Bush is on global warming. His continued insistence that immediate action isn't warranted is irresponsible and dangerous.
He should have listened to Tony Blair last week when the British prime minister urged Mr. Bush to make reducing greenhouse gas emissions a top priority.
Mr. Blair's request came the same week that the National Academy of Sciences joined with its counterparts in 10 nations to issue an urgent warning on global warming. Participants included scientists from Russia, China, India, Brazil, Japan and Europe.
Their report said any further delays could eventually lead to dramatic environmental shifts causing floods, droughts, severe hurricanes and heat waves that could threaten millions of people.
Calling global warming "the greatest danger facing humanity," the scientists said the reality of climate change is now "sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action."
The Bush administration has its own take on science, however. If you don't agree with a scientific report, just change the wording.
The New York Times reported last week that Philip Cooney, while chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, made repeated changes in government reports on global warming, downplaying its risks and raising doubts about its validity.
Mr. Cooney is not a scientist. He's a lawyer and former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group that opposes government regulation.
But he reworded dozens of sentences. In one case, he changed "the Earth is undergoing a period of relatively rapid change" to "the Earth may be undergoing a period of relatively rapid change."
In another instance, he added the words "significant and fundamental" in front of the word "uncertainties" to hype doubts about climate change.
His additions and deletions changed the meaning of the reports.
Mr. Cooney resigned his White House position last week, in the midst of a furor over his editing.
The administration's stubborn refusal to accept the obvious is a ploy to help friends in the energy industry who don't want to pay for pollution controls.
But the handwriting is on the wall. Some top companies, such as General Electric, are acknowledging that something must be done and soon. They want one national policy, instead of a growing mix of state and even local anti-pollution programs.
Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, wants California's greenhouse gas emissions reduced by 80 percent in the next 50 years. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has gotten 164 cities to sign a pledge to reduce emissions, including Newark, Bayonne, and several others in New Jersey. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently unanimously endorsed the effort.
Mr. Bush should listen to the mayors and to Mr. Schwarzenegger, who said: "We know the science, we see the threat, and the time for action is now."
Even if the White House continues to drag its feet, the rest of the world will proceed. The Kyoto treaty on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is already law in 140 countries, though not in the United States.
But this nation is the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide. Sooner or later, we must join in a global effort to fight global warming, since that's the only effective course to prevent further environmental damage.
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