Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - Polar Bears, Global Warming and Bush.

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- - Polar Bears, Global Warming and Bush. (https://thetfp.com/tfp/tilted-politics/111953-polar-bears-global-warming-bush.html)

The point is that we do not fully understand the impact of all the variables affecting the earth's climate. Other factors are ocean currents and certainly the El Nino conditions that periodically occur.

If our only plans are to deal with CO2, and possibly methane gas, and Nitrous Oxcide, it may prove to be a waste of time. Perhaps the problem is more rooted in the way we manage water (i.e. irragation of deserts) and changes in our oceans. Oceans serve as a CO2 sink.

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Oceans are natural CO2 sinks, and represent the largest active carbon sink on Earth. This role as a sink for CO2 is driven by two processes, the solubility pump and the biological pump

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink

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Originally Posted by willravel

It's kinda hard to blame California...

I lived in California for about 12 years it is a great state in many ways, I only brought that up because the greatest amount of hypocrasy on this issue comes from California. Hollywood stars, LA, the bay area all want to tell eveyone how to live, but have poor public transportation, high traffic congestion, lifestyles based on the car, and poor air. On top of that many have exorbitant lifestyles and consume more energy in a day than some people would comsume in a year.

Interesting point of view from IBD opinion page.

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Global Whining

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 1/31/2007

Climate Change: Congress' new majority conducts forums and hearings on global warming while accusing the administration of suppressing facts. But it is they who want to silence others and can't handle the truth.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, accused the Bush administration on Tuesday of attempting "to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming."

The Union of Concerned Scientists presented Waxman's panel a survey of 279 climate scientists who claimed they'd been subjected to political pressure aimed at having them downplay the effects of global warming.

In the Senate, Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, headed a forum at which senators could spout off on the dangers of global warming. Interestingly, as Democrats charge the administration with stifling discussion, Boxer opined: "We're not going to take a lot of time debating this anymore."

Idaho Republican Larry Craig observed at the Senate forum that drastic federal legislation would crush the American economy while the economies of China and India expand without being subjected to curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, exempt as they are from Kyoto as "developing" countries.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., couldn't be bothered to explain why her husband, co-President Bill Clinton, never submitted Kyoto to the Senate to be ratified. Nor she did explain why EU emissions rose in 2005 while U.S. emissions remained unchanged.

Rather, she responded to Craig by saying, "I reject that. We are the most innovative nation in the history of the world." Yes, but only because we haven't imposed draconian restrictions on ingenuity.

Mrs. Clinton neglected to comment on just why European signatories are failing to meet their Kyoto targets by wide margins or why China, where coal consumption is rising 14% a year and where a new coal-fired plant big enough to power San Diego is completed every 10 days, is exempt.

Mrs. Clinton, who sees this as "a problem whose time has come," no doubt sees global warming initiatives as a back-door way of nationalizing the economy, and imposing new taxes and regulations, as she tried to do with her failed health care plan 12 years ago.

Fact is, Craig is right. As we've reported, the annual loss for the U.S., according to the U.N., could be as high as 1.96% of GDP. This means today's $11.5 trillion economy would take a $260 billion hit every year, totaling more than $11 trillion by 2050.

Patrick Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, said: " 'Reversing' warming would require reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 60% to 80%, which is simply impossible. The world economy would implode." Is global poverty the Democrats' solution to global warming?

For all that pain, there would be very little gain. The best estimate is that full compliance by Kyoto signatories, even if we were one of them, might reduce global temperatures by 0.04 degree Celsius over the next century, an amount too small to measure, considering natural fluctuations.

Among the scientists who have complained of being muzzled is James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He did his complaining to a nationwide TV audience on CBS' "60 Minutes," during which he talked of "restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public." Right.

If anyone wants to put restrictions on communicating with the public, it is the Green Gestapo and its supporters in both parties.

Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., once wrote to Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson to demand that the company stop funding studies that dispute global warming hype. They demanded that it "acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing it or exacerbating it."

Image that — demand. Talk about your, uh, "chilling effect" on scientific inquiry.

Not long ago Al Gore proclaimed, "The debate's over. The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category with people who think the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona."

You know the type — people like Copernicus, who disputed the belief that Earth was the center of the universe, or Columbus, who disputed the international consensus that it was flat.

http://epaper.investors.com/Default/...GZ=T&AppName=1

Right, lets actually try and validate anything that comes out of an article containing this gem:

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Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., couldn't be bothered to explain why her husband, co-President Bill Clinton...

Per capita, we use nearly twice the energy as those from european nations.
We use almost 8 times the energy per person as the Chinese. The North Americans way of life is the problem. We're addicted to the unfettered use of energy. We see it as our right to be as wasteful as possible.

Exxon Mobile is not funding 'studies' They are funding a PR blitz. If they were funding studies they would be published in scientific journals. They are not. They have their little institutes pay scientists in marginally related fields to agree with their 'findings' (much like the diet supplement companies paying mexican doctors to be the 'leading physician' behind their product) and craft contrary information and get published in magazines and newspapers.

Funny that you do mention Exxon Mobile. Guardian just published this today:
Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

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Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

And no, we should not be debating whether or not GW is happening and is a direct result of our actions anymore. It's as valid a debate as if we gave time to the Flat Earthers.
We know what's happening, energy and time now needs to be spent on actions against GW.

We can stop global warming but we will never try it for real. 1 degree does not seem much, but ut is because it's the average. The temperature has risen with 1 degree in the last 100 years - we can see the consequences. Here you can see what happens if the average temperature keeps rising :

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+2.4°: Coral reefs almost extinct

In North America, a new dust-bowl brings deserts to life in the high plains states, centred on Nebraska, but also wipes out agriculture and

cattle ranching as sand dunes appear across five US states, from Texas in the south to Montana in the north.

Rising sea levels accelerate as the Greenland ice sheet tips into irreversible melt, submerging atoll nations and low-lying deltas. In Peru, disappearing Andean glaciers mean 10 million people face water shortages. Warming seas wipe out the Great Barrier Reef and make coral reefs virtually extinct throughout the tropics. Worldwide, a third of all species on the planet face extinction

+3.4°: Rainforest turns to desert

The Amazonian rainforest burns in a firestorm of catastrophic ferocity, covering South America with ash and smoke. Once the smoke clears, the interior of Brazil has become desert, and huge amounts of extra carbon have entered the atmosphere, further boosting global warming. The entire Arctic ice-cap disappears in the summer months, leaving the North Pole ice-free for the first time in 3 million years. Polar bears, walruses and ringed seals all go extinct. Water supplies run short in California as the Sierra Nevada snowpack melts away. Tens of millions are displaced as the Kalahari desert expands across southern Africa

+4.4°: Melting ice caps displace millions

Rapidly-rising temperatures in the Arctic put Siberian permafrost in the melt zone, releasing vast quantities of methane and CO2. Global temperatures keep on rising rapidly in consequence. Melting ice-caps and sea level rises displace more than 100 million people, particularly in Bangladesh, the Nile Delta and Shanghai. Heatwaves and drought make much of the sub-tropics uninhabitable: large-scale migration even takes place within Europe, where deserts are growing in southern Spain, Italy and Greece. More than half of wild species are wiped out, in the worst mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs. Agriculture collapses in Australia

+5.4°: Sea levels rise by five metres

The West Antarctic ice sheet breaks up, eventually adding another five metres to global sea levels. If these temperatures are sustained, the entire planet will become ice-free, and sea levels will be 70 metres higher than today. South Asian society collapses due to the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas, drying up the Indus river, while in east India and Bangladesh, monsoon floods threaten millions. Super-El Niños spark global weather chaos. Most of humanity begins to seek refuge away from higher temperatures closer to the poles. Tens of millions of refugees force their way into Scandanavia and the British Isles. World food supplies run out

+6.4°: Most of life is exterminated

Warming seas lead to the possible release of methane hydrates trapped in sub-oceanic sediments: methane fireballs tear across the sky, causing further warming. The oceans lose their oxygen and turn stagnant, releasing poisonous hydrogen sulphide gas and destroying the ozone layer. Deserts extend almost to the Arctic. "Hypercanes" (hurricanes of unimaginable ferocity) circumnavigate the globe, causing flash floods which strip the land of soil. Humanity reduced to a few survivors eking out a living in polar refuges. Most of life on Earth has been snuffed out, as temperatures rise higher than for hundreds of millions of years.

http://news.independent.co.uk/enviro...cle2211566.ece

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ut0dp6yU3M - Tibet turns into a desert

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7gpA...elated&search= - The Amazon is drying up

http://www.thewe.cc/weplanet/why_did...s_grandma.html
The hole in the ozone layer did not disappear because we stopped using freon. The hole is still there and is bigger than ever. Forests maintain the ozone layer, and the forests of the world are dissapearing - especialy the Amazon forest

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The 2006 ozone hole area has become more depleted in the late Austral winter than an all time record of 28 million square kilometres reached in 2000.

Is this the 'natural cycle' that some of the media advocate...?

Also basing one's opinion to just media sources tends to split people about the cause of the warming. People reading only the peer-reviewed publications have no doubts who's causing it.

The sky is falling and we must all switch to the brand of widget which I have a controlling interest of.

Nature, not man, will balance out the equation. Reducing CO2 emissions, banning SUVs, and slaughtering flatulent cattle will not have a noticeable effect in our great-grandchildrens' lifetime.

The changes coming in the next few hundred years may not be friendly, but nature and reality rarely are. If a tornado is bearing down on you you can either seek shelter or argue about what caused it while it rips you apart. We can argue about man's [negligible] effect on global warming until we're blue in the face or we can plan for the eventuality and how we as a species can survive.

You don't need to kill cattle. We can and do get free energy from cattle shit. Thousands of farms around the country are actually able to sell power back to the grid. Why does no one do research?

Stegasausus, I think we can all see that when this is made into a political topic, it becomes a waste of time. This has to be a scientific arugment or discussion. As such, we must base our opinions on the research of specialists. They overwhelmingly say that it is we who are changing the climate. It stand to reason that if we halt or change that whihc effects thwe climate, that we may undo some of the harm. That reason is backed up by research.

Yes nature will balance everything out, unfortunatley it means wiping out a large percentage of earths speciation. Likely including most of us.
Environmentalist's don't advocate saving the earth for earth's sake, it's saving earth for humanity's sake.
Our effects are not negligible if they drastically affect the composition and climate of this planet in relation to our ability to survive on it.
Changes are happening and will continue to happen, but we do still have an opportunity to affect change for the betterment of humanity.
Blindly staying the course and buying shares in air conditioning and Atlantic beachfront speculation in Ohio isn't the way to go.

I wouldn't mind being ocean side in Ohio. It is freezing in Ohio today.

The only thing that I see missing is how much CO2 does 6 billion people exhale every minute of every day? Should population restrictions be put in place worldwide?

The only way I see this turning out good is if fusion reactors are tested and actually work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power

The other big problem with global warming is the established businesses, money and power. And the companies and people on top right now wouldn't necessarily be on top in an environmentally friendly world.

But, I see this getting much worse before it gets better. The Earth will balance itself out, but that might mean an ice age in Europe if Greenland melts, or massive droughts in Africa, whole cities would be flooded, and millions of people will be forced to move.

We cannot change the inevitable result of Climate fluctuation at this point...though it feels good to think we are trying. The Earth changes regularly on a geological scale, and often this results in extinction events, which we are fortunate to be capable of avoiding as a species.

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Originally Posted by Chimera

We 'might' be able to avoid it. If you have millions of refugees (billions) and food sources get wiped out, the survivors are going to be in for a shock.

I wouldn't give up hope just yet. There are some extreme things that could be done.

But it doesn't look good at this point. Population increases, easy & cheap access to coal, gasoline/diesel for cars & trucks, ice caps melting (and stablizing things currently, once they are gone who knows what happens next)... It doesn't look good.