GLOBAL WARMING NEWS
Global warming news and global warming science leave little doubt we’re experiencing global warming. Rising sea levels, climate change and violent weather all point to the same conclusion: the planet is warming. Yet we still have global warming skeptics. Are man-made greenhouse gases to blame. Or is it just Earth's natural weather cycles? Global Warming News separates the hot air from the melting polar ice caps on this contentious topic.
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Why Is Carbon Tax Winning GOP Support?
Will Romney/Ryan Pull a Clinton on Obama 08.21.12  Ronald. Patron saint of arrogance.
When NBN saw that George Shultz, a GOP stalwart of the Ronald Reagan years, is backing the idea of a carbon tax we almost gagged on our granola. George Shultz, the 7-year secretary of state under the God of the GOP is backing the most reviled of government regulations since the Endangered Species Act? Doesn’t Shultz know the GOP presidential candidate considers such environmental regulation as emblematic of what’s wrong with this country? Just as we’re clearing the cereal from our chins we stumble upon this story saying former GOP South Carolina Sen. Bob Inglis is cobbling together a conservative think tank at George Mason University to find “conservative solutions to America’s energy and climate challenges.” What’s going on? Aren’t these guys supposed to be saying: “fix the economy then worry about the ecology” The answer lies partly in Sen. Inglis’ title. He’s the “former” senator from South Carolina, a Republican who dared to challenge the rhetoric and rigidity of the Tea Party juggernaut that replaced him with Koch—got gas?—Industry acolyte Trey Gowdy.
George Shultz is the rest of the answer. This guy played an integral part in creating the political ideology being held up by Tea Party zealots as what this country needs more of. So how is it Shultz is talking now of making a huge exception to it? Wasn’t his boss the one who so ceremoniously ripped Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the Whitehouse launching this country into another 30 years of rabid consumption of fossil fuels? What’s going on here? It all comes down to the increasingly dire threats of global warming, the insatiable need for high-power energy sources, and a high powered country so addicted to fossil fuels that the pursuit of alternative energy is increasingly too ugly an alternative to undertake in earnest. Shultz and Inglis can politically afford to consider sober assessments of the facts around them. They aren’t running for anything. People like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are. For them alternative energy legislation isn’t just ugly, it’s lethal. Climate change is rapidly becoming so threatening that from a political perspective taking small steps to address it is actually worse than taking no steps at all. In a globally warmed world the latter can only be accused of being ignorant. The former can be accused of being ineffectual. One you disdain the other your despise. How does whoever is elected seriously address our parched farmland, acidifying oceans, and the endless assault on the ecosystems connecting them from oil-wastes oozing from every pore of our economy?
It will require completely retooling our economy to run on something other than oil and that's going to take time and money. Do you want to be the president who breaks this bad news to the Iowa corn farmer, the offshore oil driller or the western Pennsylvanian town being brought back to life through fracking? People are out of work everywhere in this country, not because of Obama’s job performance in the face of a brutal economy. People are out of work in this country because this is the most inefficient country on a planet that will no longer tolerate inefficiency.
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MIT Center for Global Change Science House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Climate Change Global Warming International Center  |
Not just in our grotesque waste of energy, but in our grotesque waste of everything. Global warming is just one symptom of a country, and increasingly a world, that doesn’t do anything sustainably. Plastic is polluting our oceans because bottled water has replaced our ground water which we’ve ruined in order to chemically alter our landscape to maximize profit through any and all means possible. How do you fix that? Certainly not by deliberately weighing of all the facts involved and making an informed decision. That’s going to suck for everyone, and no one is getting into the Whitehouse saying it’s time to really start suffering. Not after six years of doing without. No, the only solution is to believe the guy who says he can fix everything tomorrow by doing things the way we did it yesterday if we just elect him today.
Why are these guys grinning?
This is where the story really starts to get interesting. This article says The Koch Brothers are also starting to see the global warming light. Then Bloomberg came out with this article last week, that suggests a lot more folks in the GOP are ready to earn the ire of the Tea Party zealots by backing a $.13 per-gallon carbon tax on gas that jumps 4 percent above inflation every year after that. We pulled these choice quotes from the piece just to show how completely many GOP stalwarts are turning from the Tea Party on this subject: “the hefty environmental costs from burning fossil fuels are borne by society, not by those who emit greenhouse gases…With no economic reason to limit pollution, there’s every incentive to overproduce.” This stuff is antithetical to pretty much every plank of the platform the Romney/Ryan ticket is running on. Are we going to see a Bill Clinton-esque move to the middle by Romney/Ryan on the carbon tax issue? If they do, Obama, who has been so lack-luster on environmental issues is out of office. Read the Bloomberg piece. It’s an eye opener.
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The great global warming debate
Why both sides are wrong 06.12.12
Why both sides are wrong 06.12.12
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In the personal evolution that is the process of growing older, it’s not uncommon to become a new species. Accordingly, I suspect I’m not the same person who could shoot the breeze for hours on any subject with the staunch conservative I bumped into in my home town pizzeria a few weeks back, a fellow I still do consider family. I told him a little about News by Nature and asked him to take a look. He said he would if I viewed this video on global warming. The guy is convinced global warming is a crock of you-know what but since this fellow tends to give some thought to his beliefs I clicked on the link and settled in.
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Sorry about the awful art. Time reference is 1880 to 2000
The video is very well done with numerous people from prestigious places like MIT making powerful arguments why manmade greenhouse gases are not warming the planet. Even I am not arrogant enough to think such accomplished folks are just on the Koch brother’s payroll with opinions easily discredited in a few minutes of surfing the internet. While I can’t say the 75-minute video changed my thinking on this subject, it is good enough to merit a 250-word synopsis so, here goes. The first 30 minutes consists of well illustrated arguments that solar activity, not greenhouse gas (CO2), is responsible for global warming. According to the video, CO2 drives global temps down. The video makes a good case with all the requisite charts and graphs. With that skepticism firmly planted in the viewer’s minds, the video moves in with the conspiracy theory: global warming science means political power and jobs for the researchers supposedly saving the planet but also making a nice living along the way.
Global warming stared here.
The next 30 minutes of the video supports this theory with a very believable history of global warming theory which apparently started in England with a BBC series on global cooling. In it, a Swedish fellow says such cooling won’t be a problem because all the CO2 man has put into the air will keep us warmer. Then the video goes into Margaret Thatcher being the first to politicize this issue through a push to crush a British coal miners’ strike and promote nuclear power. Thatcher, the video says, started funding British science to go out and prove her point. That started a cash flow that Bush ’41 turned into a torrent on the other side of the Atlantic by handing U.S. climate science $2b. That took global warming theory from one fringy Swedish scientist to a worldwide industry now strong enough to arm itself politically in defense of its interests. Good Stuff!
Chemical agriculture killing our coasts. Part of price paid for petroleum
This article answers the question of who put the video together and discusses in more detail the credibility of their arguments. I want to take a stab at why they put it together. There is so much more at stake here than whether CO2 is making the planet warmer. For the record, the planet isn’t getting warmer, it’s gotten warmer. We’ve sawed off the limb we sit on folks, now it’s just a matter of how hard we hit the ground. That said, let’s look at global warming from another perspective. Anyone, including my pizza buddy, will agree burning100 millions of years’ worth of stored carbon over 200 years will create an imbalance in the atmosphere. There is no way to say such an imbalance is not going to change the global environment. If that atmospheric imbalance were the only issue here then NBN might feel better about mountaintop mining and hydrofracking. But to quote one of the more heavily cited scientists in the video, John R. Christy said in another publication, "it is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into irrigated farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the air, and putting extra greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate has not changed in some way."
West Bank Wall. Another part of the price paid for petroleum.
Suffice to say the Koch brothers don’t want my pizza buddy to spend any time with Christy, because he crystallizes what’s being overlooked by both side in the global warming debate: the enormous collateral damage from the oil industry. The bloody perpetual political turmoil in the Middle East, the environmental havoc from BPesque oil spills, the dead zones claiming our coastlines in the name of oil-fired agriculture, mountaintop coal mining and the prospect of undermining the nation’s ground water supply in the name of harvesting natural gas. That’s not to mention the mess the refinery business has made of some of the nation’s largest estuaries in places like Texas, California, New Jersey, and Louisiana.
150 m gallons of spilled crude. Part of the price paid for petroleum.
That’s an awful lot of liability for the fossil fuel industries to defend. Accordingly, the Koch Brothers and Exxon probably love the global warming controversy because it deflects global attention away from how truly ugly, and dangerous, their industries are to our future. At the same time those liabilities are too nebulous for the so-called “global warming alarmists” to focus on convincingly. It’s much more effective to forecast the end of the world via flooded cities and weekly hurricanes than through the slow rotting away of global ecosystems. But in trying to prove something like global warming the alarmists will be fighting a losing battle until we’ve all lost the war. Predicting the impact a century from now from increased greenhouses today is like predicting the weather 40 years ago. We're going to be wrong as often as we’re right. Only, every time we’re wrong there is an enormous amount of money and industry that will exploit those inaccuracies to perpetuate the doubt needed to keep them in business. That’s what I think of this video.
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A Cruel Coincidence Revisited 03.6.12
 The 2010 map of election results. Red=Republican. |
 Tornado frequency since 1950 Red=ouch! |
Tornados pummel Indiana, Kentucky How does an environmental website which attempts to interest all Americans diplomatically broach what is, in its estimation, a very important silver lining in the storm clouds once again turning tornado alley into a bowling alley? Not by ignoring the very cruel coincidence that those being hardest hit by tornadoes, which many experts fear are spawned by global warming, are also those most likely to support a leader in November aggressively interested in pursuing energy policy that could make the problem worse. The world climate isn’t something we can prioritize through measured policy. Even the hint that fossil fuels could be at the heart of all this weird weather and tornadic activity, should have us running from this form of energy as if it were a tornado. Instead we equivocate and talk of jobs while our loved ones are literally dying. Yet, how do you tell entire regions of the country that have built their economic existence on fossil fuels that it’s time to get a new job? You don’t do it by telling them, not to worry, that the job they’ve got is just fine. Particularly, when there are viable alternative energies to pursue and so much room in our present standard of living for energy conservation.
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Feckless Pols Follow Desperate
Voters’ Lead 01.10.12
Which one would you bay a used car from?
The deals with the
devil today’s politicians are willing to make might disgust those
of us more willing to sacrifice our own ambitions for the sake of
generations to come. But in our disgust, it’s important every once
in a while to examine our own little deals with apathy and excuse,
whatever our good intentions. That’s NBN’s take on this Time
magazine article which
leads off with the only two Republican candidates previously willing
to admit global warming is a reality. As they article points out, both and now starting to salt their
opinions on the subject with the global warming skepticism that has
become a staple of Republican politics in the 21 century.
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Gingrich’s
strict allegiance to his ambition has left little doubt no infidelity
is off limits. However, Huntsman’s recent backing away from his
strident support of global warming science, stated in the first GOP
debate, is disheartening for anyone still wanting to believe in our
political system. How is it possible that an apparently well educated
and informed fellow like Huntsman can abandon reason so readily on an
issue that could substantially impact every aspect of our lives and
those of generations to come? Doesn’t he have to look at himself in
the mirror each morning? How do you one day say, “I’m going to
stand up for my beliefs” and the next day start shopping around for
a different strategy on an issue where error is not an option?
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We pledge allegiance to whomever listens.
NBN would love to
believe it’s just the corrupting
influence of
the petroleum industry producing a political party this
election cycle unusually
willing to plunder principle to push up poll performance. It’s so
tempting to vilify bogeymen like the Koch brothers as maliciously
misleading a country full of desperate, unemployed voters. However,
the Time article has NBN thinking the blame spreads a little further
afield. It seems increasingly clear these desperate voters are
ignoring global warming science as willfully as the Koch brothers do
so maliciously. A large percentage of this country wants
to believe global warming isn’t a looming disaster demanding a
total turning away from fossil fuels to prevent, and our friendly GOP
candidates are all too willing to oblige them.
That’s because fossil fuels are guaranteed to work economically, if not ecologically. Say what you want about the horrendous inefficiency of mining energy from the Alberta tar sands and then schlepping it down to the Gulf of Mexico, the numbers behind it work. So private industry is happy to invest. No tax dollars, jobs, jobs, jobs and less dependence on foreign oil. Ditto for the new fossil fuel industry called hydrofracking. It’s promising total economic salvation in areas of the country full of this country’s most desperate voters.
Why is it the most religious candidates are most opposed to climate change?
Toward that end, the Time article makes an excellent point. This
ignorance of science by those wanting to believe—despite the
horrendous cost of being wrong—is being helped in part by those
believing in every aspect of global warming science and its
horrendous costs. If global warming believers really believe, it’s
not enough to cite reams of facts in order to convert a country full
of fans of fossil fuels. Particularly when you have political leaders
telling them such skepticism is not just healthy but
possibly holy. Trying to counter such “leaderships” with a
string of science stats is as likely as not only going to harden any
skepticism embraced in ignorance.
One day soon, we all must do this.
Global
warming believers have to put our money where our mouths are. It’s
a lot easier to just demonize folks like the Koch brothers than it is
to go out and buy solar panels for our roofs and electric vehicles
for our garages. But who has $40,000 to spend on something that’s
going to possibly save the planet in the long run but only save $10 a
week in the short run? Isn’t this where our political leaders are
supposed to step in? Sadly, as John Hunstman so clearly showed, these
politicians will tell us whatever
we want to hear to
get elected, and right now a lot of Americans don’t want to hear
about global warming. Leadership is going to have to come from
opening our pocketbooks and being the change our future depends on,
and not just talking about it.
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