Bush administration pressured scientists to lie about global warming.

[uberreiniger]

http://www.alaskareport.com/reu77640.htm

Man, I almost wish mr_dark were still here. I would be most entertained by a ten page essay beginning with "First of all..." and then followed by forty-five pieces of evidence revealing this news article to be completely untrue... nearly all of them coming from Rush Limbaugh or the like.

Comments

[kakita-shisumo.livejournal.com]

So basically, what this is saying it that for the last 100K years, the climate worldwide has "shifted rapidly" and that it has caused major changes throughout time. Hmm. Who caused it to change so rapidly all those times? Must've been the gas-guzzling sled dogs...or wait, I know...it was the sled dog farts that made the ice melt! Maybe it was the whale blubber oil those damn eskimos were burning to keep their families warm and give themselves light, you know...oil is evil.

You know, the vicious evisceration of straw men, while not technically illegal, does seem to display an unhealthy attitude of aggression.

For the record, though, let me clarify my actual argument, rather than the one you're attacking over there. (Note: key elements of this argument require that the world be older than 6,000 years. You have been warned.)

Yes, climate change has indeed happened many, many times during the Earth's history. When it has, it has been strongly correlative with changes - apparently relatively small ones, on the order of a +/- 40 ppm - in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. (For a graphic of one set of data that illustrates this, click here.)

More recently, the relatively stable levels of CO2 (until about 1750) began to rise slightly, and then in the early 1800s raced upward to levels not seen any time in the last 400,000 years, as seen here. Also, around 1850, the general 850-year decline in global temperatures abruptly reversed, and in the last 150 years, has gone up by most of 1 degree C (see here and here), making up all the heat lost in the previous millenium and about half a degree more besides.

Now, all of this does not absolutely add up to anything - correlation is not causation. But the data are provocative, and the rate of global temperature increase is accelerating. Several recent studies have concluded that the odds greatly favor human effects as being largely, if not entirely, responsible for these changes in the global CO2 levels and temperatures because no other source seems to have any hope of explaining it adequately, including one that, quite coincidentally, released yesterday. (Caveat: I doubt they included "God did it," because they weren't sure how to model Him.)

All this earth worship is nothing more than another "guilt complex" scheme to make people feel like something needs to be done, so they can raise our taxes and make us more dependent on the government to "save us". Look at the organizations associated with the "green" movement. They're all socialists and liberals. It's as plain as can be.

You know what happens when you assume? For the record, the left-leaning tendencies of the Green movement come from two basic facts:

1) The right has a strong tendency to pay attention to the bottom line over any other concerns, including those of actual people. Since going Green is expensive, the right has consistently rejected it (this was the explicit argument of the current Administration when it refused to sign the Kyoto Protocols, just so we're clear).

2) It is the basic worldview of liberals to look forward. It is the basic worldview of conservatives to look back. It is the liberals, therefore, that see the problems coming before they get here, and the conservatives who argue that, since nothing has happened so far, everything must be all right.