It’s fair for the Bush administration to bring economic concerns to the table when it comes to global warming. But it shouldn’t walk away from the table, as it did last week at the global warming summit in Montreal. U.S. officials walked out of a round of informal talks aimed at finding ways to curb greenhouse gases.
Former President Bill Clinton added to the criticism in a speech Friday, calling the administration’s assertion that reducing greenhouse gases would hurt the U.S. economy “flat wrong.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
Registered?
Commenting on WE Blog now requires you to be a Kansas.com member. Use the links above to register, if you haven't already, or to log in.Contact us
Follow us
Daily Archives
-
Recent Comments
- CapnAmerica on Open thread 11/23
- donndublin on Open thread 11/23
- Regular on Open thread 11/23
- ANTI on Open thread 11/23
- Blaidd_Drwg69 on Too many exemptions
- JimJohnson on Open thread 11/23
- JimJohnson on Open thread 11/23
- ANTI on Open thread 11/23
- JimJohnson on Open thread 11/23
- BlueJay on Open thread 11/23
17 Comments
This administration, sheesh. It’s all ideology, all the time.
For instance, they argue that the reason pre-emptive war can be justified (Iraq, 2003) is that certain weapons are comprised of a combination of attributes so powerful as to comprise a direct threat to our American way of life. For example, nuclear weapons are incredibly destructive (attribute one) but when this is taken in combination with the ease of distribution granted by, say, a “dirty” or suitcase nuke (attribute two) then they pose a threat of threshold sufficient to justify pre-emptive war. It’s this modern combination of deadly attributes that, according to President Bush, justified war in Iraq, a war designed to preempt the evidence of such weapons taking the shape of a mushroom cloud over any part of the US.
But look at catastrophic climate change. Its attribute number one, force, far outweighs any one nuclear weapon. In fact, the force released in catastrophic climate change dwarfs that of a very large number of modern nuclear weapons. And its “ease of distribution” attribute also far outweighs the ease of distribution of a dirty bomb. That is, abrupt climate change would very likely instantly distribute catastrophy to the entire globe; distribution in the way we think of a nuclear dirty bomb only applies when the effects of such a weapon are localized. Abrupt climate change affects the globe and is not limited to locale.
My point is that, by the definition the administration used for weapons meeting the threshold of preemptive war, abrupt climate change far, far outweighs the threat from nuclear WMDs (plural).
So does the Bush administration act immediately after asserting that any and all action is justified in preventing abrupt climate change, no matter the cost?
Uh, no way. Quite the opposite. The US is the ONLY country to walk away from talks about such action, the France if you will of this effort.
Why? Ideology: the Right relies on pure ideology to “know” that the earth is a self-correcting system, although closed, and insists in this instance of potential catastrophy that only overwhelmingly conclusive evidence is necessary to show human effect on climate (bad or good).
Dangerous, incredibly dangerous hypocrisy that’s not limited to the negative effects of global climate change; it’s also indirectly but powerfully toxic to American democracy (empirically). It’s dangerous to our democracy because the Right prefers to call the Left cowards as it exasperatingly wonders why the Left won’t “sign on” to the war in Iraq.
The administration displays a fundamental weakness in its principles of government when it refuses to properly sort threats to our national security. The Left is NOT acting irrationally by refusing to support the (preemptive) war in Iraq until the US resumes its leading role in the area of controlling global climate change. (It’s obviously politically inexpedient of the Left, though, which is not the least of the Left’s problems. For instance, the Left refuses to articulate this position. Which it may, or may not, hold.)
All ideology, all the time. These Bush guys, sheesh.
I am in no way a “right wing ideologue”, and consider myself open minded. Such is the case with so-called global warming.
The earth, even though closed, as you put it, is and has always been a self correcting system. If is wasn’t, we wouldn’t be here blogging.
The earth has gone through, and will continue to go through, radical climate changes. For instance, the last ice age was brought about by an age of high temperature. The earth has been slowly warming up since. To place the blame squarely on green house gasses is, in my opinion, wrong.
The release of volcanic gasses outweighs all the green house gasses we have released this century. How does that square with science?
I could care less what this current administration believes or doesn’t believe concerning global warming. My personal belief is that it is the chicken little syndrome.
All the models showing the gasses causing global warming are wholly influenced by the programmers. If you want the problem to be there, you will find it. If you decide to take into consideration the history of the earth and its climatic changes, I believe you will find that human caused global warming is nonsense.
Your argument holds water if it were correct in it’s assumption, that global warming would indeed be more dangerous to freedom than WMD. I just don’t buy it.
Just as a matter of information:
“Over a five year period commencing in 1999, scientists working with the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) have drilled 3,270m into the Dome C ice, which equates to drilling nearly 900,000 years back in time.
Gas bubbles trapped as the ice formed yield important evidence of the mixture of gases present in the atmosphere at that time, and of temperature.
“One of the most important things is we can put current levels of carbon dioxide and methane into a long-term context,” said project leader Thomas Stocker from the University of Bern, Switzerland.
“We find that CO2 is about 30% higher than at any time, and methane 130% higher than at any time; and the rates of increase are absolutely exceptional: for CO2, 200 times faster than at any time in the last 650,000 years.”
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2005/1128ice.shtml
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-11/aaft-nee111805.php
Walker
Are you sure your hot air is not the cause? :-}
If we all die in the coming ice age, it’s just the earth’s way of cleansing itself. No species on earth lasts forever, not even us.
Speak for yourself. I’ll take mine on the rocks.
People on earth are also causing the global warming reported on Mars?
http://www.mos.org/cst/article/80/9.html
“If both Mars and Earth are experiencing global warming, then perhaps there is a larger phenomenon going on in the Solar System that is causing their global climates to change”
Did Bubba ever make such strong statements when he was president for 8 years? Did he lay his presidential capital on the line to get the Kyoto treaty through the Congress? No, I didn’t think so. The hot air eminates from Bubba.
If all the politicians, and some bloggers, stopped talking for two weeks, we would have global cooling on a massive scale!
Does that include you?
Hmmm . . . interesting link, KS: If there an outside influence accounting for global warming, than it does make to Kyoto treaty a non-issue.
XXX,You bring up some good points with the CO2 gasses, however the earth is 4 billion years old. A little over a half million years is less than a burp in the earth’s history. To use that as a standard for CO2 gasses is hardly proof of what is going on now.
There are still many questions concerning what exactly the level of gasses found represents. Were they a by-product of carbonaceous rock? How much CO2 was absorbed by the earth’s waters, including oceans? Is this same process going on today reflective of the past? Is it different? Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 14 million years. What was theLevel of methane and CO2 during that time? More, the same, less? Scientific minds want to know. To assume that what man is doing to the atmosphere of this planet is the root cause of global warming is, in my opinion, arrogance and nothing more.
Global warming and the following ice ages have always been part of the earth’s natural cycle. If you compacted earth’s timeline into a minute, humans have been here less than a second. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that man has had a significant impact, just look at the deforestation, toxic dumping, and pollution from burning fossil fuels all over the world. We’re certainly destructive little pests.
Damoon,I agree with you on some counts: toxic dumping, fossil fuels. However, there is estimated to be more trees on this country than at any other time in her observable past. The rest of the world has a problem with deforestation, but are working on it.
Man can be a blight, but not to the extent we are being blamed for.
There is only a very small portion of the ancient forest left in this country, and it’s completely gone in Europe. Deforestation has caused major problems in poorer countries, it makes areas prone to mudslides and allows silt to get into the rivers. It has had a huge impact on wildlife through out the world. I’m just so thankful that we are becoming more aware of our impact on the environment and that we are making headway in protecting it from man’s “progress”.
CO2 levels today (370ppmv) are as much higher than a “normal interglacial” (280ppmv) as that interglacial is higher than a glacial episode (190ppmv). We are entering positive feedback loops both in regard to ice/albedo and vegetative CO2 sequestration that will likely lead to a completely ice-free Arctic by 2050.
Everyone talks about CO2 being a greenhouse gas. But has anyone looked at the absorption spectrum of water vapor? (Chemistry isn’t that hard). Yes, water vapor is the worst green house gas and we cannot control it, yet we worry about CO2, which we think we can control?
Water vapor is indeed the major greenhouse gas. Every climatologist is aware of this and the effect of water vapor on temperature change is included in every climate change model.
However, you’re missing the point. Water vapor levels fluctuate regionally, but in general humans do not produce a direct forcing of water vapor levels. An increase in atmospheric temperature caused by the greenhouse effect due to anthropogenic gases will in turn lead to an increase in the water vapor content of the troposphere. In short, water vapor is not a forced change on the atmosphere, as is increasing CO2. Water vapor in the atmosphere reponds to climate change as part of a feedback loop.
If the world’s temperature (or CO2 level) remained constant, there would be no change in water vapor content. However, since the world’s temperature is rising (either for natural reasons or due to human activity) water vapor levels will rise in reponse, leading to an increased effect.
If man made greenhouse gases are the cause of at least part of the global warming we’re seeing, then they are external forces on the climate system, not natural responses to change. There’s a huge difference.