It's Time to Get Angry

It’s time to get angry. This is what John Kerry, not exactly the most extreme guy, is saying to us. Is it the best solution?

This is what Kerry told advocates of climate legislation recently:

“I want you to go out there and start knocking on doors and talking to people and telling people this has to happen. You know, if the Tea Party folks can go out there and get angry because they think their taxes are too high, for God’s sake, a lot of citizens ought to get angry about the fact that they’re being killed and our planet is being injured by what’s happening on a daily basis by the way we provide our power and our fuel and the old practices that we have. That’s something worth getting angry about.” (emphasis mine)

As part of my Bachelor’s thesis in sociology and environmental studies, about 6 years ago, I studied the history of the environmental movement in great depth. Since then, I have been keeping my eye on things, on the bigger picture, as I work in different fields — natural and organic foods, city planning and sustainable development, alternative transportation, and, now, online journalism with a green tint.

The underlying question, consistently, is: “How do we avoid, or — worst case scenario — deal with, huge environmental collapse?”

The issues have only gotten bigger (see: Global Warming in the Arctic — Much Worse than We Thought!, Greenland Ice Sheet Melting Faster than Ever and Oceans Absorbing CO2, Preventing Climate Change — Good, Right? No). But we seem to be going down the same road consistently, despite all the amazing efforts of people trying to turn this car around (and transform it into something green-friendly). The environmental movement, perhaps bigger than ever, still seems on the brink of failure.

How do we achieve the dream of a livable world for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren?

Soft and Hard Environmentalist Approaches

There are those who think that greens have to tone it down, compromise more, cooperate with the opposite side more, and take the approach of Judd Law’s character in “I Heart Huckabees” in order to achieve success environmentally. Some of this may be true.

There are those who think the enviromental movement needs to get back to its roots more, focus on grass-roots activism and Greenpeace-style activism, make the most noise that we can and grab the media’s attention with public, eye-catching action.

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Along this line, Kerry said, “We just have to take a page from who brought us the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act. We’ve been doing this before, and we just have to get back to basics and make it happen again. It’s called being active and not letting up.”

Some of this may be true.

It is really hard for anyone to nail down what is actually needed, but this may be the way to go. The following are other things to consider.

Climate Change & the Media, Today

Climate change was a major issue in the public eye for a short time, but now “only 57 percent of Americans think global warming is happening, down 14 points from 2008, and only 47 percent of Americans [think] global warming is caused mostly by human activities, down 10 points.” Part of this may be due to the fact that only 1.5% of media stories were dedicated to climate change and the environment in 2009, but there are other factors as well.

Apparently, we are supposed to avoid mentioning math when reporting on climate change because it turns people off and I read somewhere (can’t find the link) that the public is getting tired of the doom and gloom stories. Why? Well, it all just gets too detailed and too accurate, perhaps. Nonetheless, what is the lesson? If you are sharing information with non-involved people, it might be best to stay away from the tedious details and catastrophic language (but that always depends on the person you are talking to and the context of the discussion). But I think this may also be part of the problem — if people don’t want to evaluate the validity of a claim and they don’t want to hear that the world we rely on to survive is on the brink of collapse, we get the type of false media coverage discussed below. I think you should state clearly, as Kerry did above, that our habits are killing people and degrading the livability of our planet already. Additionally, I don’t think you can say enough what Obama stated in his State of the Union speech recently, that there is “overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.” If people want to get into the details, have it ready for them. People need to at least hear that the science is strong.

Ironically, the public trusts the wrong experts — weathermen rather than climate scientists — when it comes to climate change. Unfortunately, weathermen are in just about the worst position to evaluate climate science. Recently, people were especially eager to say that global warming wasn’t happening and maybe even “global cooling” was, but the sad truth is that isn’t true (see: Not Cold Everywhere and Addressing “Global Cooling”). If you’re going to fight for climate legislation, exposing the difference between weather and climate may be an important task.

Overall, the basic fact is, the media shares information and claims that have no scientific backing all the time as an equally weighted argument to the true climate scientists’ findings and statements (keep your eye on Joe Romm’s blog, Climate Progress, for constant debunking of completely untrue claims shared by the “status quo” media).

Despite all of this, there is actually broad public support for a climate and energy bill, a very conservative pollster recently let us know. Because of its ability to give us energy independence, good health, American jobs, and accountability for businesses and corporations, people support it.

So, what to do next to make it happen?

How Does a Democracy Work?

One problem with democracy, is that the population is responsible for everything — directly or indirectly — but the population is not well-informed on everything. Additionally, democracy requires involvement, and a lot of people just don’t want to be involved.

The bottom line is, we don’t have strong government action on climate change yet because the industries (oil, coal, auto) that would be hurt by it have a dispraportionate influence on our government.

Our national security is even in a very vulnerable position because of our addiction to oil (much of which isn’t coming from our friends), which only the oil industry really benefits from.

The status quo media isn’t interested in looking into things deeply and carefully enough to report the truth. So, much of the population remains ill-informed.

If we want to create change, just as Kerry says above, I think we have to go out there and get active. In whatever area we live or work in, we need to start sharing the truth about climate change and showing people at the same time that climate and energy legislation will create “energy independence, good health, American jobs, and accountability for businesses and corporations.”

The proof is there, but actually, most people don’t even care to find the proof. So, just tell them. If they want the proof, send them to me.

Get active & spread the news.

Help environmentalism of today live up to its history.

Related Stories (not linked above):
1) What is a Global Citizen? Are You One?
2) Who Wants a Climate & Energy Bill? 83 Leading US Companies
3) Google Earth Climate & Rainforest Tours

Image Credit: tibchris via flickr under a CC license

16 thoughts on “It's Time to Get Angry”

  1. This is a great post. There has to be a basic change in the way people think about themselves, their lifestyles, and the way they relate to government (which has ceased to represent them). You are the first person I have run across to seriously address how we bring this about.

  2. JohnG,

    Just like other people who agree with the theory of AGW, you attack the person and not the data. Intelligent people make up their own minds based on a broad cross section of research, books and reports. That is what I have done and my conclusion is that the findings on Climate Change and Global Warming is anything but conclusive. Nothing concrete enough to warrant punishing the community with a giant tax (ETS) that will only go to non-polluters in developing nations.

    Show me any research/article/book reference that shows with 100% accuracy that the theory of AGW is correct. I have an open mind. I don’t resist change, I embrace it.

    If there is anyone who is resistant to change it is the the people who are attempting to keep the climate from changing. Man against nature. I wonder which will win?

  3. Dr. Goldman, I’m sorry but I don’t see any comments awaiting moderation. Either it wasn’t actually submitted, or it was an article above that has been approved, or ??? So, if it is not above, you will have to submit it again and it must not have ever been submitted correctly or there was some computer glitch (probably not the latter, but you never know). Thank you.

  4. Sorry, I just got back over here.

    1) Dr. Goldman, I’m sorry, the system is going through some major shifts right now, and we are not able to get to comment moderation as fast as normal.

    2) To the other 2 long posts, believe it or not, I have answers to those concerns. Unfortunately, I do not have time to spend all of my working hours going back and forth on an article several days old. Sometimes, I think deniers are actually trying to stunt the work of activists with the same disproven arguments again and again, but maybe they are just as frustrated as climate activists but with completely different “in-depth” understandings of climate science. I will do my best to address all of your concerns/points in future posts on the topic. Thank you.

  5. Trying to convince a climate denialist that science is real is like trying to convince a creationist that evolution is real. You can say, “Look for yourself, these are the facts,” as reasonably as possible, but it won’t make a dent because they don’t want it to be true. Eventually, hopefully, the weight of evidence or personal experience or their brain’s own unwillingness to deny reality any longer will win out and they’ll come around. In the meantime, hopefully the people willing to behave rationally will be able to override those who find reality too offensive to contemplate and we’ll get through this.

    Anyway, thanks for trying, Zachary.

  6. Zachary,

    Well, isn’t it nice that Prof Latif has gone to the media to say that he was misquoted. When in actual fact Latif was a co-author of the paper and the quote of a 20-30 year mini ice age came from Prof Anastasio Tronis, head of the Wisconsin Atmospheric Science group. He said “MDO’s amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.”

    “We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.”

    So valant of Latif to put everyone straight, considering the quote is very precise. But then these are the things that climate change scientists get up to.

    Zachary, have you studied the workings of a cap and trade emission trading scheme? Do you know how they work? I have spent 25 years in the finance industry and I know exactly how they work. Normally, these financial instruments work within a free market, but like petrol, the demand for carbon credits is fixed (study supply and demand curves), which was never to be the case. And you know how the price of petrol reacts – 90% of the time it goes up. It is exactly like casinos in Las Vegas – the house always wins. And speaking of gambling, the Banks in Europe are already involved in their ETS, so you can imagine the consequences of the Banks being able to hedge these funds and place options on the commodity. They only get involved in activites that make them money.

    As for the green market being the big growth industry, it is, but it is also based on a false economy. The science on AGW is far from settled. Businesses are being forced to change their ways on a theory that is far from being scientifically proven, beyond reasonable doubt. As I said, the powers that be are just creating a new market, but for no good reason other than to make the money churn and for them to get their cut. A very sad state of affairs.

    How can carbon dioxide, which has an unabsorbed level in our atmosphere of 1.7% be responsible for warming the planet. It’s ludicrous. Also, if you look at the raw data of the global temperature mean over the past 130 years you will see that it went from 13.74ºC in 1880 to 14.46ºC in 2009. it took 130 years to steadily increase 0.7ºC. It has not skyrocketed as the IPCC have claimed. That means it will take about 371 years for the earth to reach a global temperature mean above the 2ºC the IPCC is creating fear about. But then, the IPCC and NASA don’t like using raw data because it doesn’t look as dramatic as their charts that only show changes in temperture.

    Now if you want to talk pollution (of which carbon dioxide isn’t), that’s a totally different matter. We should all reduce pollution. Keep the air fresh for the kiddies.

    And, by the way, I am not a US citizen. I live in Australia, where our government is about to get ousted over the ETS. Current research in Australia shows that 75% of its citizens think the ETS is just a big tax and the opposition government are following that line. Even the previous opposition leader got kicked out by his own party because he was backing the government’s stand on an ETS. It sounds like our Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will not be a Prime Minister for much longer (election this year). Once other countries see these things happen, it won’t be long before the whole (CO2) thing comes crumbling down. Not many politicians are going to back an ETS if they don’t want their careers shortened.

    The 15 minutes of fame for the green movement is at an end and so is their reputation.

  7. What Do We Mean by Climate Change?

    We all now appear to be talking about greenhouse gases, global warming and climate change as three interchangeable and emotive subjects; the three being held equally and indiscriminately as the reprehensible and damaging consequence of mankind’s generation of carbon dioxide. I suggest that the three subjects are all entirely different and utterly separate. Moreover, these three subjects are now being used conjointly and emotively to vilify carbon dioxide to justify supposedly remedial actions which sane inspection tells us are quite unjustifiable, hopelessly expensive and some plainly quite unachievable.
    There has been an undeniable increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last decade. This increase can be made to look huge or miniscule according to your espoused point of view – depending on whether you calculate the rise as a percentage increase or expressed as a fraction of the Earth’s atmosphere. However, in spite of this atmospheric carbon dioxide increase, coupled with the direst warnings complete with complex computer based predictions, the Earth’s temperature has obdurately refused to rise over the last 11 years – in fact it has fallen.

    Over geological time, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has been for long periods far higher than at present. The only proven correlation in geological history between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface temperature is that the periodic rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide content have followed rises in global temperature and not the other way round.
    Yes, the climate is changing but it has always done so. It has changed throughout Earth’s geological history and continues to change as a result of a number of variables such as the Earth’s wandering axial tilt, eccentric orbit and precession; the sun’s varying output, solar wind and the solar system’s galactic traverse. The climate was changing in the past, is changing now and, obviously, will be changing in the future – as long as our planet exists – all without input from mankind.
    Ice ages, warming periods, glaciation and deglaciation have been the geological history of this Earth for the last 4.6 billion years in what are now known as Milankovitch cycles. Moreover, local climates change as a result of altering oceanic currents, varying weather patterns, volcanic activity together with the current deglaciation since the last ice age, etc. Forces are involved which are far more powerful than man’s puny input.

    Yes, you may carefully select particular trends over very small periods of history to justify particular points of view and the warming alarmists are very skilful at doing this. However, you just cannot buck the facts of geological history. The alarmists, those who actually believe, and the bandwagon opportunists as well, have been ruthless in the pursuit of their religion. They have played on every fear and every emotion to great effect. Sadly, science, fact and common sense have been trampled in the rush. For the Met Office to forecast global warming and basing this on trends since their records began (i.e. 140 years ago) seems to smack of selectivity.

    The global warming industry is very big business and there is a huge vested interest in maintaining the myth that human carbon dioxide emissions are dangerous. To add to this The University of East Anglia’s recent Climategate suggests data manipulation, collusion, squelching dissent, hiding data, deleting data, and punishing scientific journals that dared to publish papers challenging the carbon cabal. Now we have the accusation from the USSR that the UK Met office has employed Russian meteorological data selectively to support its theory of global warming

    In the past 100 years or so the scientific consensus has twice held that the earth was definitely cooling (1895-1930 and then 1968-75) and consequently forecasted that a catastrophic ice age was approaching.

    Scientific consensus has also held on two occasions the contrary view that, instead of cooling, the Earth was dangerously warming up (1930-60 and 1981-now) to the imminent destruction of coral reefs and polar bears. Mankind has been blamed in each of these four separate alarms and thus mankind must do something about it. What cavalcades of bandwagons each of these dire warnings have engendered.
    Grapes were once grown in Britain as far north as Newcastle, crops and cattle were once raised in Greenland; on the other hand, the Thames has frozen over on occasions. Regular glaciations of cold periods during the Pleistocene era lasted for approximately 90,000 years, with a low temperature of approximately 5°C below that of the present, alternated by warm interglacial periods (for 4,000-6,000 years) with temperatures of 1-3°C higher than at present. Approximately 11,000 years ago the last significant increase in temperature began (of approximately 5°C), during which time a huge glacier, that covered a considerable part of Eurasia and America, had melted. Climate warming has played a key role in humanity’s acquisition of the secrets of agriculture and in its transition to civilization. Over the past 11,000 years there were at least five distinct warm periods, the so-called “climatic optima” when the temperature of the planet was at 1-3°C higher than at present..
    Yes, the Arctic ice is thinning but do we hear at the same time about the contemporaneous extension and thickening of the Antarctic ice? Why are some populations of polar bears actually increasing? The thinning of the polar ice caps has not just started to happen – it has been going on constantly but irregularly since the last ice age. The Earth’s polar regions have had ice caps for only about 20% of the Earth’s geological history. To parade precariously poised and puzzled polar bears as being the consequence of man’s burning of fossil fuels is political gimmickry of a low order — yet it sells, and how!

    The very same scientists who were forecasting in the 1970s the imminent disaster of the approaching new ice age are now forecasting doom by global warming. What a myriad of businesses this new religion of climate change has spawned and what a bandwagon on which to advance both careers and profit. En passant, an entirely new concept has been created – that of policy based evidence making.

    If it were not so serious it would be profoundly funny to witness the very building block of life, carbon dioxide, vilified as a pollutant. Nitrous oxide, nitric oxide, sulphur dioxide, the fluorocarbons and the particulates of combustion are all pollutants and do damage. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is an essential part of all life on Earth. Furthermore, atmospheric carbon dioxide is but 0.0001% of the carbon dioxide held in the Earth’s oceans, rock, terrestrial structure, soil and life itself. .

    Carbon dioxide has neither a colour, nor a taste, nor a smell. Therefore, popularly used photos and videos showing factory chimney stacks emitting smoke and cars emitting exhaust to illustrate carbon dioxide are just as misleading as pictures of puzzled polar bears – CO2 is invisible; that which is visible in those images are pollutants and nothing else.

    There is no notional greenhouse surrounding us. The Earth has an atmosphere composed of a number of gases, some of which absorb and impede heat re-radiated from the Earth but others do not. The atmosphere contains two main absorbers and retainers of Earth’s radiated heat – water vapour and carbon dioxide. Water vapour accounts for some 95% of the heat retention whilst carbon dioxide accounts for less than 4%, with methane and ozone accounting for nearly all the rest. I.e. by far the largest culprit in so-called global warming is water vapour but do we hear anything about that or any proposals to reduce water vapour?

    Without these heat-retaining gases Earth’s surface temperature would be some minus 18°C and life, as we know it, could not exist. It is more accurate and meaningful to describe the atmosphere as a sweater round the earth, protecting us from the cold, rather than a greenhouse intent on boiling us and doing us harm.

    The table below demonstrates the “greenhouse effect” of the various constituents of the atmosphere and which shows the overwhelming importance of water vapour as being by far the greatest agent in heat retention whilst carbon dioxide in total contributes a mere 3.502%. Moreover the proportion of mankind’s generated carbon dioxide is a miniscule 0.117%.

    Anthropogenic (man-made) Contribution to the
    “Greenhouse Effect,” expressed as % of Total

    Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics % of Greenhouse Effect % Natural % Man-made
    Water vapor 95.000% 94.999% 0.001%
    Carbon Dioxide (CO2) 3.618% 3.502% 0.117%
    Methane (CH4) 0.360% 0.294% 0.066%
    Nitrous Oxide (N2O) 0.950% 0.903% 0.047%
    Misc. gases ( CFC’s, etc.) 0.072% 0.025% 0.047%

    Total 100.00% 99.72 0.28%

    To ascribe modern climate change to one single variable (carbon dioxide) or, more correctly, a small proportion of one variable (i.e. human produced carbon dioxide – 0.117%) is not science, for it requires abandoning all we know about planet Earth, the sun, our galaxy and the cosmos.

    95%, yes, 95% of the Earth’s greenhouse gas effect is produced by water vapour and only an about 4% by carbon dioxide. The remaining is 6% provided by methane etc. The methane of cattle kept by mankind has more greenhouse effect than the whole of the world’s current transport system. Yes, 95% of the greenhouse effect comes from water vapour and what on earth are we doing bleating about carbon dioxide? Even worse, why on earth are we spending prodigious amount of money on trying to act like King Canute.

    The Kyoto agreement has largely fallen apart and the Russians for a long time resolutely refused to join it. That is until they belatedly realised just how much money they could make out of the EU with carbon trades. They have made billions out of these trades, to which you and I have contributed involuntarily, without needing to modify their emissions by one puff.

    The disaster of chopping down and burning of carbon-absorbing rainforests in order to grow biofuels has added measurable amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere – never mind the immorality of diverting agricultural output for us to drive our cars whilst many in the world are starving. This gives an inkling of the degree of human idiocy involved in trying to interfere with the natural change of Earth’s climate.

    In a bid to outdo the EU in idiocy Britain has exceeded the bounds of sanity by passing the Climate Change Act thereby hobbling any attempt to produce a rational energy policy for this country. Britain stands alone in the world in legislating such folly into law. When the lights start to go out in Britain will you blame it on climate change or the Climate Change Act? No other country in the world has embodied into its statute book such a specific and powerful legal prescription for the destruction of its own industrial base.

    TATA is currently closing the Redcar steelworks with the loss of 1700 British jobs. The current report are that TATA thus stands to benefit by some £600 million in EU Carbon Credits for stopping Redcar’s “Carbon Emissions”. TATA is currently expanding its steel production elsewhere. Thanks to Gordon Brown the British taxpayer is now paying Europe to throw British workers out of work.

    The Meanwhile, the City of London is enjoying the joke tremendously whilst trading Carbon Credits enthusiastically and profitably. This form of trading is an unedifying up-to-the-minute, revival of the mediaeval practice of selling indulgences. If you made this up who would believe you?

    What a wonderful self-sustaining activity this global warming delusion has generated. We now have a whole new and expensive Government Department, that of Energy and Climate Change, which has brought new lustre and dimension to the term “tilting at windmills”

    I pity the party in power when the public arrives at the full realisation of how completely misled it has been by its own Government and how many trillions of their money had been wasted (accompanied by falling standards of living) in vainly trying to pursue the deluded folly of stemming naturally occurring climate change. The attempt of King Canute springs to mind. I can just imagine the wrath that will be visited on the party in power when the full realisation sets in.

    To summarise: scares may come and scares may go but, whilst there is no dispute about the fact that the climate is changing, as it always has done, there is no universally accepted evidence that mankind’s production of carbon dioxide has anything whatsoever to do with climate change or even temporary global warming. Of the total “greenhouse effect” the constituent having by far the greatest proportion of this “effect” is water vapour at 95% whilst atmospheric carbon dioxide in toto contributes a mere 3.5% with man-made carbon dioxide at 0.117% – but what discussion do we hear about tackling water vapour?

    If mankind doubled its carbon dioxide emissions, bearing in mind that the increased “greenhouse effect” is logarithmic and not linear, the increment in heat retention would be less than a further 0.117%, whilst a halving of mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions would reduce the total greenhouse effect by 0.0585%. However, the cost of achieving this utterly miniscule reduction can only be measured in trillions of pounds, which would impact on the whole world’s standard of living. I suggest that many of the remedies and restrictions being currently suggested are not only pointless but also utterly impractical. Man against the tide is one thing but to take on the power of the sun does seem to be taking vainglory to the extreme.

    While the emission reductions would exact a high human price, in terms of sacrifices to our standard of living, they would yield statistically negligible results in terms of measurable impacts to climate change. There is no expectation that any statistically significant global warming reductions would come from any international emissions agreement — should one ever be reached.
    The present controversy, embellished by Climategate and the USSR accusation that the UK Met office has employed Russian meteorological data selectively to support its theory of global warming has surely validated one old theory — that “scientific consensus” varies in direct proportion to government funding and patronage. I fear that “climate change” has simply become a Convenient Untruth; now being peddled in the UK to conceal a hopelessly delayed and utterly inept energy policy for Britain.
    In 2007, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued an “official report” that predicted the glaciers of the Himalayas would completely melt by the year 2035..”
    According to the London Times of 18 Jan.10, the UN will now be forced to withdraw this 2007 report because it turns out that it is was not based on any scientific research at all. Instead, the authors could only cite the speculation of a scientist in India who had been interviewed by a magazine some years before 2007. He did no research to back up his speculation.

    If this is an example of how careless UN climate scientists are in writing their official reports, it is a wonder that any reasonable scientist could trust their conclusions.

    In ending may I commend and acknowledge valuable help from Nigel Lawson’s book “An Appeal to Reason – A Cool Look at Global Warming”: Professor Ian Plimer’s book “Heaven and Earth – Global Warming: the Missing Science”: Christopher Booker’s “The Real Global Warming Disaster.”

    – —————– –

    Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age”
    Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT.

    “Global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that cannot be fixed”
    Doctor David Bellamy, Lecturer in Botany and wildlife broadcaster

    Clive Francis 18 January 2010

  8. ok, back here.

    economy: you criticized the c&t bill because it will hurt people (through hurting companies/the economy) — this is something opponents consistently want to say. then, you are going to criticize me for talking about the global economy. basically, you want to say what you want about the effect it would have on the economy but not listen to the other side?

    clean tech is already a leading sector in the global economy: “1st World Ranking of Clean Energy Technology (CET) Sales — CET to Become 3rd Largest Global Sales Sector by 2020” — http://cleantechnica.com/2009/12/13/1st-world-ranking-of-clean-energy-technology-cet-sales-cet-to-become-3rd-largest-global-sales-sector-by-2020/

    it is the leading sector for VC investment, meaning that it will continue to grow in importance: “Clean Tech: #1 in Worldwide Venture Capital Investments” — http://cleantechnica.com/2009/10/02/clean-tech-1-in-worldwide-venture-capital-investments/

    it is widely known by people informed on the matter that “the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy,” Obama. somewhere in the middle of this hour-long Q&A with republicans (the whole thing is good, i think) there is a little more discussion on that: http://vodpod.com/watch/2952414-video-obama-republicans-spar-in-qa

    the fact is, Asia is starting to eat our lunch: http://cleantechnica.com/2009/11/20/asia-light-years-ahead-of-the-us-in-clean-tech-investment-financial-and-economic-consequences/

    and without strong support for energy of the future, people who once thought climate change was a crock of crap and America would be on top of the world forever, are going to be in for a big surprise

    the bottom line: things change. if you want to be stuck in the past (whether it be concerning climate or energy), the future isn’t going to be so bright for you. or for us, as the case may be, since we are both citizens of the world and US citizens

    to simply address your other concern, that i might care more about the economy than the environment: the environment sustains life on this Earth. it also sustains the economy, the economy is based (at its root) on what the environment gives us. of course, in the day-to-day, both are important, but in the long-term, you can’t forget the environment if you want to have food, shelter, and water, at least.

  9. steveig: i’m only on here for a brief second, so don’t have time to address the first & third part yet, but will have to come back to them later.

    for the second part, this is exactly the problem with the way media covers climate science. Latif does not say that. here is an article addressing exactly that issue, “Exclusive: Dr. Mojib Latif sets the record straight on what his work says about global warming and what it doesn’t say about global cooling,” http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/14/science-dr-mojib-latif-global-warming-cooling/

  10. Zachary,
    Of course the cap and trade ETS will punish people. You don’t think the polluters are going to absorb the extra cost of buying credits, do you? They are going to pass these extra costs onto the consumer in addition to the conversion costs of going towards greener technology.

    I think that Nature has already responded with the claims of Global Warming being caused by anthropogenic CO2, by cooling the planet down since 2006. Professor Mojib Latif, an IPCC eminent scientist has now published a report that says that we are in for a mini ice age for the next 20-30 years. How can that be if the theory of Global Warming is correct? And we are not talking about weather (short term) here, but climate (long term).

    And I can’t believe that you have posted a comment on where America fits in the global economy. So does that mean you don’t really care about the environment, but more on the financial viablilty of America. So, is this why you want the ETS? Creating a new market to keep the money churning around.

  11. Sorry Zach, All of the ground-based temperature data used by the IPCC is hopelessly compromised, “adjusted”, “homogenized”, or otherwise fudged in a way that always shows false warming. Only the RAW Satellite temperature data is now reliable.

    Click my name and it links you to a new report by 2 meteorologists. You will be hearing A LOT about this report as it will set the tone for this debate for many years to come.

    I used to be a Green Party Candidate, and I have a long background in Applied Sciences. Phony, rigged pseudo-science pisses me off. Read the report and LOOK AT THE PICS and you will see what I am talking about. An IPCC temperature station located above a barbeque pit. And another at the end of a runway being blasted all day by jet engine exhaust. I’m not kidding bro’. I wish this wasn’t real, but it is.

    I wish the 111 page report by Meteorologists Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts had some flaws in it, but it makes a rock-solid case for global warming fraud. I now have to re-evaluate my position on all this, because it looks like global warming was faked. I used to hate skeptics, but D’Aleo and Watts woke me up.

    Peace from Canada

  12. steveig: a cap&trade bill (as initially proposed) would not punish people. it would make polluting companies more accountable, create a more livable world for people (even if you dropped the climate change issue altogether), create More Jobs, and help America from falling beneath China, Europe, and others in the global economy.

    also, you are exactly right, we are all part of nature and the universe that creates us is more powerful. i think it will respond to our actions in the appropriate way — consider what that would be if you were Nature.

    Eve: give me a an article showing that global warming is a scam and i will give you one debunking that with more complete evidence.

    try not to make your claims on ideology, but get into the details of it

  13. I am agreed with that we are addict to oil from which only oil industry getting benefits. Most of the people are not aware of the cilmate situation.

  14. I agree it is time to get angry. Angry ate the Politicians who are trying to ride the global warming scam for every dollar they can. And angry at the environmentalists who still have not used a correct piece of science. And really angry at the environemtalists for killing so far a Billion people on this planet.

  15. Yes, you are right. It is time to get angry. Angry with environmentalists, politicians and scientists who prescribe a solution of shaming and guilt and akin to hitting someone with a big stick as a punishment (cap and trade carbon emission scheme). Shame on you.

    The majority of people of this world did not invent power plants, car or, planes. We use them because they became available to us. And we were told everyday that all these things are good. Now you want to take our toys away, like we are bad children. We did nothing wrong. We are innocents. We are children – children of this planet. We are a part of nature, not exclusive from it. Nature is more powerful than any of you. Let’s see you create something the size of a universe with its own energy source.

    Shame on you for trying to scare the community and it’s time someone put you back in your place.

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