Did you know that there is no commonly-accepted standard for carbon credits? There isn't. And why would that be? Because the GOVERNMENT has not come forward with such definitions. The private groups that have some standards may not be right, exactly, and the industry isn't working by accepted standards because the Bush EPA doesn't believe in global warming, see? It's awfully hard to blame Gore for that.
You believe every bit of political spin that emerged 7 years ago, on the War on Gore. He didn't say he "invented" the internet, he didn't hire Naomi Wolf to tell him what color clothes to wear, he was talking with Karen Tumulty of TIME for several hours about many subjects when she brought up a recent article in the Nashville paper that made that claim. He laughed about it. The author later said that Gore was the model for Oliver in Love Story, but that the girl was an amalgam. So? It should make you cautious that so much of what you believe about Gore was constructed by political spinners, the same who were telling us that Bush didn't want to get into "nation-building."
"Why didn't Gore win the Nobel Prize for SCIENCE?"
Because he's a popularizer of science. By the way, the great majority of world scientists agree with HIM, not YOU.
"What does global warming have to do with PEACE?" I don't know, could it be that it shows that without world cooperation on some level, we're headed into some very hard times?
"Is that because the global warming diatribe is all based on junk science?" Actually, no. Most of the response is.
"Yes, you liberals are really something. "Don't bother me with the facts! My mind is made up!"
If you go to a psychiatrist, have him explain the concept of "projection." YOUR unresolved anger and fear is getting projected on others.
Here are MORE scientists that do not agree with Mr Gore's theories than those who do. I am in their camp,and very partisan. Now, if you would only identify yourself as a partisan most of the people you complain about would be kinder to you. In order for the debate to be "over" there must first be a debate - one that you and Mr Gore would not like to allow.
As you (the editor) pointed to the website of the group that did this "STUDY" on the environment and global warming. On the site it says:
"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been established by WMO and UNEP to assess scientific, technical and socio- economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation."
WMO and UNEP... who are they??? Let's see.
The WMO is the World Meteorological Organization is basically part of the United Nations. The WMO are currently being investigated by the Swiss government for Muhammad Hassan buying votes or trying to influence the voting. He is Sudanese, not that it?s a conflict of interest given much of the current conflict or considering the gross human right violations going on in Sudan. The WMO is also represented by almost 200 different nations. I am sure none of those nations have agendas regarding increasing their own power, money, an influence in the world. Some may even be willing to attempt to drag down the Kings of the hill to accomplish such endeavors.
The UNEP is the United Nations Environment Program. It was created to give the UN the ability to help or even ?control? or have sway over what other developing nations do in regard to energy supply and to maintain good environmental practices. The Director of the UNEP, Achim Steiner was nominated by Kofi Anna and later voted in to be director of UNEP.
The United Nations is a joke - Seriously. The members and representatives, including Kofi Anna?s son of the UN have been involved in and accused of numerous scandals and obvious negligence to perform the duties the UN was created to perform.
The oil-for-food program for example? Top leaders of the UN and associated countries and organizations were found to have funneled money from oil sales intended for food but instead went to the Iraqi military illegally. Food was meant for the Iraqi people many of which were starving.
Not to mention that the UN for the most part is very slow and unresponsive to the very atrocities it was created to stop. The conflicts and mass murder in Darfur, Rwanda, the list goes on and on.
These rich, power organizations, comities, individuals, and even countries are so totally jaded and filled with agendas and lies. There is a lot of money out there boys and girls? a lot. This whole thing is a huge money and power grab by probably most of the groups involved. Nothing is absolute of course, you hate to blame groups when it was only a few individuals and you hate to blame innocent individuals when it was only most of the group doing wrong. All of that does not matter. The bottom line is these groups are far from credible.
The editor does not seem to mind sighting ?scientific? ?reports? written by these very groups. Some of the science might be good and some of the information might be total propaganda. I would argue easily that we are far from a scientific consensus on much of anything. Al Gore is heavily invested in the whole carbon credit thing. He stands to get very rich if laws are passed to make it mandatory for all these rich industries to pay for his services to help get clean and buy their way into Al Gore heaven where Gore is the pope. Money, money, money every time. Follow the money.
Personally I think the earth does go through warming and cooling cycles, and opinion based off plenty of graphs and scientific data and reading. Even if we were living ?clean? like apes in the forests, the earth will warm and Carbon would increase naturally until it sends the planet into yet another ice age. Maybe this is triggered when the poles flip. No one really agrees, but it?s been happening since way before we were ever here. Maybe we are having a mild effect on it or maybe we are not but make no mistake. This whole Global warming thing is not about saving the environment. It?s about a few manipulative people or groups getting rich and powerful. If you want to know who? just look at all the folks at the top that are pushing so hard for environmental reform.
Of yeah, and never mind that the Chinese are building coal plants by the hand full every month. Way to fight for the environment China. They only have 1/6 of the world population. Just wait until India and China go totally Industrial? holy crap it?s gonna make Europe and the US look insignificant unless we get our collective acts together and start having more sex and less environmental restrictions. Guess I am just dreaming though.
Let?s say we do bend over backwards to conserve, take cold shorter shower, drive lead acid battery cars, spend millions running our selves into the ground trying to collect the whole set of Al Gore?s Carbon Credit cabbage patch cards while he gets rich and moves somewhere where he can burn all the energy he wants? wait he already burns probably 10 to 100 times more energy than most Americans with his giant house(es?) and private jet fuel and limo convoys. So let?s say we do that and cut our usage by half (that?s near impossible with totally stunting any and all growth in the US). What about China and India and all the other developing countries? Are they going to do the same? I bet they would be laughing at us while they get rich. Maybe the ice age will only hit them and God will save the US and Europe because we sacrificed so much by turning our A/C units up to 90 in the summer and to only 55 in the winter. I think God would be laughing at us too.
Come on guys, don?t be fooled by the political propaganda. Let?s kick most of these morons out of office and get some people in there that actually care about our country. Let?s cut back on government in general. I don?t need those guys telling me how to live my life? I am just fine with fewer rules. I don?t like being told how to live my life and what I can eat and how I can sleep and how much I can flush or how long a shower I can take. Enough is enough? and please don?t give Al Gore any more credit than he scammed some folks and won a pointless award for media sake. I do praise him for being crafty enough to know how to abuse and change the system to benefit himself, but that?s as far as it goes.
You don't convince. Instead of dealing with the immense body of research out there, you've chosen to rely upon ad hominem attacks and character assassination.
i have noticed alot of people grab onto ONE or two statements and leave the important things, like the BODY, alone when it disagrees with their view of reality. Yes, the highcourt said there were inaccuracy, but also, that the video was pretty much right on the ball. If people would bother with the WHOLE TRUTH, and forget the small stuff, this world MIGHT be in better shape. But they did it to Gore before, and they will do it to the next one that sticks his head too far above the "accepted norm".
I really don't understand most of the comments bashing Al Gore?
First and foremost, when people reference his statement about creating THE Internet, people are misinterpreting what exactly he's trying to say. I don't know if most kiddies nowadays realize that The Internet was not just something that became available to the public right from the get-go.
The Internet was create back in the 70s by the Military to create a network of communication between different military bases. This concept was furthered to provide channels to facilities at UCLA, UCSB, Eglin AFB, etc.
Al Gore at the time, was a PROPONENT of providing this service to the public, and hence major schools received the capability to use that service, and from the it migrated to public access. It's not because he INVENTED it... he just proposed (along with other Congressmen) to provide this "network" to the public sector.
To claim that he said he INVENTED it or to say that he originated the Internet is an ignorant effort to put words in someone's mouth and anyone that goes along with that statement is equally ignorant.
Furthermore, I'm not understanding why we have all kinds of ecology and environmental experts on this column all of the sudden. Of course he did research on Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect. The man found sources, cited those sources, and presented an argument in a concise and understandable fashion. Sure, there are probably some errors in the research, there always are errors, but he didn't get the Nobel "PEACE" prize because of the Global Warming Conferences he presents around the world. He received the award because of his concern about the people on this planet and it's environment. Mind you, this is not the Nobel prize given to people for a major find in Engineering or Physics, for all the research done some theory. It's the Nobel PEACE prize and this is an award not just handed out by the United States. The research, for who this award will go to, is done by multiple nations and organizations, so to say that he is not deserving of it is ludicrous. I'm sure everyone on this page is on the Nobel Committee and has evaluated other candidates for the Nobel Peace prize.
I think everyone needs to quit being an armchair ecology and environmental science PhD, re-evaluate their expertise in deciding who should get the Nobel Peace prize, and go back to writing in some blog about how emo this is making them.
You criticize others in the forum for not being experts and therefore they have no right to counter what Gore presents. Are you an expert? What does that mean really? And hey, what?s a few errors in a "documentary"? No biggie right? It's just meant to be fact. I would say all of the errors conveniently swayed in a Pro Global War panic direction.
What gore did is not science. It was an argumentative piece attempting to sway people to his way of thinking. Fine, people do that all the time right. But he lied when he said science has pretty come to a universal agreement that global warming was real and we were all causing it. That's a straight lie. All you have to do is look and there are plenty of creditable real scientist that will tell you there is no agreement on what is actually going on with our environment, what is causing it, or what possibility there is of changing this alleged problem.
Gore is proposing we spend crazy amounts of money and tie our hands industrially. This will hurt only the countries that do it, and if humans are damaging the environment all of the countries that don?t conform will still do their damage. It?s a pointless way to destroy the economy of the U.S. because we are gullible enough to tie our own hands while others don?t in the vein attempt to change the inevitable.
Bottom line, if you like you?re A/C and your lights and driving, and computers run by power, you will need power. You can get power from maybe 3 places: the sun, burning stuff like oil, wood, or coal (chemical), or nuclear fission/fusion (nuclear). Might be able to say there is a 4th, that?s harnessing mechanical power like hydro power or wind. Solar, hydo, and wind power cost way way more than fossil fuels. If you don?t mind you bill going by by a factor of 10 or more, lets do it man! Can you afford that? I can?t.
If you want cheap power, use fossil fuels like everyone else and just deal with it. Even if it is destroying the environment? what?s your alternative? Are you going to start living like a mountain man to save power? Is everyone else? Don?t forget, even if we had fuel cells, you need electricity (made in coal and fuel power plants) to separate the hydrogen and oxygen? the process is less efficient than if you just burned the fuel straight up with combustion engine.
I purpose tacking all this money and effort to save the environment and using it for Studying Nuclear Fusion until it?s we are able to build a viable power plant. Build it and just try to keep it away from as many people as possible and make it as safe as possible. It is a viable option and would probably be cheaper and more abundant than coal or gas. I am fairly sure. If any experts want to put some numbers out here, that would be great.
I am not an expert in lots of this stuff. I am a well educated Mechanical Engineer with a degree. We can?t all be experts in everything. I think the only thing Gore is good at is getting people to give him their money and getting it passed into law.
As a meteorologist for 32 years, I can assure you that severe and extreme weather (i.e., flooding, droughts, heat waves) have occurred many times in the past (just look at official NWS records), long before carbon emissions were as high as today. As a point, the 1900 Galveston Hurricane was a Category 4 when it hit land, whereas Katrina was only a Cat 3 Hurricane when it hit New Orleans (the reason so much damage occurred at New Orleans was because the levees failed). So far, nobody I know is saying Global Warming caused the 1900 Galveston storm! There are many other examples of extreme weather in the past 100 years and I personally don't see any increase in extreme weather today compared to then - it's just that the news media now has 24-hour instant coverage of even the lightest rain shower or smallest tornado, which would not have been known about 100 years ago. Just look at the weather history and records and not just today's weather headlines.
I did a quick "back of envelope" calculation and determined that each word in each comment to this column is using enough computer server power to contribute .0005875672488790 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, assuming that 75 percent of the readers of this column get their electricity from fossil fuels, which approximates the national average for electricity supply.
Thanks to me, a piece of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica just calved off into the ocean.
My advice for those of you who don't believe in global warming: stop reading these rabble-rousing communists like Charlie Cooper, put your money where your mouths are and buy a mainframe. That'll show us!
For those of you who do believe: Start powering your computers with hemp-fueled generators.
If Gore's leadership led to the Internet in 1991, why then was I involved in the Internet's predecessor ARPANET in the early '70's and the actual internet while back in school in the late '80s.
Moreover, while some global climate change is without doubt happening, as it is always, why is it the warmest avg world temp this century actually occurred in 1936 and the second highest was in 1998. Does it not make sense that, if global warming is such an "indisputable" fact, we would have seen a higher avg world temp in the last ten years.
As far as Gore's Noebel "Peace" prize, I give you another "winner" Arafat to substantiate that the prize is given by a bunch of Norwegians with a liberal political agenda.
Speaking of agenda's, I don't know about others, but I don't read CNet newsletters to get Coop's or anyone else's liberal political agenda. If I wanted to read about politics I'll go to Druge or Limbaugh.
I agree that politicians in general need to be taken with many grains of salt, but it is good to see someone as reasonable and engaged as Al Gore be defended by someone in the ever-cynical world of IT.
You quoted a spokeswoman for GE, "We're past the point of debating the science." In logic or debate this is known as "begging the question" or circular reasoning. " I think, therfore I am" being the most famous of such absurd statements!
I find it incredibly arrogant and irresponsible for mankind to start considering ways to change the climate to what we want it to be rather than find ways to adapt to what it's becoming. I don't object to lowering carbon emissions, moving to green technology, etc... What I object to personally are the hairbrained ideas about seeding the atmosphere to cool it to a point we want it to be at and other similar tacts. Basically, yah we need to be MUCH more environmentally responsible, but we also need to not get so arrogant as to think just because we like things the way they are right now we have to take dangerous steps to keep them that way. We're likely to do more damage trying to 'fix' what we've done than just stopping doing it and learning to live with the consequences. Either extreme has it wrong, we can't use and abuse to our heart's content, and we can't remove ourselves from it entirely either. The climate and planet are a very complicated ever changing system that we are a PART OF, not an observer of. Taking us out of the equation is just as silly as saying it's all there for us to do with as we please.
I really appreciate your idea.It seems to me that manhandling the climatic events is not a holistic approach toward climate change. I am not against reducing greenhouse gasses, though.
One study finds the Holocene Optimum warm event showeed 4 degrees Celsius in the North Pole about 10,000 years ago.
No mention at all of the irony of a guy who bombed at least five sovereign countries getting the peace prize? I guess for Cooper bombs=peace? In any case, *** does any of this have to do with tech news, the purported purview of this rag?
How about a historical perspective for somebody over 55?
Look, many of you techie Gen-x'ers and Millennials do not have the historical perspective behind this Global Warming thing. CNN, PBS, NBC, ABC, CBS, BBC, NewsCorp, Yahoo!, Google, MSN, et al need a crisis-de-jour to sell all that annoying advertising.
In the 60's, before any of you were born, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the 70's, we had the government meltdown caused by Nixon, Agnew & Co. By the 80's, the Cold War was in the forefront, motivating Ronnie to instruct Gorbie to 'tear down that wall'.
During all these bonified crises, the last thing we needed was to construct a new crisis.
Note then after the old war, there was a vacuum looking for that next 'crisis'. I specifically recall Global Warming getting legs in the late 80's after the Russian threat had diminished (just as much as I recall the Global Cooling frenzy during the 70's but I won't go there now). Basically, Bush 41 had nothing to do until Sadam invaded Kuwait and then they got smoked by our Finest.
So during the late 80's and into the 90's, a crisis vacuum was created by 12 years of good times, starting in 89 and ending with the tech meltdown of 2000. But Global Warming came to the rescue, filling the vacuum, and establishing itself during the 90's. Global Warming helped sell a lot of those annoying pop-up ads before pop-up blockers were developed in the late 90's. Back in those days, Netscape flourished, often times headlining with a Global Warming 'news' item. Yahoo!, MSN, and their ilk continue the same today, sucking many of us saps into a pseudo-science septic tank of consensus, when the educated among us understand that 'consensus' and 'science' do not ever belong in the same sentence.
btw, I am still waiting for a reputable scientist to show the math calculations demonstrating how a few hundred thousand cubic yards of ice melting in Greenland would even negligibly raise the level of the many quadrillion cubic yards of the massive global ocean. It cannot be the same scientists who, in 2005, recommended dumping some boatloads of ice-cubes into the Caribbean to cool it down...
I won't even bother blowing off on Gore, I do that often enough, and his bandwagoning the same people that bellied up on the coming ice age in the 70s-80s comes off that he isn't just a populist, but not well researched.
the real aim of my ire at this moment is the fact you brought up the IPCC report, check your facts; a number of the climatologists who worked on that have now laid claim that they were forced to falsify data; that this is the same scam that was pulled over in the (supreme court dismissed) second-hand smoke studies that got everyone in to a ruckus. the ipcc was run by politicos, not scientists, and they went in with an agenda and demanded the results they got because, they simply refused any other results.
stopping at the surface of these topics is ridiculous, lose the scam study.
maybe we ought to read more then the paper prints (i use paper as a global term for anything with an advertiser, be it magazine, journal, website or whatnot.) and try filtering the agendas and bias of the sources.
maybe then, not only will we get our priorities in a row, but we'll figure out who's the goose amongst the ducks.
Gore is a huckster capitalizing on a natural phenomena...
Just spend some time poking around for the opposing views of Global Warming and you'll see the whole thing falls apart. There are plenty of scientists - real climate scientists - who think it's a joke. Why write a story of Gore's "tech cred"?
And for those that still want to attack global warming even with plenty of evidence that the idea that humans cause it is false, I say you are wrong. Why? Because, it makes no sense to turn the world to spending so much time and money on a ghost when there are so many other issues. Millions die every year from malaria. Look at Africa. Many Africans are irriated that we're wasting time on Global Warming when so many of them are dying!
The reason why these people keep pushing it un on is because the leaders are Socialists. The whole scam is designed around the idea of shifting wealth around. It's a Big Lie. One of the EU's Environmental Ministers said a few years ago that Kyoto wasn't just about the environment, but that it was for "leveling the playing field." Europe is falling further and further behind and they can't catch up to us, so the idea is to slow us down.
One last thing: if the Global Warming idiots really cared about the environment, then they would have jumped on the news that cows and other animals spew out more and more potent greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation. They ignore news like this because then they couldn't blame humans. It's not about the environment, it's about ruining people's lives through Socialism.
All these attacks, motivated by a deepening political divide and the usual denial before facing any situation seriously and the level of anger (not to mention hatred) surrounding the man only show the title of his "broadly accurate" documentary was as rightfully chosen as it's subject.
Honestly, it's quite funny to see the obvious posts from those heavily politically motivated people as they pontificate as if they were experts in climate science when they obviously don't know more on the subject than what they heard on the latest weather forecast.
BTW, when citing the "unforgivably lazy media" then created this "Gore pretends he invented the internet" piece of political hackery, the author forgot to mention it was Declan McCullagh who invented that spin, here on c-net.
Al is a propagandist for an ideology, not science. His true significance is as an indictment of what passes for higher education in America. Who says this current weather is optimum? Better weather may be when wheat fields flurish once more on GREENLAND. The island was called that for a reason. When Al follows his mouth with personal lifestyle actions he will at least appear sincere. Al is really a high priest wannabe for the worship of MOTHER EARTH.
Gore is grifter. Just do a little Socratic thinking after reading more of the science and you'll see that Gore and the others are wrong. It doesn't take long.
...time passes...
Just a little Googling turned up this series: <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=156df7e6-d490-41c9-8b1f-106fef8763c6&k=0" target="_newWindow">http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=156df7e6-d490-41c9-8b1f-106fef8763c6&k=0</a>
There are plenty more.
So, in fact, it's the liberals/socialists who cling to ideology and ignore the science. Even a kindergartener would admit there is some opposition; you guys can't tolerate any and therefore you and your ilk have no credibility.
The nine errors don't matter then, even when they are deliberately used to mislead. OK, he lied, but it doesn't matter. The Judge was not deliberating on the IPCC, he was asked to rule on whether the "documentary" was true, the defence being the UK government's own fully signed up global warming scientists who had to admit the Gore errors. If you knew how the IPCC worked then you might take a different view. It is run by governments for governments and the Summary for Policy Makers is written and agreed by government representatives. The Scientific report is put out several months later to agree with the political summary. The IPCC do not do research, they review scientific papers. They are in charge of the process and get to choose the papers they review. Very often the conclusions drawn differ from the intentions of the original contributor. As an example of how this process works, take the recent hype from the World Cancer group, they say they reviewed 500,000 papers and selected 7000 that were "relevant". In other words only 1.4% contained the sort of information they wanted in order to try and prove their case.
With climate, all the claims are on the basis of exteremely complex and unaudited models which are tweaked to produce the required results. They don't even use correct real time data, eg, they have always used annual CO2 increments of 1% when it has been little more than half that. They don't even know the global temperature to any degree of accuracy.
So back to big Al: "nine errors over the course of a 100-minute documentary. I'll leave you to make the call".
Check out how much "science" was left after taking out the footage of the nine errors, here:
You are not a scientist, just another person who hates Al Gore. Speaking of scientists, there's more consensus among them on the subject of global warming than almost any other subject, a position that is usually reserved for scientific concepts such as those describing the laws of physics. So rant and rave about some government report all you'd like, you're just side-stepping the issue that 90% of the scientists studying the subject believe global warming, caused by man, is happening right now. Talk about having one's head in the sand!
You are not scientists, just a bunch of people who hate Al Gore (exactly why you do, I'm not sure). Speaking of scientists, there's more consensus among them on the subject of global warming than almost any other subject, a position that is usually reserved for scientific concepts such as those describing the laws of physics. So rant and rave about some government report all you'd like, you're just side-stepping the issue that 90% of the scientists studying the subject believe global warming, caused by man, is happening right now. Talk about having one's head in the sand!
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carbon credits? There isn't. And why would that be? Because the
GOVERNMENT has not come forward with such definitions. The
private groups that have some standards may not be right, exactly,
and the industry isn't working by accepted standards because the
Bush EPA doesn't believe in global warming, see? It's awfully hard to
blame Gore for that.
you're proven wrong, it will be too late to do anything. Blub, blub.
If you read about Bush's behavior in college, it's clear that he was
an evil little frat boy then. Same as now.
on the War on Gore. He didn't say he "invented" the internet, he
didn't hire Naomi Wolf to tell him what color clothes to wear, he
was talking with Karen Tumulty of TIME for several hours about
many subjects when she brought up a recent article in the
Nashville paper that made that claim. He laughed about it. The
author later said that Gore was the model for Oliver in Love
Story, but that the girl was an amalgam. So? It should make you
cautious that so much of what you believe about Gore was
constructed by political spinners, the same who were telling us
that Bush didn't want to get into "nation-building."
Because he's a popularizer of science. By the way, the great
majority of world scientists agree with HIM, not YOU.
"What does global warming have to do with PEACE?"
I don't know, could it be that it shows that without world
cooperation on some level, we're headed into some very hard
times?
"Is that because the global warming diatribe is all based on junk
science?"
Actually, no. Most of the response is.
"Yes, you liberals are really something. "Don't bother me with
the facts! My mind is made up!"
If you go to a psychiatrist, have him explain the concept of
"projection." YOUR unresolved anger and fear is getting
projected on others.
"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been established by WMO and UNEP to assess scientific, technical and socio- economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation."
WMO and UNEP... who are they??? Let's see.
The WMO is the World Meteorological Organization is basically part of the United Nations. The WMO are currently being investigated by the Swiss government for Muhammad Hassan buying votes or trying to influence the voting. He is Sudanese, not that it?s a conflict of interest given much of the current conflict or considering the gross human right violations going on in Sudan. The WMO is also represented by almost 200 different nations. I am sure none of those nations have agendas regarding increasing their own power, money, an influence in the world. Some may even be willing to attempt to drag down the Kings of the hill to accomplish such endeavors.
The UNEP is the United Nations Environment Program. It was created to give the UN the ability to help or even ?control? or have sway over what other developing nations do in regard to energy supply and to maintain good environmental practices. The Director of the UNEP, Achim Steiner was nominated by Kofi Anna and later voted in to be director of UNEP.
The United Nations is a joke - Seriously. The members and representatives, including Kofi Anna?s son of the UN have been involved in and accused of numerous scandals and obvious negligence to perform the duties the UN was created to perform.
The oil-for-food program for example? Top leaders of the UN and associated countries and organizations were found to have funneled money from oil sales intended for food but instead went to the Iraqi military illegally. Food was meant for the Iraqi people many of which were starving.
Not to mention that the UN for the most part is very slow and unresponsive to the very atrocities it was created to stop. The conflicts and mass murder in Darfur, Rwanda, the list goes on and on.
These rich, power organizations, comities, individuals, and even countries are so totally jaded and filled with agendas and lies. There is a lot of money out there boys and girls? a lot. This whole thing is a huge money and power grab by probably most of the groups involved. Nothing is absolute of course, you hate to blame groups when it was only a few individuals and you hate to blame innocent individuals when it was only most of the group doing wrong. All of that does not matter. The bottom line is these groups are far from credible.
The editor does not seem to mind sighting ?scientific? ?reports? written by these very groups. Some of the science might be good and some of the information might be total propaganda. I would argue easily that we are far from a scientific consensus on much of anything. Al Gore is heavily invested in the whole carbon credit thing. He stands to get very rich if laws are passed to make it mandatory for all these rich industries to pay for his services to help get clean and buy their way into Al Gore heaven where Gore is the pope. Money, money, money every time. Follow the money.
Personally I think the earth does go through warming and cooling cycles, and opinion based off plenty of graphs and scientific data and reading. Even if we were living ?clean? like apes in the forests, the earth will warm and Carbon would increase naturally until it sends the planet into yet another ice age. Maybe this is triggered when the poles flip. No one really agrees, but it?s been happening since way before we were ever here. Maybe we are having a mild effect on it or maybe we are not but make no mistake. This whole Global warming thing is not about saving the environment. It?s about a few manipulative people or groups getting rich and powerful. If you want to know who? just look at all the folks at the top that are pushing so hard for environmental reform.
Of yeah, and never mind that the Chinese are building coal plants by the hand full every month. Way to fight for the environment China. They only have 1/6 of the world population. Just wait until India and China go totally Industrial? holy crap it?s gonna make Europe and the US look insignificant unless we get our collective acts together and start having more sex and less environmental restrictions. Guess I am just dreaming though.
Let?s say we do bend over backwards to conserve, take cold shorter shower, drive lead acid battery cars, spend millions running our selves into the ground trying to collect the whole set of Al Gore?s Carbon Credit cabbage patch cards while he gets rich and moves somewhere where he can burn all the energy he wants? wait he already burns probably 10 to 100 times more energy than most Americans with his giant house(es?) and private jet fuel and limo convoys. So let?s say we do that and cut our usage by half (that?s near impossible with totally stunting any and all growth in the US). What about China and India and all the other developing countries? Are they going to do the same? I bet they would be laughing at us while they get rich. Maybe the ice age will only hit them and God will save the US and Europe because we sacrificed so much by turning our A/C units up to 90 in the summer and to only 55 in the winter. I think God would be laughing at us too.
Come on guys, don?t be fooled by the political propaganda. Let?s kick most of these morons out of office and get some people in there that actually care about our country. Let?s cut back on government in general. I don?t need those guys telling me how to live my life? I am just fine with fewer rules. I don?t like being told how to live my life and what I can eat and how I can sleep and how much I can flush or how long a shower I can take. Enough is enough? and please don?t give Al Gore any more credit than he scammed some folks and won a pointless award for media sake. I do praise him for being crafty enough to know how to abuse and change the system to benefit himself, but that?s as far as it goes.
But they did it to Gore before, and they will do it to the next one that sticks his head too far above the "accepted norm".
First and foremost, when people reference his statement about creating THE Internet, people are misinterpreting what exactly he's trying to say. I don't know if most kiddies nowadays realize that The Internet was not just something that became available to the public right from the get-go.
The Internet was create back in the 70s by the Military to create a network of communication between different military bases. This concept was furthered to provide channels to facilities at UCLA, UCSB, Eglin AFB, etc.
Al Gore at the time, was a PROPONENT of providing this service to the public, and hence major schools received the capability to use that service, and from the it migrated to public access. It's not because he INVENTED it... he just proposed (along with other Congressmen) to provide this "network" to the public sector.
To claim that he said he INVENTED it or to say that he originated the Internet is an ignorant effort to put words in someone's mouth and anyone that goes along with that statement is equally ignorant.
Furthermore, I'm not understanding why we have all kinds of ecology and environmental experts on this column all of the sudden. Of course he did research on Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect. The man found sources, cited those sources, and presented an argument in a concise and understandable fashion. Sure, there are probably some errors in the research, there always are errors, but he didn't get the Nobel "PEACE" prize because of the Global Warming Conferences he presents around the world. He received the award because of his concern about the people on this planet and it's environment. Mind you, this is not the Nobel prize given to people for a major find in Engineering or Physics, for all the research done some theory. It's the Nobel PEACE prize and this is an award not just handed out by the United States. The research, for who this award will go to, is done by multiple nations and organizations, so to say that he is not deserving of it is ludicrous. I'm sure everyone on this page is on the Nobel Committee and has evaluated other candidates for the Nobel Peace prize.
I think everyone needs to quit being an armchair ecology and environmental science PhD, re-evaluate their expertise in deciding who should get the Nobel Peace prize, and go back to writing in some blog about how emo this is making them.
What gore did is not science. It was an argumentative piece attempting to sway people to his way of thinking. Fine, people do that all the time right. But he lied when he said science has pretty come to a universal agreement that global warming was real and we were all causing it. That's a straight lie. All you have to do is look and there are plenty of creditable real scientist that will tell you there is no agreement on what is actually going on with our environment, what is causing it, or what possibility there is of changing this alleged problem.
Gore is proposing we spend crazy amounts of money and tie our hands industrially. This will hurt only the countries that do it, and if humans are damaging the environment all of the countries that don?t conform will still do their damage. It?s a pointless way to destroy the economy of the U.S. because we are gullible enough to tie our own hands while others don?t in the vein attempt to change the inevitable.
Bottom line, if you like you?re A/C and your lights and driving, and computers run by power, you will need power. You can get power from maybe 3 places: the sun, burning stuff like oil, wood, or coal (chemical), or nuclear fission/fusion (nuclear). Might be able to say there is a 4th, that?s harnessing mechanical power like hydro power or wind. Solar, hydo, and wind power cost way way more than fossil fuels. If you don?t mind you bill going by by a factor of 10 or more, lets do it man! Can you afford that? I can?t.
If you want cheap power, use fossil fuels like everyone else and just deal with it. Even if it is destroying the environment? what?s your alternative? Are you going to start living like a mountain man to save power? Is everyone else? Don?t forget, even if we had fuel cells, you need electricity (made in coal and fuel power plants) to separate the hydrogen and oxygen? the process is less efficient than if you just burned the fuel straight up with combustion engine.
I purpose tacking all this money and effort to save the environment and using it for Studying Nuclear Fusion until it?s we are able to build a viable power plant. Build it and just try to keep it away from as many people as possible and make it as safe as possible. It is a viable option and would probably be cheaper and more abundant than coal or gas. I am fairly sure. If any experts want to put some numbers out here, that would be great.
I am not an expert in lots of this stuff. I am a well educated Mechanical Engineer with a degree. We can?t all be experts in everything. I think the only thing Gore is good at is getting people to give him their money and getting it passed into law.
Greg
Thanks to me, a piece of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica just calved off into the ocean.
My advice for those of you who don't believe in global warming: stop reading these rabble-rousing communists like Charlie Cooper, put your money where your mouths are and buy a mainframe. That'll show us!
For those of you who do believe: Start powering your computers with hemp-fueled generators.
Moreover, while some global climate change is without doubt happening, as it is always, why is it the warmest avg world temp this century actually occurred in 1936 and the second highest was in 1998. Does it not make sense that, if global warming is such an "indisputable" fact, we would have seen a higher avg world temp in the last ten years.
As far as Gore's Noebel "Peace" prize, I give you another "winner" Arafat to substantiate that the prize is given by a bunch of Norwegians with a liberal political agenda.
Speaking of agenda's, I don't know about others, but I don't read CNet newsletters to get Coop's or anyone else's liberal political agenda. If I wanted to read about politics I'll go to Druge or Limbaugh.
spage
I don't object to lowering carbon emissions, moving to green technology, etc... What I object to personally are the hairbrained ideas about seeding the atmosphere to cool it to a point we want it to be at and other similar tacts.
Basically, yah we need to be MUCH more environmentally responsible, but we also need to not get so arrogant as to think just because we like things the way they are right now we have to take dangerous steps to keep them that way. We're likely to do more damage trying to 'fix' what we've done than just stopping doing it and learning to live with the consequences.
Either extreme has it wrong, we can't use and abuse to our heart's content, and we can't remove ourselves from it entirely either. The climate and planet are a very complicated ever changing system that we are a PART OF, not an observer of. Taking us out of the equation is just as silly as saying it's all there for us to do with as we please.
One study finds the Holocene Optimum warm event showeed 4 degrees Celsius in the North Pole about 10,000 years ago.
In the 60's, before any of you were born, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In the 70's, we had the government meltdown caused by Nixon, Agnew & Co.
By the 80's, the Cold War was in the forefront, motivating Ronnie to instruct Gorbie to 'tear down that wall'.
During all these bonified crises, the last thing we needed was to construct a new crisis.
Note then after the old war, there was a vacuum looking for that next 'crisis'. I specifically recall Global Warming getting legs in the late 80's after the Russian threat had diminished (just as much as I recall the Global Cooling frenzy during the 70's but I won't go there now). Basically, Bush 41 had nothing to do until Sadam invaded Kuwait and then they got smoked by our Finest.
So during the late 80's and into the 90's, a crisis vacuum was created by 12 years of good times, starting in 89 and ending with the tech meltdown of 2000. But Global Warming came to the rescue, filling the vacuum, and establishing itself during the 90's. Global Warming helped sell a lot of those annoying pop-up ads before pop-up blockers were developed in the late 90's. Back in those days, Netscape flourished, often times headlining with a Global Warming 'news' item. Yahoo!, MSN, and their ilk continue the same today, sucking many of us saps into a pseudo-science septic tank of consensus, when the educated among us understand that 'consensus' and 'science' do not ever belong in the same sentence.
btw, I am still waiting for a reputable scientist to show the math calculations demonstrating how a few hundred thousand cubic yards of ice melting in Greenland would even negligibly raise the level of the many quadrillion cubic yards of the massive global ocean. It cannot be the same scientists who, in 2005, recommended dumping some boatloads of ice-cubes into the Caribbean to cool it down...
the real aim of my ire at this moment is the fact you brought up the IPCC report, check your facts; a number of the climatologists who worked on that have now laid claim that they were forced to falsify data; that this is the same scam that was pulled over in the (supreme court dismissed) second-hand smoke studies that got everyone in to a ruckus. the ipcc was run by politicos, not scientists, and they went in with an agenda and demanded the results they got because, they simply refused any other results.
stopping at the surface of these topics is ridiculous, lose the scam study.
maybe then, not only will we get our priorities in a row, but we'll figure out who's the goose amongst the ducks.
And for those that still want to attack global warming even with plenty of evidence that the idea that humans cause it is false, I say you are wrong. Why? Because, it makes no sense to turn the world to spending so much time and money on a ghost when there are so many other issues. Millions die every year from malaria. Look at Africa. Many Africans are irriated that we're wasting time on Global Warming when so many of them are dying!
The reason why these people keep pushing it un on is because the leaders are Socialists. The whole scam is designed around the idea of shifting wealth around. It's a Big Lie. One of the EU's Environmental Ministers said a few years ago that Kyoto wasn't just about the environment, but that it was for "leveling the playing field." Europe is falling further and further behind and they can't catch up to us, so the idea is to slow us down.
One last thing: if the Global Warming idiots really cared about the environment, then they would have jumped on the news that cows and other animals spew out more and more potent greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation. They ignore news like this because then they couldn't blame humans. It's not about the environment, it's about ruining people's lives through Socialism.
Honestly, it's quite funny to see the obvious posts from those heavily politically motivated people as they pontificate as if they were experts in climate science when they obviously don't know more on the subject than what they heard on the latest weather forecast.
BTW, when citing the "unforgivably lazy media" then created this "Gore pretends he invented the internet" piece of political hackery, the author forgot to mention it was Declan McCullagh who invented that spin, here on c-net.
significance is as an indictment of what passes for higher education
in America. Who says this current weather is optimum? Better
weather may be when wheat fields flurish once more on
GREENLAND. The island was called that for a reason. When Al
follows his mouth with personal lifestyle actions he will at least
appear sincere. Al is really a high priest wannabe for the worship of
MOTHER EARTH.
...time passes...
Just a little Googling turned up this series:
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=156df7e6-d490-41c9-8b1f-106fef8763c6&k=0" target="_newWindow">http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=156df7e6-d490-41c9-8b1f-106fef8763c6&k=0</a>
There are plenty more.
So, in fact, it's the liberals/socialists who cling to ideology and ignore the science. Even a kindergartener would admit there is some opposition; you guys can't tolerate any and therefore you and your ilk have no credibility.
With climate, all the claims are on the basis of exteremely complex and unaudited models which are tweaked to produce the required results. They don't even use correct real time data, eg, they have always used annual CO2 increments of 1% when it has been little more than half that. They don't even know the global temperature to any degree of accuracy.
So back to big Al: "nine errors over the course of a 100-minute documentary. I'll leave you to make the call".
Check out how much "science" was left after taking out the footage of the nine errors, here:
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20071019.html" target="_newWindow">http://www.junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20071019.html</a>