Mother Can You Spare A Dime?
”For those who are directly or implicitly lobbying against climate action, I have a clear message: your ideas are out of date, and you are running out of time…Continuing to pour trillions of dollars into fossil-fuel subsidies is like investing in sub-prime real estate,” Ban said. ”Our carbon- based infrastructure is like a toxic asset that threatens the portfolio of global goods, from public health to food security.”
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
"We have to do it this year. Not next year. This year. The clock is ticking, because Mother Nature does not do bailouts…The business community and the leaders of the world must go together to safeguard the world."
Al Gore
”Renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies are our fastest growing exports right now. That’s the message to businesses here: put pressure on governments that this is not just about idealism. This is not anti-growth.”
Connie Hedegaard
Danish Climate and Energy Minister
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7 comments:
And then of course there is the inconvienient fact of the Midieval Warming Period, which AlGore airbrushed out of his infamous "hockey stick" graph but which was real enough to lead the Norsemen to establish farming settlements in Greenland. Those same settlements, abandoned in about 1300 A.D., are now in an area of permafrost.
The most fervent apostles of AGM protest that the MWP was merely a "regional" aberation in an otherwise stable global climate. Sure. But the fact of the MWP is unquestioned.
This of couse leads to the question: Who was burning all the fossil fuel and raising the CO2 levels from 800 to 1300 A.D.?
Isn't it true that those settlement were abandoned because the land was pretty much deforested? There were lots of tress when the Norsemen arrived, but those tress had taken hundreds of years to grow because of the short growing season.
I really don't know why people are afraid to acknowledge that global warming is happening. It is quite obvious that it exists and the evidence is all around us. Surely you don't dispute that golbal warming is taking place...
Check out the report by the Global Humanitarian Forum at http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/05/29/annan.climate.change.human/index.html.
I realize that we tend to take something like global warming seriously only after it begins to affect our own country directly, but it is really provincial and short-sighted to ignore the results from years of environmental denial and neglect as if what happens in other areas of the world will have no impact on the United States. There are too many things we can do now that will create new industries for American workers while also protecting the environment and it is stupid not to behave responsibly and get on with it!
On this global warming business, if we've had multiple glacial ages that have come and gone, haven't we had global warming? How do we protect the environment from natural climate patterns? Shambo makes some broad generalisations about the environment, but the facts are we have one of the cleanist environments in the nation. What more do we need to do?
No one denies the fact that we've had some warm weather the past few years, notwithstanding the fact that global temperatures have actually been static (or slightly declining) for the last 10 years or so.
What we skeptics have a hard time with is the idea that this is some sort of unprecedented calamity, of unprecedented scale, caused solely by human activity, but which human activity (or inactivity) can reverse. As Kerelan correctly points out, the earth has been much colder and much warmer at various times in its history. What makes this slight fluctuation any different than all the others?
If it is human activity, I still wnat to know who was burning the fossil fuels and making big carbon footprints from 800 to 1300 AD.
Heck, back in the 1970's the scientists and journalists were telling us to brace for the coming new ice age. But now, a mere 30 years later, the latest scientific crisis is catastrophic warming. Funny how that boomeranged on us so fast.
Back in history, these events unfolded in tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and lasted many millenia. Now we get different versions every few decades. You'ld almost think the journo's are trying to scare us.
So perhaps climate change is related to human activity. The actvity of scaremongering.
I'm not sure what Kerelan is basing his opinion on. If ever there was a broad, sweeping generalization, saying that 'we have one of the cleaninst environments in the nation', is it!
The gains we have made in environmental quality occured because somebody continued to push for them. It will always be that way. The past 8 years saw a continual erosion of environmental laws in this country and, yes, the results of that erosion will affect us in Wisconsin too.
When everyone figures out that there is plenty of money to be made from eco-friendly materials and products, the arguments will fade away.............
It's interesting the Shambo thinks all this green stuff will ignite the economy. If he is saying this is good for the free market economy, he's saying the opposition of what the free market pundits are saying. They predict gloom and doom. I suspect the reality is somewhere in the middle.
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