Michael, most of the really inaccurate and inflammatory garbage in your post is unattributed, but I found it on the web at some site which advertises it as the home of property rights and back to basics education. Hardly anything scientific about that! I think you must be so brainwashed at this point you can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak, but niceties like how many taxes your grandchildren will pay will be irrelevant if the planet is ruined environmentally. I can tell that the stuff you are believing is way, way right wing, because you seem to think pesticides are a good thing! Did you read about the whales who have significant amounts of them in their systems, at a level which is alarming? Do you realize that pro-pesticide propaganda is spread by the huge chemical companies because they profit from selling these poisons? Do you think they really have your children's health at stake? Did you know that male fertility is way down globally since the introduction of pesticides? Why do you think that is?
To address what you said directly, the main scientific claim made by the anti-global warming lobby recently was that satellite temperature measurements proved that the upper atmosphere was actually cooling, so global warming couldn't be true!!! The article in Nature is science, not politics. They are saying, essentially, that those satellite measurements are inaccurate, that the upper atmosphere is warming. It is up to others to make the political arguments. Certainly, the far right has used the satellite data repeatedly to try to make theirs.
You keep talking about all the scientists who are against global warming, but I refuted that argument last week by actually looking at your list. As I explained before, most of them just majored in some kind of science in college (the minimum requirement to be on the list). Most real scientists have advanced graduate degrees and are working in their fields. The "scientists" on your list show a few Ph.D.'s after their names, but not many. And many of them are simply conservative M.D.s. As I pointed out, one who has my maiden name and who I investigated further because that intrigued me, is a cardiothoracic surgeon in Louisiana. I can pretty much promise you he knows little or nothing about climatology; his goal is protecting his wealth, not any kind of science at all.
And one more thing--you forgot the huge economic cost which will come with global warming. You act like it is impossible to live environmentally sensitive lives--what on earth is wrong with recycling, incidentally? Another Communist plot?--but you totally ignore the billions of dollars that the drought in Texas and other global warming kinds of changes are costing people, not to mention all the lives being lost.
Here is a recent column by Molly Ivins which pretty much refutes everything you say. I am sorry to have to copy it, but I could not find it on the web, so I can't just url it. You really need to deal with why some major companies, including oil companies, have accepted global warming as fact, incidentally. Your arguments are illogical.
TEXAS COOKS, BUT DON'T SAY IT'S GLOBAL WARMING
Austin, Texas
"As Texas endures the slow, agonizing death of our entire agricultural sector by drought, a check of our media and political leaders shows we are also suffering from a bizarre silence on a topic that could be described as "the cause that dare not speak its name."
Local newspapers have responded heroically to the heat wave that has now killed more than 120 Texans, unleashing a torrent of efforts to help those most in peril. The one topic they have not addressed is: Why is this happening?
Of the few articles on the subject, all are limited to the answer "El Nino," which is half right. According to climatologists, this is an El Nino drought: El Nino shifted the jet stream just enough to hold the high that normally sits over the Rockies in the summertime east over Texas, so we are not getting the clouds and cooling that normally give us some relief. But the other half of the answer, global warming, has gotten little or no attention.
A recent Dallas Morning News article gives the flavor of what little coverage global warming has gotten: "What did skies over Texas and a Washington debate about global warming share this week? An unusual amount of hot air, say experts on both meteorology and politics." Heh-heh.
The media are doing so poorly on this issue that it's an embarrassment to the profession, and we are being hoist partly by the petard of our infamous "objectivity." We continue to report global warming as though it were a "debate" among scientists. It is not.
What we mistake for a "debate" is actually a public relations campaign by the American Petroleum Institute, which has recruited and funded a few scientists who question the entire phenomenon. They, in turn, are given equal weight by the media, as though they were precisely as objective as the 2,500 scientists who work with the United Nations'Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
According to USA Today, when 14 energy industry lobbyists gathered in April to work out the details of a $6 million lobbying plan on global warming, they targeted Congress, the news media, the public and . . . schoolchildren. "Informing teachers/students about uncertainties in climate science will begin to erect a barrier against further efforts to impose Kyoto-like measures in the future," says a memo obtained by the National Environmental Trust.
The notion that the IPCC is some group of fear-mongering enviros is easily disproved by study of any of its cautious work or the testimony of its chairman, Robert T. Watson. On the other hand, the API's notorious PR campaign is designed, in the words of its own strategy documents, to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact."
In addition, a number of conservative think tanks have been churning out dubious studies allegedly proving that doing much of anything about global warming will cost each and every citizen a small fortune and "radically" affect all our lives. These studies have been given solemn coverage by the press.
Among the most important developments this year is the formation of a coalition of major companies--including Sun Co., 3M, British Petroleum, Lockheed, Maytag, United Technologies, Boeing, etc.--that not only accept climate change as a serious threat but also believe that action is necessary and can be taken without economic damage.
Meanwhile the Republican party of Texas has adopted the flat statement: 'We oppose the theory of global warming and the Kyoto Agreement.' That certainly takes care of that as far as Texas Republicans are concerned." |
