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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Krowbar who wrote (528795)	1/24/2004 7:03:09 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

LOL so what... Did you know Glaciers on Mars are also melting. And except that gore got to be a fool on the coldest day in 50 years, nothing has changed in the last couple of years. What have we to show for a century of warming? In 1900 life expectancy at birth in the United States was 42 years. After 100 years of globalwarming, it was exactly twice that number, 84 years. Urban infrastructure in the United States has adapted so well to both average and warmed climates that heat-related deaths are disappearing. After a global warming of 0.6°C, U.S. crop yields quintupled. World food production per capita has increased by nearly 50 percent in the last half century. An untold story is that carbon dioxide itself makes most crops grow better: By the year 2050 that direct stimulation of planetary greening will feed an increment of 1.5 billion people the equivalent of today's diet. The Kyoto Protocol Does Nothing about Global Warming No known mechanism can stop global warming in the near term. International agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, would have no detectable effect on average temperature within any reasonable policy time frame of 50 years or so-even with full compliance. Climate modelers at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research calculate that full compliance with the Kyoto Protocol by all signatory nations would reduce global surface temperature by 0.07°C by 2050, and 0.14°C by 2100. Congress should note the dangers of an expensive environmental accord with no benefit. Recently, NASA scientist James Hansen, whose 1988 congressional testimony started the global warming furor, wrote that reducing carbon dioxide is a highly ineffective means of slowing global warming in the 50- year time horizon. Rather, he argued, concentrating on the other greenhouse gases, such as CFCs and methane (which has stopped increasing in the atmosphere for only partially known reasons), is much more effective and politically acceptable than the costly Kyoto Protocol, which, he wrote, ``cast the developed and developing worlds as adversaries.'' But beyond 50 years we have little, if any, idea what the energy infrastructure of our society will be. To highlight the folly of any such projection, compare the energy-related concerns of 1900, when pundits cautioned that major U.S. cities would be knee-deep in horse ``emissions'' by 1930 unless we saw fit to ``act now,'' with those of 2000. We simply cannot predict our technological future. Rather, the more serious question the facts on global warming provokes is this: Is the way the planet warms something that we should even try to stop? cato.org