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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (182174)	2/20/2006 11:01:00 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Mq, you seem to be fairly unique in the ability to take comfort that we may return to climatic conditions from the age of dinosaurs. Maybe things were really nice then, and maybe it's all quite sad there weren't any people around to appreciate the global balm. It's true the ice core data only goes back 400k years or so, a fairly short period geologically speaking. Enough to see cycles, though, and enough to see that we're pretty much off the deep end already as far as the world we grew up in goes, metaphorically speaking for homo erectus and descendents. Some charts and graphs, just for old time's sake: stanford.edu (from stanford.edu ) The funny thing about that one is it shows a historical cycle of C02 levels in the 170-270 ppm range, and you can't quite see from that particular graph how far off the deep end we're heading, except that things are sort of going vertical at the end. This one makes it a little clearer: stanford.edu So, we're about 100 ppm / 30-40% over recent historical peaks in the 100k year cycle, and it looks like we're heading up about 1 ppm per year, with some acceleration in there for good measure. Not to worry, though, official conservative "science" is working hard at random word police activities to make sure it's all handled in a proper W "personal responsibility" fashion. It's all Al Gore's fault, or something. Random local references of note: Message 22109840 Message 22080198 A really cool overview of the Deutsch episode can be garnered from nytimes.com , which also gives some indication of the proper scope to look at these things in, which you might appreciate as a long view kind of guy. You might or might not appreciate the one true explanation, though, but that's life in the age of W: So imagine my surprise to find the origin of the universe suddenly at the white hot center of national politics. Last week my colleague Andrew Revkin reported that a 24-year-old NASA political appointee with no scientific background, George C. Deutsch, had told a designer working on a NASA Web project that the Big Bang was "not proven fact; it is opinion," and thus the word "theory" should be used with every mention of Big Bang. It was not NASA's place, he said in an e-mail message, to make a declaration about the origin of the universe "that discounts intelligent design by a creator." We don't need no stinkin' science, when we got W's handlers around to explain it all to us. You just got to believe.