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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (14590)	11/12/1998 3:27:00 AM
From: jbe	Respond to of 67261

Global warming -- again. Michael, the only reason I am up so late is that I am supposed to be preparing a paper to deliver at a conference. (At this rate, I will never finish it.) I repeat, that I am not an expert on global warming; I am not even a scientist; I have never followed the debate that closely. I just skim the newspaper, like everyone else. So, at this point, at any rate, I cannot answer all your questions. Instead, I will throw some questions back at you -- including ones I have already asked you. 1) Why is a belief that there is no global warming "conservative", and a belief that there is global warming "liberal"? This is a scientific issue, and it will be ultimately resolved on scientific grounds. What will you do if they ever come up with absolute, final, irrefutable evidence that global warming is occurring? Stop being a "conservative"?? 2) I repeat -- there are quite a few different theories out there. Why do you speak of "both sides"? How about "all sides"? From what I've seen of this issue, it is incredibly complex. I gather, from one NYT news item that I forgot to post, as well as from something on one of those websites you posted, that some conservative economists, around the time of the Kyoto affair, were arguing that the world may indeed be warming some -- but that the effects will be good, not bad. (Yeah, here we go, from your website: "Spending money to avoid better weather makes little sense," writes Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.) 3) I made an effort to find you some articles from the best paper in the country, The New York Times. You haven't checked them out yet. So how do you know whether they were "fair" to Singer or not? 4) And if it should turn out that Dr. Singer is indeed not taken seriously by the media, that is probably because he is not taken seriously by his peers -- the top scientists in his field. A good science reporter is not just going to paraphrase a news release; he/she will check it out with other sources. And the other sources are other scientists. Then the question would be: why don't his peers take him seriously? Professional jealousy? Competition for grant money? Profound scientific disagreement? Suspicion of his close ties with polluting businesses? There can be any number of reasons. But I would suggest that the least likely reason is that the other scientists are "liberals". Politics and science do not, or at least should not, mix. As for the 17,000 scientists who signed the petition, only 2/3 of them have advanced degrees. And who are they? I don't know. Do you? Are they better qualified than the scientists with whom they disagree? The campaign to get signatures was very intense; it raised quite a few eyebrows, as I recall. (Remember, I told you that I had heard about it.) Bedtime!!! jbe

To: greenspirit who wrote (14590)	11/12/1998 4:01:00 AM
From: John Ritter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Michael, I happen to know a little bit about 'global warming' and agree the concept is about something else, energy distribution, or more starkly wealth distribution. The 'global warming' label does have some benefit in the balance of wealth (first world) and people (third world) in that there is scientific theory to back the concept that we are pumping C02 into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels and industrial activity. No one has any real idea of the risk!? Most likely the atmosphere will be more fickle with higher concentrations of CO2, which means weather. Since large populations in the globe depend on continuing weather patterns to survive we could have some serious problems. It is not impossible that at some level of CO2 concentration there will be significant weather pattern shifts (see books on chaos theory) that have little to do with 'warming' from a statistical sense, so the scientists are correct as you state. CO2 is harmless to humans and good for plants and the weather pattern changes could be for the better looking forward several hundred years. In the meantime the world governments need to prepare irrespective of this topic to distribute wealth and infrastructure to bring marginal economic groups into the mainstream. This seems to be happening to some extent in the global markets. I don't believe the use of liberal and conservative in global warming debates makes sense, but admit that it is used like a football politically and only clouds the debate with politics. One can see from the Bill Clinton Scandal that the debate was not about impeachment, it was about power, money, and wealth accumulation, just like global warming.