Wraith

I am a fairly liberal individual. I hate Bush/Cheney passionatly. I think Iraq was one the worst ideas in the long, sad, history of bad ideas. I despise the patriot act, telecom immunity, and corporate welfare. But when towards the middle of March, I come back from getting my mail with snow caked on me almost to my knees with more snow on the way. My liberal position is that global warming is a bunch of crap.

__________________
"Oh people, know that you have committed great sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you!" -- Genghis Khan, Bukhara 1220

Pats&Sox

So global warming which is measured in decades at the very least is nonsense because it snowed in winter?

BTW this storm was nothing but rain for most of Massachusetts. New England, known for frigid winters buried in snow, is getting rain on March 8th.

Pats&Sox

Stick around long enough and maybe one of them will drag out their 'Oregon Petition', thousands of scientists supposedly signed. There's even a spice girl on it.

Charleston Patriot

When asked who is the "founder" of the global warming movement, to most people Al Gore comes to mind. This guy is a huge hypocrite. He does not practice what he preaches.




FROM USA TODAY:

Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe
Updated 12/7/2006 5:45 PM ET E-mail | Save | Print |


Enlarge By Rusty Kennedy, AP


By Peter Schweizer

Al Gore has spoken: The world must embrace a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." To do otherwise, he says, will result in a cataclysmic catastrophe. "Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb," warns the website for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. "We have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin."

ON DEADLINE: Your thoughts?

Graciously, Gore tells consumers how to change their lives to curb their carbon-gobbling ways: Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, use a clothesline, drive a hybrid, use renewable energy, dramatically cut back on consumption. Better still, responsible global citizens can follow Gore's example, because, as he readily points out in his speeches, he lives a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.

For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.

Gore is not alone. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has said, "Global warming is happening, and it threatens our very existence." The DNC website applauds the fact that Gore has "tried to move people to act." Yet, astoundingly, Gore's persuasive powers have failed to convince his own party: The DNC has not signed up to pay an additional two pennies a kilowatt hour to go green. For that matter, neither has the Republican National Committee.

Maybe our very existence isn't threatened.

Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.

Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn't mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either.

Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.

The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life? Giving up the zinc mine or one of his homes is not asking much, given that he wants the rest of us to radically change our lives.

Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy.

Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe - USATODAY.com

Having Al Gore talk about personal sacrifice is like asking Jeffrey Dahmer to promote a book on etiquette. If you want me to believe in G.W, find a better spokesman.

Pats&Sox

He's viewed as the father of the movement by deniers because they cant debate the data. That's a dead end.

TeaSea

I've posted a very long list of scientific organizations of the world in this forum a couple of times before, so I'll not repeat that, but for those who just don't like scientists/science - maybe oil companies are a more trustworthy source of information??? After all, it is not in their best interests that people believe that human-caused global climate change is real. They just don't want to look like fools.
If scientists are too liberal and politicians too unreliable, perhaps you find the opinion of key industry representatives more convincing:
• BP, the largest oil company in the UK and one of the largest in the world, has this opinion:
There is an increasing consensus that climate change is linked to the consumption of carbon based fuels and that action is required now to avoid further increases in carbon emissions as the global demand for energy increases.
• Shell Oil (yes, as in oil, the fossil fuel) says:
Shell shares the widespread concern that the emission of greenhouse gases from human activities is leading to changes in the global climate.
• Eighteen CEOs of Canada's largest corporations had this to say in an open letter to the Prime Minister of Canada:
Our organizations accept that a strong response is required to the strengthening evidence in the scientific assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We accept the IPCC consensus that climate change raises the risk of severe consequences for human health and security and the environment. We note that Canada is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

Have the environazis seized the reigns of industrial power, in addition to infiltrating the U.N., the science academies of every developed nation, and the top research institutes of North America? That just doesn't seem very likely.

Calvin-X

No it does not. However here is a possiblity,

SSRN-Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation by Timur Kuran, Cass Sunstein




Considering the ridicule suffered by any non-conformist on this issue, this seems quite possible.

jpn of Seattle

source

Yeah, I'd say that about sums it up.

TeaSea

Possible. To me, a perfect example of that cascade effect is how one person says it snowed yesterday, therefore the climate can't be warming, and then a lot of others jump in with their similar anecdotes and they all conclude that Gore is full of crap.
But the science and the data, lots of it, support the theory of global climate change. If that's too tedious, just kind of stand back and look at the big picture of industrialized humanity on this planet. We know we've been pouring ever increasing tons of stuff into the atmosphere in just the past 100 years or so. We know that here are hundreds of thousands less square acres of forest on the surface of this planet. Granted, we don't know the precise effect of all this but so what? Shouldn't the real question be "Where's the proof that we are not changing the climate?" rather than "Where's the proof that we are changing the climate?"

Troianii

Global warming, if we were to take it at the idea that the globe is getting warmer, is real. However, the idea that humans are behind it is connected with "global warming", not global climate change. The global climate has been getting warmer for a long time.

Humans have an impact, but humans aren't fully responsible, and the difference that we could make isn't cost efficient. If we restrain our industries to try to slow global warming than ok, we're sacrificing our economy to make global warming a little bit slower, and in the next ten years China and India will pick up the pace and surpass our economies.


And the statements you made, which I put in bold and italics, seem to be contradicting each other, could you clear that up?



I'm not sure I agree with those reports (and I'd also have to note that it's measuring a single point). I live in Maine, and we're going through one of our colder winters, and every time it looks like the ice and snow will melt away we get another snowstorm. It's pretty much a weekly experience now.