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Maldives Government Holds Undersea Cabinet Meeting
Hugh Pickens writes "The president of the Maldives and 11 ministers, decked out in scuba gear, held a cabinet meeting 4m underwater to highlight the threat of global warming to the low-lying Indian Ocean nation. While officials said the event itself was light-hearted, the idea is to focus on the plight of the Maldives, where rising sea levels threaten to make the nation uninhabitable by the end of the century. President Mohamed Nasheed and his cabinet spent half an hour on the sea bed, communicating with white boards and hand signals and signed a document calling for global cuts in carbon emissions. The Maldives has already begun to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue to buy a new homeland as an insurance policy against climate change that threatens to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees. Emerging out of the water, a dripping President Nasheed removed his mask to answer questions from reporters and photographers crowded around on the shore. 'We are trying to send a message to the world about what is happening and what would happen to the Maldives if climate change isn't checked,' he said, bobbing around in the water with his team of ministers. 'If the Maldives is not saved, today we do not feel there is much chance for the rest of the world.'"
The Ocean is not becomming "more acidic". It's still very alkaline. You should say "over the very brief period of time we've been testing the PH of the ocean with any degree of accuracy, it's alkalinity has decreased by a very small amount. We have no way of knowing whether or not this is a natural cycle, or whether or not the measurements we take today, with different instruments from yester-year, account for the difference; in any case, we're pretty sure life in the Ocean will adapt to such a small change with relative ease, although this would mean our research grants to study it being severely curtailed, hence we need lots of alarming headlines in the mainstream media".
I'm not a Conservative and, frankly, in my country there's not much difference between any of the parties with respect to "global warming". All of them uncritically accept it without question, throwing their rationality out of the window along with all common sense, as you seem to have. For there to be a conspiracy, there has to be a secret. But there are no secrets here; it's all available to you if you care to read the criticisms and counter arguments to much of this work. There is no secret that Goldman Sachs is lobbying for Cap & Trade and stands to make billions from it. There's no secret that Al Gore has interests in Carbon Offset companies, even going as far as to offset his own Carbon use by making payments to his own company. You can choose to ignore things like this and assume they are acting with the best of intentions, but as I'm not an idiot like you, I don't.
Here's a clue: the Scientific Process is broken, particularly in Climate Science. How else can papers such as Steig, Briffa, Mann, et al actually get published in the first place? These guys have been farming hockey sticks for a living for the past two decades and, despite eminent Mathematicians pointing out the folly of their methods, some links to which I have provided in this discussion, they are still held up by people like you as "experts". You can disagree with Wegman if you like, but I think you're on shaky ground if your argument rests on Authority. Wegman IS an authority. The guys he critiques in his paper aren't trained mathematicians, but they're inventing statistical techniques Wegman clearly shows are wrong in their papers. Steve McIntyre and Ross McIntrick (the former is a Mathematician and Statistician) show the same follies in paper after paper. Do you care? No, you don't read it, because you only read stories that confirm your already held position. It's called bias.
Finally, if you don't think institutions aren't farming government grant money through hyping up alarmist press releases, then I'm afraid you're very naive and, frankly, an idiot.