Slashdot Mirror
Panetta Labels Climate Change a National Security Threat
skipkent writes "Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared global warming a national security threat [Wednesday] during a speech before an environmentalist group in Washington, D.C. 'The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security,' Panetta told the Environmental Defense Fund last night. 'Rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.'"
... starts now.
No one actually sees what is really happening to the climate any more, just what political advantage they can get from it. Because of that it has become just noise.
He's saying what's been said many times before, e.g. this from 2009 about the Pentagons simulations:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html?pagewanted=all
"Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change."
"The National Intelligence Council, which produces government-wide intelligence analyses, finished the first assessment of the national security implications of climate change just last year. "
The greenhouse effect creates conditions that will increase plant growth. This removes more CO2. You can TEST THIS YOURSELF.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse
Now go ahead and slaughter me for not posting this AC. I can spare the karma for people who disagree. Feel free to ignore that the science is really split on how the global feedback mechanism actually works. Feel free to ignore that the oceans have not risen and buried Houston, like they said they would for years...
There are all kinds of problems with the videos you presented. See here for a very clear step by step instructions and video showing what your videos are claiming to show, have results that have been fabricated:
Real CO2 in a bottle experiment
The problem is you and so many others not actually understanding the effects that CO2 really has, and only believing in a simplistic view of warming promoted by your cult leaders.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Now everybody can be accused of terrorism: We caught this man attempting a global warming attack by emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. In fact, we had to put him down as he would not stop even after being caught, threatening the security of our agents.
Mind the frickin' laser...
When anyone who isn't a climate change "expert" voices skepticism on climate change, all the believers pile on, outraged, about how the person isn't qualified to be making such statements, how they're abusing their position/authority to sound like they know what they're talking about, &c.. (Remember Bjorn Lomburg?) So I'm sure we'll see the global-warmers express similar outrage about this, right?
And... "national security threat"? This is the same government agency that thinks that bearded malcontents hiding out in desert caves is a "national security threat." This is the same agency that spent decades fighting the "national security threat" posed by tiny little countries like Vietnam and Cuba going communist. I seem to remember an awful lot of progressives dismissing the lunacy of the War on Terror and the Cold War. So I'm sure they'll dismiss and mock this latest attempt by the U.S. military to imagine or invent new threats, right?
Right?
Liberty in your lifetime
it will not happen. The reason is that many nations like China will take advantage of this to build up their own economy and hope that other nations do the heavy lifting. Worse, EU and liberals here fall for the trap of emissions PER CAPITA. It is the WORST IDEA EVER. China has not had a changing population, yet, their emissions went up nearly 10 fold over something like a 20 year period. It is about ECONOMIC OUTPUT and how you cheat at it. And yes, China CHEATS HEAVILY. So do many nations.
If we want this solved, America is the solution. We are the largest importers. At this time, we should put a tax on ALL GOODS, both local and imported, based on the CO2 (and later add other pollutants) that is emitted from an area. The CO2 should be measured by satellite and it should be a case of (co2 out - co2 in).
The important part is that the tax is then based as a % of CO2 PER GDP (unleveled) or a combination of CO2/GDP and CO2/land size (deals with farming which can add a lot of CO2).
If America was to do this, it would impact the world over. Basically, nations that have been working on lowering their emissions will have lower taxes. Those like China which continue to cheat, would have top taxes applied to them.
Ideally, ALL nations that care should do this. They will encourage all other nations to move quickly towards dropping their emissions.
Since the economy is fragile, the maximum tax should start low and build yearly. That gives nations time to adjust.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is observation of effects. Another term for it is science... They have proposed the same hypothesis for 30 years, and it keeps not being right. The temperature has risen a degree or two, and the seas have not.
And yet, they did not. They have said for the last 8 years that AGW is a threat to global security and ultimately to the West. The scenarios painted over and over show that China runs out of water which is why they are building dams higher up on the rivers. They plan to take the water from India and bangladash. In the mean time, China is helping Pakistan and Burma knowing that they could tie up India and Bangladash with nukes pointed at them.
Then you have central and southern America which are heavily populated and they will likely have issues with water as well. With the overpopulation that exists there now, ppl will leave to go to Argentina, or northern America. Northern Africa will have massive wars as it dries up further.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's the "War On Climate Change" ... get it right.
The only "obvious" solution is a complete government take over of all things that produce CO2 ... in other words ... socialism. People, Factories, Vehicles, ect ... all property of the state and may only be used if they give the ok, but not before they make you feel horrible about it.
Who cares that the US Debt:GDP has surpassed 1:1 and that true unemployment is well over 16% ... let’s focus on the climate and stop worrying about that whole economy thing.
Be Very Afraid: The Church of The Climate is getting it's own Armed Inquisitition.
Life Imitates Super Bowl Ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml54UuAoLSo
Only in some conditions for some plants see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorespiration
Higher temperatures above a certain point decrease efficiency, to differing levels for different plants, and can lead to death or decreased yields. This could well render California's wine industry economically unsustainable with only a few degrees change see http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/june/wines-global-warming-063011.html.
It is true that to sea level rises will be minor, more a problem for a few cities on coastal swampland and some protected habitats but this is not the damage that real scientists have been most worried about, at least for America. If you got your idea on climate scientists opinions from newspapers understand that the often twist the subject to use fear to sell the paper and are often too scientifically illiterate to know when they crossed the line form exaggerating into lies. This is a problem they also have with everything form climate yes and diet advice eg super foods and medicine eg cancer drugs and even computer science (have you read a computer security article in a normal newspaper recently?).
The real problems are smaller but still important like the desertification that is currently happening in places like Texas, Global warming increases average rainfall but also makes it more "patchy" and increases evaporation. Also how do you like hurricanes? Because increased surface temperature and sea level moisture directly drive stronger storms in the American "hurricane ally" http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/hurricanes-and-climate-change.html. How a bout a bit of malaria or Lyme disease ect, as increase temperatures will drive the movement of biting insects. Note that none of these are a global doom scenario but go tell a Texan farmer the drought was not important, even if they do not believe in global warming reality is not a matter of opinion and the pain it has caused them is very real.
Actually it goes further back than that. In the 1950s climate scientists, reasoning by extrapolation, expected the next climate swing would be toward cooling. If you do a Google Scholar search you'll find papers starting around 1956 suggesting (tentatively) that anthropogenic CO2 generation would drive climate the other way, toward warming. Scientific consensus shifted over the next two decades toward a warming trend.
My wife was a physical oceanography grad student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic in the early 80s. I distinctly recall her telling me about a symposium in which CO2-driven AGW was discussed. It wasn't controversial -- nobody outside of geophysics and climate research had heard of it. Nor was the position that global warming wasn't happening controversial, although it was increasingly a minority opinion. Over the next two decades I watched the back and forth as evidence for warming per se was challenged, then vindicated in the pages of the journals she read and in geek publications like Science News. It wasn't until about a decade or so ago that the term "global warming" started taking off in the popular press.
Then there was Al Gore's *An Inconvenient Truth*, which was a blow against actual science having any influence in the public debate on pollution. It's not that the movie was scientifically inaccurate on the whole, although it was stated in much more positive terms than scientists are comfortable using. It's that a lot of people had been taught to hate this man, and for those people scientists and science as a whole was tarred with the brush of partisan distrust as well.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The average sea level rise in the last few decades has been about 3mm/year. So the sea level rise in the last thirty years has been about 3 inches since 1980. Your situation may vary due to geology. In Alaska sea levels are falling due to uplift of the land.
Take out a 3mm allen key and ask yourself, would you be able to eyeball that much change from year to year, given that the diurnal tides at Galveston are over two feet, and vary by several inches depending on weather and the moon. That's not counting the effect of wind and waves, which have to be averaged out.
You *can't* eyeball this magnitude of change without special instruments, even if it happened overnight, and you'd still need a long sequence of measurements to know what you are looking at. The practical effects of recent sea level rise are statistical, rather than directly observable.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy#Inquiries_and_reports
This issue has been investigated to death by the following organizations:
4.1 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee
4.2 Science Assessment Panel
4.3 Pennsylvania State University
4.4 Independent Climate Change Email Review
4.5 United States Environmental Protection Agency report
4.6 Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Commerce
4.7 National Science Foundation
No scientific wrong doing has ever been found. The quotes that the tinfoil heads have used to show that "Phil Jones admitted manipulating data" were taken out of context and completely misunderstood. So please go take your willfull ignorance and hang out with the young earth creationists and the flat earthers, and stop interfering with the rest of us while we try to save our asses and your sorry ass from this building world disaster.
-- QED
I have been hearing that Global warming will cause the seas to rise for 30 years. And yet the concrete piers in the gulf are still at the same level as they were 30 years ago.
This is the worst sort of nonsensical argument. You equate scientific predictions of sea level rise with a sea level rise that is so large that you would be able to observe and notice it with the naked eye by casual and randomly timed observations when you go to the beach. Did you take measurements? Did you account for tide level when you were there? Were you a kid with a totally different sense of scale 30 years ago?
No scientist ever predicted a rise so large over the last 30 years that casual observation would be able to observe it. The reality is that the predicted sea level rise has matched the reality quite closely. During the last thirty years that you referenced the three-year-average sea level has risen by about 5cm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png
The scientific predictions I am aware of predict that the rise will accelerate over the coming century. Some effects, especially big systemic effects lag behind the cause. For instance it takes time for rising CO2 to trap the amount of heat to increase average ocean temperature (which requires a gargantuan amount of energy that is really beyond most humans ability to grasp) then it takes more time for the warmer water to undermine the Antarctic and Greenland Glaciers, but if they do start to fall apart in a big way the Army Corps of Engineers will have to really scramble to keep Huston dry.
-- QED