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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.
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...
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.
No, damn it. False equivalency. One side lies about it for political gain, the other is desperately trying to get the public to understand that it is a scientifically accepted truth that must be dealt with.
Tell me, in what way would flooding in NYC and global famine not affect our security?
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.
"That group of politicians are self-serving liars, but this group is benevolent and trying to help everyone!"
I knew there were still people like you out there, but I thought we'd pretty much fixed this kind of ignorance on Slashdot. I guess we've got some more work to do.
Here's a hint: neither side gives a shit about you. You're not even a pawn in their little game. At best, you're the chair they rest their fat, sweaty ass on while they play the game and get rich and powerful. That you believe you're on the same side or working towards similar goals is, quite frankly, pathetic.
If you want to see politicians who aren't stepping on every man, woman, and child to get a little higher up, look for the ones who've been marginalized as fanatical zealots and kooks. After all, in the game of politics, anyone who isn't crushing everyone else to get more money, power, and glory must be a lunatic.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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.
Yes Yes because no one really checked
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/03/climate_change
!!!
and the initial reluctance to release the raw data had noting to do with the huge effort it took to get permission form all the thousands of individuals and governments who produced it
www.newscientist.com/article/dn20739-ok-climate-sceptics-heres-the-raw-data-you-wanted.html
and no one ever went back and re collected it for public release either!!!
and the freedom of information requests where all completely innocent too!!!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/25/freedom-information-laws-harass-scientists
Here's Bill Nye's response to WattsUp's experiment, explaining why they failed to reproduce results that have been successfully reproduced over and over and over again by other scientists, organizations, and amateurs.
What's sad is that the AGW skeptics give so much link-love to this bungled demonstration, that the other experiments get pushed down in the google results. AGW Skeptics are a lot like evolution-deniers in this regard, who also push anti-evolution nonsense to the top of all google results. It must be nice to have so much free time to promote this propaganda, while real science is so careful, nuanced, and time-consuming it gets lost in the politics.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
I've got karma to burn, so I'll bite. This is the problem with you people, instead of rationally talking about what the problems are and practical things we can all do to help, you jump straight to the end of the world scenario. This makes people tune you out, and you sound like a fool.
Saying shit like that is the equivalent of saying that if we don't have mandatory internet ID and censorship, that pedophiles and terrorists are inevitably going to break into our homes in the middle of the night and rape our daughters, and take control of the nuclear power plants and run them up to 1000% causing Chernobylfukushimas at every generating station, respectively.
Both are hyperbole, and do nothing to get logical folks considering your point of view. Try being rational and practical instead of religious and fanatical for a change, and I bet you'll find people are a bit more receptive to your ideas.
Which side is the one lying about it for political gain?
The side that is LYING!! Truth is REAL. I know that it's trendy to deny it these days, but there are such things as objective facts. All of the science proves that global warming is a fact. You don't like it? Too fucking bad, go cry me a river. Your opinions hold absolutely no sway over fact. You can disbelieve climate change, you can disbelieve evolution, you can disbelieve the moon landing, you can disbelieve that passenger jets brought down the Twin Towers, you can disbelieve gravity. But none of that fucking matters. Because truth is true whether you believe it or not.
And tell me, how is there "political gain" for the Democrats in raising taxes and creating regulations? How does it help them? Cause from where I stand, they'd be able to win a lot more power if, like the Republicans, they simply denied objective fact and promised tax cuts for everyone. They don't do that. Instead they accept the truth and try to deal with it.
Fuck you for waging this war on objective truth. We cannot survive without science, and we cannot have science without objective truth.
The financial gain/loss by the fossil fuel industry dwarfs any political or economic gains anybody else may have.
I don't respond to AC's.
Which side is the one lying about it for political gain?
The side that doesn't have facts supporting its position.
Was that a trick question?
Can we next debate whether or not smoking tobacco is bad for your lungs?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
While your assumption is very simplifying, and thus attractive, I don't think it's correct. The reality is that politicians feel corrupt to us because they live in their own echo chamber, and they do believe a lot of things that are just plain stupid because of that. They listen to the wrong people, the people who have the loudest voices, and choose who to ally with based on what they think is right, or in some cases what they think is beneficial to them.
Saying that they are just looking out for themselves is oversimplifying. Saying that nothing they say is ever valid is incorrect. It's comforting either to think that politicians are basically good, and looking out for us, or basically evil, and trying to screw us. It's much harder to live in the real world, where they are much more complicated than that, and require our involvement if they are to serve us.
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
Panetta is the same guy who compares cyber threats to Pearl Harbor. He sees threats everywhere, and his solution is more DoD funding.
Seriously, in your earlier post you basically said that everyone who disagrees with you is lying for political gain, and everyone who agrees with you is a sincere communicator. Don't you see a serious logical problem in that? If you don't, I'll make it explicit: just because people agree with you, that does not mean they are kind, sincere, or even right.
Let me explain how politics works. People will attempt to gain power wherever they can. It doesn't matter if AGW is 110% real, and serious threat with fires erupting on the equator, people dying of starvation, and oceans rising to the Rocky Mountains. Politicians are STILL going to try to use it to their advantage.
We see this all the time. In the 1950s, communist spies WERE a reality. A guy named McCarthy twisted this fact to destroy his political enemies. In the 2000s, anti-American terrorists WERE a real threat. A guy named George Bush used this fact to invade a completely unrelated country and destroy its government.
It doesn't matter if an issue is real or not. If it has captured attention, people will try to use it for their advantage.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You seem confused so I'll break it down for you:
Small list of observed facts:
-Carbon Dioxide, Nitrous Oxide, and Methane Gas are all greenhouse gasses.
-Human behavior at this time includes producing or releasing these gasses.
-Government regulators in the United States have mandated that cars run at reduced fuel efficiency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
-Our records indicate that average temperature over time has increased.
-There are lakes of methane hydrate crystals on the ocean floor.
-Changes in temperature and pressure can cause heavier-than-water liquids and solids to change phase in to lighter-than-water gasses.
This is a theory:
-The recorded change in climate is caused by the human release and production of greenhouse gasses.
These are hypothesis:
-A tipping point exists where the Earth's climate will cease to be habitable to human life.
-We have passed, or are approaching this point.
-Human influence on climate is significant.
Seriously, in your earlier post you basically said that everyone who disagrees with you is lying for political gain, and everyone who agrees with you is a sincere communicator.
That's a very misleading way to phrase it. You're implying that I believe that the liars are lying because they disagree with me. That is false. I believe that they're lying because all of the evidence shows that they are. I disagree with them as a consequence of that fact.
I'm quite happy to admit when I'm wrong. Example: I voted for Bush, twice. I believed Iraq had WMDs. I believed that the United States wasn't torturing detainees. Go back to my pre-college years, and I was even a creationist! By 2006, the evidence of torture and lack of evidence of WMDs was such that I had to admit that I had been wrong, so I abandoned the GOP that had misled me so. And I was wrong about another thing: I thought at the time that a lot of other people would follow me, and that the GOP would collapse under the enormity of their lies. O, how wrong I was. Most of my former peers simply blinded themselves to the truth. Others rationalized by deciding, "Well, sure, I supported the bad guys, but the other guys are just as bad, so it's okay!" That's a defense mechanism, used by a brain that doesn't want to face its former mistakes.
Higher taxes + more bureaucracy = bigger government = more power. How do you not see how this helps them?
It may help them.
Good Republicans are for smaller, less powerful government.
Unless you have a working vagina:
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/87be7156f5/republicans-get-in-my-vagina?playlist=featured_videos
Have you spent a week or two among [Republicans], away from your friends of a similar mindset and comfort zone, where you are forced to interact with them on a minute by minute basis?
Yup, a week, two weeks, my entire childhood, every single holiday since then. Try listening to your aunt talk about how the Jews are using Hollywood to brainwash society, while your Jewish mother sits awkwardly in the corner. Try watching your supposedly devout Christian father argue that torture is good. Try arguing with your uncle that his daughter, your cousin, is not a "race traitor" just because she's dating a black man. Do all that for decade after decade, and then come back to me and say that these people can be reasoned with.
Sometimes people really are just too far gone, and society's only option is to move on without them.
I wish the Democrats would yank the window around. The sad fact is that they don't.
Twenty years ago, the Republicans supported cap & trade as a free market alternative to the Democrats' policies. Today, they've renamed it "cap & tax" and it's politically toxic. Their new alternative is to do nothing because they don't even acknowledge the scientific truths that they did years ago.
Twenty years ago, the Republicans supported the individual mandate as a free market alternative to the Democrats' policies. Today, it's a "government takeover of health care" that will institute "death panels". Their new alternative is to sell state insurance across state lines, meaning that all insurance companies would move to the state with the most lax regulations, meaning the quality of care would drop like a stone.
Twenty years ago, Medicare was a beloved program and considered untouchable. Today, the Republicans, including their presidential nominee, have announced their intention to end the program, replace it with one that covers only a fraction of seniors' medical costs, and give the savings to the super rich in the form of the largest tax cut in decades.
Twenty years ago, waterboarding was an evil torture technique used against American servicemen in WWII. Today it's a useful "enhanced interrogation" technique.
Twenty years ago, a ban on assault weapons was a reasonable compromise in gun control. Today, even after the near assassination of a Representative and murder of several bystanders, we can't manage to pass a law against extended magazines -- weapons that have no purpose other than mass murder.
The only area in which the Democrats have gained any ground is gay rights. Sorry, but truth doesn't get through to people. The average American is way too stupid to recognize a logical fallacy when he hears one. You can either lose every argument and watch the country go down the shitter, or you can fight fire with fire.