You do realize that Bush won the Popular vote in 2004 by three million twelve thousand four hundred ninety-nine (3,012,499) votes, right? I'm not sure what "popular vote tally" you're looking at.
Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 by about five hundred forty thousand (543,811) votes. And if you want to be technical about it, the recount in Florida was not stopped illegally, it was started illegally when Gore's campaign filed a suit to prevent the certification of the election. Had they allowed the election to be certified, Florida state law would have automatically required a state-wide recount of every vote. By preventing the certification and tying the Florida Secretary of State up in court until they reached the deadline for appointing Electors, Gore insured that the State of Florida had no choice but to "illegally halt" the recount. Had they not, then their Electors would not have been selected in time for the meeting of the Electoral College, and the entire state of Florida would have been disenfranchised. (Resulting in a Gore win.) So, if that's the basis for your argument that Bush lost in 2000, you'd be right.
In fact, only in the case where all election law was thrown out and the most liberal (not *that* meaning of "liberal") definition of "vote" was used (the Palm Beach County "Pregnant Chad" rule), and you only recounted the five most democratic counties in the state of Florida, only in that (incredibly invalid and illegal case) does Al Gore squeak out a margin of 22 votes. http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/s tories/main.html Heck, had Gore won his home state of Tennesee, the whole thing would have been moot anyway.
In retrospect, Bill Clinton never won the majority of the popular vote. (He won pluralities in both elections.)
Man-made CO2 represents 4% of the annual output of CO2 on the planet. 96% of all CO2 is generated by natural causes.
The Earth has gone through more massive changes in it's history than you seem to be capable of conceiving. CO2 levels have been as high as 7000ppm in the past. Yes, we have a bunch of arctic ice cores that may indicate CO2 levels have been mostly invariable in the past, but, as one PhD Chemist I know pointed out, "All that may be measuring is the level of CO2 dissolution in water at 0 degrees C." In other words, CO2 in ice is more likely to be the function of how well CO2 dissolves into ice water than any other mechanism like atmospheric density.
I'm not saying that there aren't some signs of warming, but I am highly skeptical of the supposed disastrous consequences.
Sea levels are "noticeably rising"? Not according to the 1841 sea level marking in Tasmania found here. Even the IPCC only claims a maximum of 15 millimeters over the 6000 year average. If you can see 2/3rds of an inch difference, more power to you, but calling it "Noticeably Rising" is a vast overstatement. The 2007 IPCC report is claiming a maximum rise of about 18 inches, or about the same as during the Medieval Climate Optimum. Al Gore is claiming 20 feet, but he also claims to have created the Internet...
Weather, overall, is not getting worse. The 1930's saw worse hurricanes then even the 2005 season. The difference being that now we can name storms 2,000 miles out to sea that never touch land, whereas, the 1930's used ships that passed storms in the ocean and very few storms were measured until land-fall. In fact, the largest hurricane (Typhoon Tip) occurred in 1979, in the midst of a "slow period". In 2005, the increase in Atlantic hurricanes was matched by a decrease in Pacific Typhoons (hurricanes), meaning that overall, the number barely increased. The link to storms and global warming is hotly debated.
In fact, were anthropogenic global warming a reality, we'd find that storm severity would decrease because storms are driven by the heat engine effect, namely the flow of heat from the equator towards the poles. Global Warming, as predicted by the models and climate scientists, indicates that the majority of warming occurs at the upper latitudes, with the largest increases at the poles. This means that the gradient of temperature from equator to poles would be less, and thus, the storms would decrease in severity. In fact, this was the prediction published in several papers up until about 1999, when they suddenly reversed themselves.
I could speculate that it was because they had seen a record storm year with the 1998 El Nino season, and they wanted to use the connection between strong storms and global warming to sell the science, but that would be a correlation vs. causation fallicy. Of course, in 2006, those same scientists predicted a "killer" Atlantic hurricane season, and not one single hurricane touched North American soil. (Yes, one storm was a hurricane when it approached Cuba, but by the time it made landfall it had been downgraded to a tropical storm.) Suddenly we were back to the climate scientists, and they actually said, "The reason we had so few hurricanes was because of global warming." So, now we have global warming if there's more hurricanes, global warming if there's less hurricanes, and, we must assume, global warming if there's no hurricanes. That's called non-falsifiable, and there's a name for its practice, but it's not science. The word is religion.
Is the Earth warming up? Satellite measurements continue to show, at most, a mild and limited warming, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, and mostly in the middle latitudes. Claiming that glaciers melting (which they are)
This is mostly due to the fact that Hollywood uses stage weapons, which have no projectile in front of the explosive. Having gotten to fire a whole plethora of movie weapons when working in theatre productions, I've seen these things up close. Without the projectile to provide back-pressure in the muzzle, the initial ignition which occurs at the back of the shell pushes the un-burned powder forward and out of the barrel where it burns as it escapes. This is what produces the huge muzzle flash in the movies.
Mind you, the weapons master also told me that they often add other things (corn starch, non-dairy creamer, etc.) to enhance the flash when they're shooting movies, because most directors like the effect so much.
In fact, most of the explosions that you see don't use gasoline any more either. Apparently non-dairy creamer produces a much better (and less dangerous to store) explosion. In fact, if you put a one gallon jug of non-dairy (powdered) creamer around a flash powder charge, you can get a 30 foot fireball. (My dad worked in pyrotechnics shows.)
Except that SS is not a funded "pay as you go" system. That's been a fiction since the beginning. Social Security is paid out to recipients based on current receipts, not current receipts plus a surplus set aside and saved for future benefits. The surplus has not been "saved" in some big bank vault. Thanks to Teddy Kennedy's bill in the 1970's, the money in the Social Security Trust fund is used to purchase government savings bonds (with a 0.5% ROI), effectively taking the money from Social Security and adding it to the General Fund. In fact, the Social Security Trust Fund is only solvent when you add in the eight trillion dollars of IOU's that the U.S. Congress has written to them.
When SS was created in 1933, the ratio was one recipient was being paid for by 10 payers. In 1980, the ratio was down to 6 earners paying in for each recipient. As of 2000, the number is three point five to one. By 2015 (when the last baby boomers are jumping on the system), the number will be two to one or less, and the "surplus" will be draining at over 400 billion dollars a year. That's 400 billion dollars that the Congress will now *have* to pay back to the Social Security Trust Fund.
Now, think about that. Not only will they have to pay $400B into Social Security, but the vast amount of money that Social Security used to pay into the General Fund via their savings bonds won't be there any more either. That's about $250 Billion more not going in. So we have an instant additional $650B deficit in the federal budget. Can you imagine coming up with an extra 2/3rds of a TRILLION dollars a year?
Do you really think that the government is going to stop spending money? What will they cut? Education, Health care, Social Services, the Military, the FBI, roads?
Or do you think there will be a new round of tax hikes on "the richest Americans", which, according to the definition of rich in the 1993 tax increase was, "Anyone earning over $32,800 a year."
By 2029, the Social Security Trust Fund is completely broke, and, with raising life expectancies, and fewer children per parent, the payout rate by 2035 is predicted to be 1 payer for each 3 recipients. The only way to support that system is an 80% tax rate. America was formed when the colonists rebelled against an appalling tax rate of... seven percent.
I don't think there's an American alive who would tolerate eighty cents of every dollar going to someone else who didn't plan for retirement.
But you don't have to believe me. The Social Security Trustees don't say it survives until 2056. In fact, they've had to repeatedly move the bankruptcy date up, now to 2029. In fact, over history they've been hopelessly optimistic about the future, and have been repeatedly slapped by reality showing that things are much worse then they claimed. Here, here, here, and here. The first one is the trustee report from 2004. The rest are articles from various sources. I intentionally picked articles from all sides of the political spectrum. There is a broad bi-partisan acknowledgement that the system is in horrible trouble -- President Clinton's own committee recommended privatization as the only alternative to higher taxes or lower benefits. The only people denying it are the ones running on "keeping social security safe". People like Barbara Boxer and the like who continuously say there's no problem with the system, even as it racks up 12 digit shortfalls year after year. ($200,000,000,000+ in 2004).
So, I've been putting my own money away (401Ks, IRAs, etc) because I know I can't count on Social Security to give me anything. In fact, more people under the age of 30 believe that we'll make contact with aliens in the next 30 years than believe that Social Security will still be available for them.
I usually lump FICA/Medicare together since 1) they were created in the same month, 2) they come out of my paycheck as a single item (Fed OASDI/MED) and 3) since I'm 36, I can expect to never see either of them.
So, mea culpa on the incorrect phrasing, but the point is still valid, and comes from several economic studies done in the last few years. In fact in the (paper) study that I took this from, the worst case is that 2035 would see a minimum federal combined (Income+FICA+Medicare) tax rate of 87%. Best case was 71%.
Global warming has nothing to do with the lack of a child's exposure to farm animals. The reason most kids today haven't seen a pig is because our society has stigmatized real nature in favor of an idealized version created in manicured city parks. I grew up in farm country, and I've seen cows and pigs up close and personal (I still have a scar on my leg where a pig took a chunk out of me). My parents' house was in an unmanaged "wild" forest with real nature all around.
But, in the city, farmers aren't diligent hard workers who tend to the land and grow food. No, according to the majority of "cultured" city people I've met, farmers are just "poor dumb dirt-scrubbing hicks."
With that attitude, it doesn't surprise me at all that their children have never seen a farm animal or a wild animal. How many of your Environmentalist Icons have actually walked through *real* nature, namely a forest without hiking trails or roads? How many have been on a farm, and not just to protest it, but to spend an entire year working there to produce the food they think comes pre-wrapped in plastic?
Bah, Thomas Jefferson was right. To paraphrase him -- "No man's opinion should count until he has grown a tomato plant from a seed, tended it, kept it, harvested the tomatoes, and eaten the result. Only then can they begin to understand the cycle of nature." He also called cities, "the festering scabs on the face of America."
You mean the Naomi Oreskes' non-peer reviewed essay in "Science" Magazine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_o n_climate_change#Oreskes.2C_2004), where she cherry picked 983 articles, out of over 11,000 published on climate during the 1993-2003 time period, and then claimed that it proved something? In fact that study has been debunked thoroughly.
Here's a quote from an article in The Wall Street Journal"More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy [sic -- Naomi] Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it."
Apart from that, Ms. Oreskes is the author of such fine scientific articles as "The Rejection of Continental Drift". Good thing we don't have any evidence to prove her wrong there. In fact her entire career appears to be all about how we must trust our computer models more than physical observation. But let her hold up the shiny holy grail of scientific consensus of Global Climate Change, and she's an untouchable pillar of science.
The best predictions of the effect of the Kyoto treaty are that it would postpone the amount of warming felt on January 1, 2100 to...
November 1, 2100.
It's economic impact, globally, has been estimated at five trillion dollars (US). Is that enough time for "the children" to fix the problem? About 250 days?
And by the way, the party that cries "Lower taxes" wants lower taxes for everyone, not just the current generation. The party that cries, "Raise Taxes" knows that the only way to leave the social security system as it currently is, means that our children (those working in the year 2035) will be facing an 80% tax rate to support the baby boomers on Social Security. Now who's taxing the children?
Are you mad? The UCS is an environmentalist group, founded in 1969. It's current president, Kevin Knobloch is a Washington insider Democrat, who served on the staff of two Democrat Congressmen. He's a "No Nukes" activist and pushes the hybrid car/hug a tree agenda. He's got a degree in Journalism for crying out loud, not science. This institute has nothing to do with science and more to do with making sure the giant cash cow of government funding never dries up. Read their own web-site and look up where their funding comes from.
Sheesh, on every scientific study that casts the slightest doubt on Global Warming, every other post is how the study must have been funded by the semi-mythical "Big Evil Oil". How come no one ever questions where this group/study gets its funding from. It took me under two minutes to find out about their President's background.
May I point out that this happened in a country called "The People's Republic of China", also known as Communist or even "Red" China.
May I point out that the communist system is considered the "ideal" form of liberalism.
May I further point out that many environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and even militant groups like ELF, all endorse this political system. Most of them take money from groups like ANSWER who actively support the Communist system. The same system of government that has had at least 20 years of foreknowledge (see "Last Chance to See" by Douglas Adams) to do something and still destroyed the species.
On the other hand, we have the evil capitalists in America, where even the most humble creature (see "Prebble Jumping Mouse") is protected by draconian measures to ensure it's survival.
Where creatures like the American Bald Eagle have been brought back from the brink of extinction to a point where I can see them almost any day of the week here in Colorado.
As a conservative, as an "evil republican", I do care about wildlife, I do care about the environment, I do care about the future of the planet. I have children after all.
I no more want my children drinking polluted water or breathing polluted air than you do. But I'm a realist, you can't have an advanced society without some compromises. They just have to be intelligent and made on the basis of sound science and fact, with a complete evaluation of the costs.
Your comment about "what meltdowns" shows that you know nothing about science. If you did, you'd be begging for nuclear plants to be built so we could get rid of fossil fuels, just like the founder of Greenpeace is.
I care about the eco-system. I'd love to get rid of our local coal plant that puts out more radiation every day than Three Mile Island did in it's lifetime. You'd prefer to fight any improvement in the human condition, telling me that to want to live better than my parents is a crime. You tell me that all technology is an evil thing, and that if it is necessary, that wind and solar power will be the answer, without realizing that wind power requires massive manufacturing costs, vast areas of land, destruction of any natural views, and not even mentioning the windmills nickname of "California Condor Cuisinarts." Solar power is no better, with prohibitively expensive and inefficient solar cells built with a process that is not only energy intensive, but horribly polluting. Like most liberals, you ignore the unintended consequences, doing only what feels good, what seems "right" at the moment.
Communism is the ultimate expression of doing what feels right over doing what is right. Communism steals one person's wealth at gunpoint to hand to someone else. Communism tears down the rich until the whole country is filled with the poor. Communism feels so good at the beginning, but by the end you've made it clear to everyone that any entrepreneurial spirit will be harshly punished.
And it was communism that killed the Baiji dolphin.
I think I'll go home and read my signed copy of "Last Chance to See" again. You see, I met Douglas Adams, and I talked to him. He would have been sad today not only because of the dolphins, but mainly because, after 20 years, China hasn't changed. They were a horrid place to live 20 years ago, and they're just as horrid today. In that respect, the dolphin was a symptom, not an end result.
The article you cite claims that the CO2 comes from fossil fuels or plant/vegetable matter burning. In fact, it starts with the line "Since fossil fuels are ultimately derived from ancient plants, plants and fossil fuels all have roughly the same 13C/12C ratio" which suggests that any plant-derived CO2 is going to be the same ratio of isotopes.
Now, where do you think the CO2 locked in the permafrost comes from? Most of it is frozen peat bogs or similar swampy terrain.
Time's up. It's all ancient plant matter. Which means it's chemically indistinguishable from burning fossil fuels or forests. Since something like 90% of airborne CO2 comes ultimately from vegetable matter decomposition (either through decay or burning), they're whole statement that they can prove it's all man-made is laughable. If they could do that, without any shred of doubt, then there would be no debate whatsoever.
The problem is that you can't determine, without error, what the source of atmospheric CO2 is. The Carbon Cycle in the atmosphere is mind bogglingly complex. The U.S., often cited as the worst polluter in the world, actually shows a net drop in CO2 as air passes over it (from a NASA satellite that measures CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.) This is largely a result of the large tracts of farmland and forested land that still cover a large chunk of the continent. On the other hand, China, which has deforested huge tracts of land and flooded more of it for the growing of rice paddies, has such a huge CO2 output that it dwarfed the output of a giant (50,000 sq. mile) forest fire during the same period.
Even if the atmospheric CO2 were man-made, it doesn't mean that permafrost melt hasn't contributed to the baseline level of CO2 in the atmosphere. If it adds enough CO2 to overcome some natural sink (like the permafrost itself, which is a natural CO2 sink) then the overall level of CO2 will go up. It's kind of like pouring liquid from 20 different pitchers into a bucket with 20 different holes. Change the rate you're pouring from any given pitcher and the level in the bucket will change. The problem is, you can't tell, from looking at the bucket, which pitcher is pouring faster. Isotope tracing is like adding food coloring to the buckets. But 18 of them all pour green....
Of course, in reality, the bucket's holes also change, and some of those holes lead straight back to refill the pitchers. And some of the holes get bigger based on the amount of liquid in the bucket, and some of them get smaller, and all of them are just one bucket in a bigger bucket that has 200 more pitchers pouring into it with 200 more holes, and all of those other pitchers and holes might affect the flow of the CO2 bucket.
And we don't even know for certain what half of the pitchers and holes are.
That's the problem here. If you think any answer in climate science is certain then you've fallen for propoganda.
Actually, the second article I link to is all about how the thawing permafrost might contribute up to 500ppm to the atmosphere as it thaws, that implies an amount nearly twice the total "normal" level of 280ppm, for an overall tripling of CO2. (The number might have been from a different article -- use the google search for a better authority than USA Today.)
Clearly, that's an amount more than enough to explain the 25% increase we've seen in the past century.
You missed the whole point. Your original post asked for any information that said CO2 followed warming and not vice versa. Read in that context, the single sentence you decided to pick at, makes perfect sense. I did not claim that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. That would be foolish, nay, idiotic. I attempted no such thing.
My answer was in reply your original comment which said, and I quote, "Explain to me how increased levels of CO2 (which are rising due to humans- I challenge you to find an alternative explanation that has not been debunked from here to Shanghai and back)...."
So, that's what I did, I presented a source other than humans.
Read in that context, the single line you chose to pick out has exactly that meaning. It is a mechanism for CO2 increase that is not the cause of warming, but the result of it.
So there, in two links, are strong evidence that CO2 change could be a result of temperature change and not vice-versa.
Now I await the flames... let me guess the order:
Someone will argue that the RealClimate article says that CO2 lag is only at the start of interglacials, and the rest of the time it is the driving force of climate change. This ignores the fact that they never explain a mechanism for this reversal, or explain how it isn't a continuous feedback process that results in run-away greenhouse. Nor do they explain how a constantly climbing amount of CO2 suddenly causes the next ice age...
Someone will argue that the second article comes from USA Today, hardly a credible source, without bothering to spend two minutes with Google http://www.google.com/search?q=co2+release+from+pe rmafrost finding the dozens of scientific papers.
Someone will claim I work for the oil companies (I don't.)
My post will be modded down as -1 Flamebait to make sure no one reads it.
I have absolutely nothing against stem cell research, not at all. Nor do almost all Republicans. What they are against is Federal Funding for embryonic stem cell research.
The only reason that it's even an issue is that embryonic stem cell research has, so far, produced zero (zilch, nada, nunca, squat) treatments in humans. That's right, not one. Adult Stem Cell research has produced a list of 75+ treatments and counting. So, in the free market economy, guess where the research money is going?
Adult Stem Cells.
Leaving the embryonic bunch, who, despite every effort, has only managed to kill a lot of Parkinsons infected rats with cancer, without any private funding. Sure, they made the Parkinsons go away in the rat, but dying of cancer within 6 months isn't much of a trade off.
So, since they can't get private funding for experiments that have yet to show one positive result, they turn to the great "Udder of Democracy" the Federal Government, in an attempt to get funding. They promise to heal the sick, make the lame walk, and just about raise the dead. All without a single success. And then they tell us that all they need to do is destroy a whole bunch of embryos to do it, which, while I'm personally morally uncertain about it (the whole "when does life begin argument"), a lot of people on the right side of the aisle equate destroying embryos with murder.
So, what the right is uptight about is that you have a group of scientists with no useful results, who come asking the government to dig into the wallet of every American, and give them money to something that nigh on 50% of Americans find morally repugnant. All with empty promises without a single success to hang their hat on.
So, like any good business man, the President said, "Nope, no funds for you, unless you use one of the already established embryonic stem cell lines (i.e. no more new embryos)."
No one on the right has ever said you can't do stem cell research. That's one of the big lies of this last campaign.
Man, I wish had mod points today. I was wondering if anyone was going to point this out. Strange how with all of these close elections in traditionally "red" areas we don't hear anyone screaming "FRAUD! WAAAAHHHH!" like you did in the last three elections that the Dems lost big.
Why? Because I'm not, and you don't read far enough. This is why 90% of the people in America are uninformed:
(13) "Stem cell" means a cell that can divide multiple times and give rise to specialized cells in the body, and includes but is not limited to the stem cells generally referred to as (i) adult stem cells that are found in some body tissues (including but not limited to adult stem cells derived from adult body tissues and from discarded umbilical cords and placentas), and (ii) embryonic stem cells (including but not limited to stem cells derived from in vitro fertilization blastocysts and from cell reprogramming techniques such as somatic cell nuclear transfer). [Emphasis mine]
See that at the end of the first paragraph? "It can also be used as the first step in the process of reproductive cloning."
Missouri is claiming cloning is only cloning if you then bring the embryo to full term by implanting inside a uterus. That's the definition of clause #1 in section 6.2 http://www.sos.mo.gov/elections/2006petitions/ppSt emCell.asp. In other words, they could allow the blastocyst to mature as far as they want so long as they don't implant it in a female human uterus. Nothing in there about using chimpanzees or any other surrogate uterus. It doesn't even say they can't implant it for the purpose of growing it to term and then aborting. Just that you can't do it to deliver a live human clone.
In that respect, I agree with you completely. I can't believe how many people (including some I work with) who consider themselves "informed voters" who can't name even one of the candidates on their ballot. Or who don't even know their voting precinct number. But that doesn't stop them from heading straight to the polls and then coming back saying, "I didn't know all that was going to be on the ballot" and then finding out they voted in favor of "The Nun Beating Amendment" or something similar.
Yes, I hate "uninformed voters", but it's the "uninformed" part that I really despise. Wake up, people -- what your government does affects you every day of your life.
Except that almost all states use election judges who are volunteers, who receive a pathetic stipend to be an election judge (Colorado pays a reasonable $100, but when I was in Wisconsin, it was $25). You have to attend an (unpaid) training session that lasts about one hour.
All of these things are done in the middle of the week (eliminating just about anyone with a job.) Almost every election cycle the political parties send out calls *begging* for volunteers because they are hopelessly short. They tend to find these people at the last minute, after the training has been held.
So, are you surprised that most election judges are either elderly and retired, or 18 and uneducated?
As opposed to what? The alternative is that someone who knows nothing about a candidate, an issue, or whatever is going to make an uneducated guess as to what they should do.
Is that somehow better? You would rather have an uninformed voter basically fill in dots (pull levers/push buttons/touch a screen) at random? That's not a democracy, that's chaos. That's why candidates fight over who gets listed first on the ballot because it can give up to a 5% boost in the vote because people are too lazy to know who they're voting for. That's why the Missouri measure to legalize human cloning is called the "Stem Cell Research Amendment". If all you see is the title it sure looks like a good idea. You'd have to actually read the bill (something Michael J. Fox should have done before making commercials for it) to know what it says.
As far as I'm concerned, uninformed voters represent a larger problem than any hacking, fraud, or other issue. If you don't know what you're voting for, then for [insert preferred deity here]'s sake, DON'T VOTE
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You do realize that Bush won the Popular vote in 2004 by three million twelve thousand four hundred ninety-nine (3,012,499) votes, right? I'm not sure what "popular vote tally" you're looking at.
s tories/main.html Heck, had Gore won his home state of Tennesee, the whole thing would have been moot anyway.
Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 by about five hundred forty thousand (543,811) votes. And if you want to be technical about it, the recount in Florida was not stopped illegally, it was started illegally when Gore's campaign filed a suit to prevent the certification of the election. Had they allowed the election to be certified, Florida state law would have automatically required a state-wide recount of every vote. By preventing the certification and tying the Florida Secretary of State up in court until they reached the deadline for appointing Electors, Gore insured that the State of Florida had no choice but to "illegally halt" the recount. Had they not, then their Electors would not have been selected in time for the meeting of the Electoral College, and the entire state of Florida would have been disenfranchised. (Resulting in a Gore win.) So, if that's the basis for your argument that Bush lost in 2000, you'd be right.
In fact, only in the case where all election law was thrown out and the most liberal (not *that* meaning of "liberal") definition of "vote" was used (the Palm Beach County "Pregnant Chad" rule), and you only recounted the five most democratic counties in the state of Florida, only in that (incredibly invalid and illegal case) does Al Gore squeak out a margin of 22 votes. http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/
In retrospect, Bill Clinton never won the majority of the popular vote. (He won pluralities in both elections.)
The sad part is that you believe what you wrote.
Man-made CO2 represents 4% of the annual output of CO2 on the planet. 96% of all CO2 is generated by natural causes.
The Earth has gone through more massive changes in it's history than you seem to be capable of conceiving. CO2 levels have been as high as 7000ppm in the past. Yes, we have a bunch of arctic ice cores that may indicate CO2 levels have been mostly invariable in the past, but, as one PhD Chemist I know pointed out, "All that may be measuring is the level of CO2 dissolution in water at 0 degrees C." In other words, CO2 in ice is more likely to be the function of how well CO2 dissolves into ice water than any other mechanism like atmospheric density.
I'm not saying that there aren't some signs of warming, but I am highly skeptical of the supposed disastrous consequences.
Sea levels are "noticeably rising"? Not according to the 1841 sea level marking in Tasmania found here. Even the IPCC only claims a maximum of 15 millimeters over the 6000 year average. If you can see 2/3rds of an inch difference, more power to you, but calling it "Noticeably Rising" is a vast overstatement. The 2007 IPCC report is claiming a maximum rise of about 18 inches, or about the same as during the Medieval Climate Optimum. Al Gore is claiming 20 feet, but he also claims to have created the Internet...
Weather, overall, is not getting worse. The 1930's saw worse hurricanes then even the 2005 season. The difference being that now we can name storms 2,000 miles out to sea that never touch land, whereas, the 1930's used ships that passed storms in the ocean and very few storms were measured until land-fall. In fact, the largest hurricane (Typhoon Tip) occurred in 1979, in the midst of a "slow period". In 2005, the increase in Atlantic hurricanes was matched by a decrease in Pacific Typhoons (hurricanes), meaning that overall, the number barely increased. The link to storms and global warming is hotly debated.
In fact, were anthropogenic global warming a reality, we'd find that storm severity would decrease because storms are driven by the heat engine effect, namely the flow of heat from the equator towards the poles. Global Warming, as predicted by the models and climate scientists, indicates that the majority of warming occurs at the upper latitudes, with the largest increases at the poles. This means that the gradient of temperature from equator to poles would be less, and thus, the storms would decrease in severity. In fact, this was the prediction published in several papers up until about 1999, when they suddenly reversed themselves.
I could speculate that it was because they had seen a record storm year with the 1998 El Nino season, and they wanted to use the connection between strong storms and global warming to sell the science, but that would be a correlation vs. causation fallicy. Of course, in 2006, those same scientists predicted a "killer" Atlantic hurricane season, and not one single hurricane touched North American soil. (Yes, one storm was a hurricane when it approached Cuba, but by the time it made landfall it had been downgraded to a tropical storm.) Suddenly we were back to the climate scientists, and they actually said, "The reason we had so few hurricanes was because of global warming." So, now we have global warming if there's more hurricanes, global warming if there's less hurricanes, and, we must assume, global warming if there's no hurricanes. That's called non-falsifiable, and there's a name for its practice, but it's not science. The word is religion.
Is the Earth warming up? Satellite measurements continue to show, at most, a mild and limited warming, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, and mostly in the middle latitudes. Claiming that glaciers melting (which they are)
This is mostly due to the fact that Hollywood uses stage weapons, which have no projectile in front of the explosive. Having gotten to fire a whole plethora of movie weapons when working in theatre productions, I've seen these things up close. Without the projectile to provide back-pressure in the muzzle, the initial ignition which occurs at the back of the shell pushes the un-burned powder forward and out of the barrel where it burns as it escapes. This is what produces the huge muzzle flash in the movies.
Mind you, the weapons master also told me that they often add other things (corn starch, non-dairy creamer, etc.) to enhance the flash when they're shooting movies, because most directors like the effect so much.
In fact, most of the explosions that you see don't use gasoline any more either. Apparently non-dairy creamer produces a much better (and less dangerous to store) explosion. In fact, if you put a one gallon jug of non-dairy (powdered) creamer around a flash powder charge, you can get a 30 foot fireball. (My dad worked in pyrotechnics shows.)
Except that SS is not a funded "pay as you go" system. That's been a fiction since the beginning. Social Security is paid out to recipients based on current receipts, not current receipts plus a surplus set aside and saved for future benefits. The surplus has not been "saved" in some big bank vault. Thanks to Teddy Kennedy's bill in the 1970's, the money in the Social Security Trust fund is used to purchase government savings bonds (with a 0.5% ROI), effectively taking the money from Social Security and adding it to the General Fund. In fact, the Social Security Trust Fund is only solvent when you add in the eight trillion dollars of IOU's that the U.S. Congress has written to them.
When SS was created in 1933, the ratio was one recipient was being paid for by 10 payers. In 1980, the ratio was down to 6 earners paying in for each recipient. As of 2000, the number is three point five to one. By 2015 (when the last baby boomers are jumping on the system), the number will be two to one or less, and the "surplus" will be draining at over 400 billion dollars a year. That's 400 billion dollars that the Congress will now *have* to pay back to the Social Security Trust Fund.
Now, think about that. Not only will they have to pay $400B into Social Security, but the vast amount of money that Social Security used to pay into the General Fund via their savings bonds won't be there any more either. That's about $250 Billion more not going in. So we have an instant additional $650B deficit in the federal budget. Can you imagine coming up with an extra 2/3rds of a TRILLION dollars a year?
Do you really think that the government is going to stop spending money? What will they cut? Education, Health care, Social Services, the Military, the FBI, roads?
Or do you think there will be a new round of tax hikes on "the richest Americans", which, according to the definition of rich in the 1993 tax increase was, "Anyone earning over $32,800 a year."
By 2029, the Social Security Trust Fund is completely broke, and, with raising life expectancies, and fewer children per parent, the payout rate by 2035 is predicted to be 1 payer for each 3 recipients. The only way to support that system is an 80% tax rate. America was formed when the colonists rebelled against an appalling tax rate of... seven percent.
I don't think there's an American alive who would tolerate eighty cents of every dollar going to someone else who didn't plan for retirement.
But you don't have to believe me. The Social Security Trustees don't say it survives until 2056. In fact, they've had to repeatedly move the bankruptcy date up, now to 2029. In fact, over history they've been hopelessly optimistic about the future, and have been repeatedly slapped by reality showing that things are much worse then they claimed. Here, here, here, and here. The first one is the trustee report from 2004. The rest are articles from various sources. I intentionally picked articles from all sides of the political spectrum. There is a broad bi-partisan acknowledgement that the system is in horrible trouble -- President Clinton's own committee recommended privatization as the only alternative to higher taxes or lower benefits. The only people denying it are the ones running on "keeping social security safe". People like Barbara Boxer and the like who continuously say there's no problem with the system, even as it racks up 12 digit shortfalls year after year. ($200,000,000,000+ in 2004).
So, I've been putting my own money away (401Ks, IRAs, etc) because I know I can't count on Social Security to give me anything. In fact, more people under the age of 30 believe that we'll make contact with aliens in the next 30 years than believe that Social Security will still be available for them.
I usually lump FICA/Medicare together since 1) they were created in the same month, 2) they come out of my paycheck as a single item (Fed OASDI/MED) and 3) since I'm 36, I can expect to never see either of them.
So, mea culpa on the incorrect phrasing, but the point is still valid, and comes from several economic studies done in the last few years. In fact in the (paper) study that I took this from, the worst case is that 2035 would see a minimum federal combined (Income+FICA+Medicare) tax rate of 87%. Best case was 71%.
Global warming has nothing to do with the lack of a child's exposure to farm animals. The reason most kids today haven't seen a pig is because our society has stigmatized real nature in favor of an idealized version created in manicured city parks. I grew up in farm country, and I've seen cows and pigs up close and personal (I still have a scar on my leg where a pig took a chunk out of me). My parents' house was in an unmanaged "wild" forest with real nature all around.
But, in the city, farmers aren't diligent hard workers who tend to the land and grow food. No, according to the majority of "cultured" city people I've met, farmers are just "poor dumb dirt-scrubbing hicks."
With that attitude, it doesn't surprise me at all that their children have never seen a farm animal or a wild animal. How many of your Environmentalist Icons have actually walked through *real* nature, namely a forest without hiking trails or roads? How many have been on a farm, and not just to protest it, but to spend an entire year working there to produce the food they think comes pre-wrapped in plastic?
Bah, Thomas Jefferson was right. To paraphrase him -- "No man's opinion should count until he has grown a tomato plant from a seed, tended it, kept it, harvested the tomatoes, and eaten the result. Only then can they begin to understand the cycle of nature." He also called cities, "the festering scabs on the face of America."
You mean the Naomi Oreskes' non-peer reviewed essay in "Science" Magazine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_o n_climate_change#Oreskes.2C_2004), where she cherry picked 983 articles, out of over 11,000 published on climate during the 1993-2003 time period, and then claimed that it proved something? In fact that study has been debunked thoroughly.
Here's a quote from an article in The Wall Street Journal "More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy [sic -- Naomi] Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it."
Apart from that, Ms. Oreskes is the author of such fine scientific articles as "The Rejection of Continental Drift". Good thing we don't have any evidence to prove her wrong there. In fact her entire career appears to be all about how we must trust our computer models more than physical observation. But let her hold up the shiny holy grail of scientific consensus of Global Climate Change, and she's an untouchable pillar of science.
Sheesh, read some background for crying out loud.
The best predictions of the effect of the Kyoto treaty are that it would postpone the amount of warming felt on January 1, 2100 to...
November 1, 2100.
It's economic impact, globally, has been estimated at five trillion dollars (US). Is that enough time for "the children" to fix the problem? About 250 days?
And by the way, the party that cries "Lower taxes" wants lower taxes for everyone, not just the current generation. The party that cries, "Raise Taxes" knows that the only way to leave the social security system as it currently is, means that our children (those working in the year 2035) will be facing an 80% tax rate to support the baby boomers on Social Security. Now who's taxing the children?
Are you mad? The UCS is an environmentalist group, founded in 1969. It's current president, Kevin Knobloch is a Washington insider Democrat, who served on the staff of two Democrat Congressmen. He's a "No Nukes" activist and pushes the hybrid car/hug a tree agenda. He's got a degree in Journalism for crying out loud, not science. This institute has nothing to do with science and more to do with making sure the giant cash cow of government funding never dries up. Read their own web-site and look up where their funding comes from.
Sheesh, on every scientific study that casts the slightest doubt on Global Warming, every other post is how the study must have been funded by the semi-mythical "Big Evil Oil". How come no one ever questions where this group/study gets its funding from. It took me under two minutes to find out about their President's background.
Dear liberal troll,
May I point out that this happened in a country called "The People's Republic of China", also known as Communist or even "Red" China.
May I point out that the communist system is considered the "ideal" form of liberalism.
May I further point out that many environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and even militant groups like ELF, all endorse this political system. Most of them take money from groups like ANSWER who actively support the Communist system. The same system of government that has had at least 20 years of foreknowledge (see "Last Chance to See" by Douglas Adams) to do something and still destroyed the species.
On the other hand, we have the evil capitalists in America, where even the most humble creature (see "Prebble Jumping Mouse") is protected by draconian measures to ensure it's survival.
Where creatures like the American Bald Eagle have been brought back from the brink of extinction to a point where I can see them almost any day of the week here in Colorado.
As a conservative, as an "evil republican", I do care about wildlife, I do care about the environment, I do care about the future of the planet. I have children after all.
I no more want my children drinking polluted water or breathing polluted air than you do. But I'm a realist, you can't have an advanced society without some compromises. They just have to be intelligent and made on the basis of sound science and fact, with a complete evaluation of the costs.
Your comment about "what meltdowns" shows that you know nothing about science. If you did, you'd be begging for nuclear plants to be built so we could get rid of fossil fuels, just like the founder of Greenpeace is.
I care about the eco-system. I'd love to get rid of our local coal plant that puts out more radiation every day than Three Mile Island did in it's lifetime. You'd prefer to fight any improvement in the human condition, telling me that to want to live better than my parents is a crime. You tell me that all technology is an evil thing, and that if it is necessary, that wind and solar power will be the answer, without realizing that wind power requires massive manufacturing costs, vast areas of land, destruction of any natural views, and not even mentioning the windmills nickname of "California Condor Cuisinarts." Solar power is no better, with prohibitively expensive and inefficient solar cells built with a process that is not only energy intensive, but horribly polluting. Like most liberals, you ignore the unintended consequences, doing only what feels good, what seems "right" at the moment.
Communism is the ultimate expression of doing what feels right over doing what is right. Communism steals one person's wealth at gunpoint to hand to someone else. Communism tears down the rich until the whole country is filled with the poor. Communism feels so good at the beginning, but by the end you've made it clear to everyone that any entrepreneurial spirit will be harshly punished.
And it was communism that killed the Baiji dolphin.
I think I'll go home and read my signed copy of "Last Chance to See" again. You see, I met Douglas Adams, and I talked to him. He would have been sad today not only because of the dolphins, but mainly because, after 20 years, China hasn't changed. They were a horrid place to live 20 years ago, and they're just as horrid today. In that respect, the dolphin was a symptom, not an end result.
When you said the beer store recycled 95% of their products sold, I immediately wondered how they re-filtered the effluent from the urinals...
It's more accurate to say they recycle 95% of the packaging for their products.
Unless you're claiming that the bottle/cap/case is the product and the beer is a waste. In which case, I didn't know they only sold Pabst...
The article you cite claims that the CO2 comes from fossil fuels or plant/vegetable matter burning. In fact, it starts with the line "Since fossil fuels are ultimately derived from ancient plants, plants and fossil fuels all have roughly the same 13C/12C ratio" which suggests that any plant-derived CO2 is going to be the same ratio of isotopes.
Now, where do you think the CO2 locked in the permafrost comes from? Most of it is frozen peat bogs or similar swampy terrain.
Time's up. It's all ancient plant matter. Which means it's chemically indistinguishable from burning fossil fuels or forests. Since something like 90% of airborne CO2 comes ultimately from vegetable matter decomposition (either through decay or burning), they're whole statement that they can prove it's all man-made is laughable. If they could do that, without any shred of doubt, then there would be no debate whatsoever.
The problem is that you can't determine, without error, what the source of atmospheric CO2 is. The Carbon Cycle in the atmosphere is mind bogglingly complex. The U.S., often cited as the worst polluter in the world, actually shows a net drop in CO2 as air passes over it (from a NASA satellite that measures CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.) This is largely a result of the large tracts of farmland and forested land that still cover a large chunk of the continent. On the other hand, China, which has deforested huge tracts of land and flooded more of it for the growing of rice paddies, has such a huge CO2 output that it dwarfed the output of a giant (50,000 sq. mile) forest fire during the same period.
Even if the atmospheric CO2 were man-made, it doesn't mean that permafrost melt hasn't contributed to the baseline level of CO2 in the atmosphere. If it adds enough CO2 to overcome some natural sink (like the permafrost itself, which is a natural CO2 sink) then the overall level of CO2 will go up. It's kind of like pouring liquid from 20 different pitchers into a bucket with 20 different holes. Change the rate you're pouring from any given pitcher and the level in the bucket will change. The problem is, you can't tell, from looking at the bucket, which pitcher is pouring faster. Isotope tracing is like adding food coloring to the buckets. But 18 of them all pour green....
Of course, in reality, the bucket's holes also change, and some of those holes lead straight back to refill the pitchers. And some of the holes get bigger based on the amount of liquid in the bucket, and some of them get smaller, and all of them are just one bucket in a bigger bucket that has 200 more pitchers pouring into it with 200 more holes, and all of those other pitchers and holes might affect the flow of the CO2 bucket.
And we don't even know for certain what half of the pitchers and holes are.
That's the problem here. If you think any answer in climate science is certain then you've fallen for propoganda.
So it's paid for by a group whose absolute life and livelihood depend on getting the right answers. Seems like the ones I'd want paying for it...
Of course, if I were OPEC, I think I'd prefer the doom and gloom scenario, because then I could raise prices through the roof...
Actually, the second article I link to is all about how the thawing permafrost might contribute up to 500ppm to the atmosphere as it thaws, that implies an amount nearly twice the total "normal" level of 280ppm, for an overall tripling of CO2. (The number might have been from a different article -- use the google search for a better authority than USA Today.)
Clearly, that's an amount more than enough to explain the 25% increase we've seen in the past century.
You missed the whole point. Your original post asked for any information that said CO2 followed warming and not vice versa. Read in that context, the single sentence you decided to pick at, makes perfect sense. I did not claim that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. That would be foolish, nay, idiotic. I attempted no such thing.
.
My answer was in reply your original comment which said, and I quote, "Explain to me how increased levels of CO2 (which are rising due to humans- I challenge you to find an alternative explanation that has not been debunked from here to Shanghai and back)...."
So, that's what I did, I presented a source other than humans
Read in that context, the single line you chose to pick out has exactly that meaning. It is a mechanism for CO2 increase that is not the cause of warming, but the result of it.
Throughout history, CO2 levels have always lagged behind temperature increases. Even RealClimate admits it http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13.
A major component of this is that climbing temperatures release large amounts of CO2 locked in the permafrosts. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/
So there, in two links, are strong evidence that CO2 change could be a result of temperature change and not vice-versa.
Now I await the flames... let me guess the order:
Like I said, I've done this before.
I have absolutely nothing against stem cell research, not at all. Nor do almost all Republicans. What they are against is Federal Funding for embryonic stem cell research.
The only reason that it's even an issue is that embryonic stem cell research has, so far, produced zero (zilch, nada, nunca, squat) treatments in humans. That's right, not one. Adult Stem Cell research has produced a list of 75+ treatments and counting. So, in the free market economy, guess where the research money is going?
Adult Stem Cells.
Leaving the embryonic bunch, who, despite every effort, has only managed to kill a lot of Parkinsons infected rats with cancer, without any private funding. Sure, they made the Parkinsons go away in the rat, but dying of cancer within 6 months isn't much of a trade off.
So, since they can't get private funding for experiments that have yet to show one positive result, they turn to the great "Udder of Democracy" the Federal Government, in an attempt to get funding. They promise to heal the sick, make the lame walk, and just about raise the dead. All without a single success. And then they tell us that all they need to do is destroy a whole bunch of embryos to do it, which, while I'm personally morally uncertain about it (the whole "when does life begin argument"), a lot of people on the right side of the aisle equate destroying embryos with murder.
So, what the right is uptight about is that you have a group of scientists with no useful results, who come asking the government to dig into the wallet of every American, and give them money to something that nigh on 50% of Americans find morally repugnant. All with empty promises without a single success to hang their hat on.
So, like any good business man, the President said, "Nope, no funds for you, unless you use one of the already established embryonic stem cell lines (i.e. no more new embryos)."
No one on the right has ever said you can't do stem cell research. That's one of the big lies of this last campaign.
Man, I wish had mod points today. I was wondering if anyone was going to point this out. Strange how with all of these close elections in traditionally "red" areas we don't hear anyone screaming "FRAUD! WAAAAHHHH!" like you did in the last three elections that the Dems lost big.
Yes, nothing like pandering to the 2% of the population (15% of which are under 18 years of age) who earn the minimum wage for, on average, 11 months.
Stock futures are down big this morning, as happens after almost every democratic win. I believe NASDAQ is down 20+ and Dow is down 40+.
Why do people feel they need to lie about things?
_ transfer
t emCell.asp. In other words, they could allow the blastocyst to mature as far as they want so long as they don't implant it in a female human uterus. Nothing in there about using chimpanzees or any other surrogate uterus. It doesn't even say they can't implant it for the purpose of growing it to term and then aborting. Just that you can't do it to deliver a live human clone.
Why? Because I'm not, and you don't read far enough. This is why 90% of the people in America are uninformed:
(13) "Stem cell" means a cell that can divide multiple times and give rise to specialized cells in the body, and includes but is not limited to the stem cells generally referred to as (i) adult stem cells that are found in some body tissues (including but not limited to adult stem cells derived from adult body tissues and from discarded umbilical cords and placentas), and (ii) embryonic stem cells (including but not limited to stem cells derived from in vitro fertilization blastocysts and from cell reprogramming techniques such as somatic cell nuclear transfer ). [Emphasis mine]
Please look up the term "somatic cell nuclear transfer" and find out what it means. Too lazy? Let me help you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_nuclear
See that at the end of the first paragraph? "It can also be used as the first step in the process of reproductive cloning."
Missouri is claiming cloning is only cloning if you then bring the embryo to full term by implanting inside a uterus. That's the definition of clause #1 in section 6.2 http://www.sos.mo.gov/elections/2006petitions/ppS
Read CLOSER
In that respect, I agree with you completely. I can't believe how many people (including some I work with) who consider themselves "informed voters" who can't name even one of the candidates on their ballot. Or who don't even know their voting precinct number. But that doesn't stop them from heading straight to the polls and then coming back saying, "I didn't know all that was going to be on the ballot" and then finding out they voted in favor of "The Nun Beating Amendment" or something similar.
Yes, I hate "uninformed voters", but it's the "uninformed" part that I really despise. Wake up, people -- what your government does affects you every day of your life.
Except that almost all states use election judges who are volunteers, who receive a pathetic stipend to be an election judge (Colorado pays a reasonable $100, but when I was in Wisconsin, it was $25). You have to attend an (unpaid) training session that lasts about one hour.
All of these things are done in the middle of the week (eliminating just about anyone with a job.) Almost every election cycle the political parties send out calls *begging* for volunteers because they are hopelessly short. They tend to find these people at the last minute, after the training has been held.
So, are you surprised that most election judges are either elderly and retired, or 18 and uneducated?
That's just depressing to me.
As opposed to what? The alternative is that someone who knows nothing about a candidate, an issue, or whatever is going to make an uneducated guess as to what they should do.
Is that somehow better? You would rather have an uninformed voter basically fill in dots (pull levers/push buttons/touch a screen) at random? That's not a democracy, that's chaos. That's why candidates fight over who gets listed first on the ballot because it can give up to a 5% boost in the vote because people are too lazy to know who they're voting for. That's why the Missouri measure to legalize human cloning is called the "Stem Cell Research Amendment". If all you see is the title it sure looks like a good idea. You'd have to actually read the bill (something Michael J. Fox should have done before making commercials for it) to know what it says.
As far as I'm concerned, uninformed voters represent a larger problem than any hacking, fraud, or other issue. If you don't know what you're voting for, then for [insert preferred deity here]'s sake, DON'T VOTE
Hark, what hempen homespuns,
have we swaggering here?