[Market-farming] are you a global warming deniers?

STEVE GILMAN stevegilman at verizon.net
Fri Sep 14 12:22:30 EDT 2007


Hi All,

	Climate change has been called the Mother of All Externalities.  
That's the polite term for the unpaid pollution costs generated by  
business as usual. The fact is -- ALL those fossil fuels, products  
and by-products used by industrialized humans that were once stored  
deep in the earth have been released/pumped into the Ecosystem --  
air, atmosphere, soil, streams, rivers, oceans, etc. as pollutants of  
one type or another.

	But humans also have the cognizant ability to create and utilize  
viable alternatives that can dramatically curtail pollution, reduce  
energy use and reverse the generation of greenhouse gases (and even  
sequester/nullify existing greenhouse gases in the soil by a major  
shift to organic farming, for example). However, the Vested Interests  
and their governmental minions in almost every industry stand to have  
their pecuniary oxen gored by such shifts -- hence the huge degree of  
obfuscation, disinformation and denial so widely generated today.

	So, even in the face of over-whelming scientific consensus there's a  
lot of unverified opinions about Climate Change flying around these  
days. Some people seem to believe Denial is de river that flows by  
Egypt...  So, you have to consider the source. Here's one of our top  
Climate scientists who is routinely slammed by Deniers and Public  
Relationists -- but his work and views are constantly upheld by  
scientists. And, he shows that he bottom line of Climate Change is  
this is really a political problem ...

Steve

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/hansen

Why We Can't Wait

by JAMES HANSEN

[from the May 7, 2007 issue of The Nation]

This is an adaptation of a talk delivered February 26 at the National  
Press Club. Comments relating to policy are Dr. Hansen's personal  
opinion and do not represent a NASA position.

There's a huge gap between what is understood about global warming by  
the relevant scientific community and what is known about global  
warming by those who need to know: the public and policy-makers.  
We've had, in the past thirty years, one degree Fahrenheit of global  
warming. But there's another one degree Fahrenheit in the pipeline  
due to gases that are already in the atmosphere. And there's another  
one degree Fahrenheit in the pipeline because of the energy  
infrastructure now in place--for example, power plants and vehicles  
that we're not going to take off the road even if we decide that  
we're going to address this problem.

The Energy Department says that we're going to continue to put more  
and more CO2 in the atmosphere each year--not just additional CO2 but  
more than we put in the year before. If we do follow that path, even  
for another ten years, it guarantees that we will have dramatic  
climate changes that produce what I would call a different planet-- 
one without sea ice in the Arctic; with worldwide, repeated coastal  
tragedies associated with storms and a continuously rising sea level;  
and with regional disruptions due to freshwater shortages and  
shifting climatic zones.

I've arrived at five recommendations for what should be done to  
address the problem. If Congress were to follow these  
recommendations, we could solve the problem. Interestingly, this is  
not a gloom-and-doom story. In fact, the things we need to do have  
many other benefits in terms of our economy, our national security,  
our energy independence and preserving the environment--preserving  
creation.

First, there should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired  
power plants until we have the technology to capture and sequester  
the CO2. That technology is probably five or ten years away. It will  
become clear over the next ten years that coal-fired power plants  
that do not capture and sequester CO2 are going to have to be  
bulldozed. That's the only way we can keep CO2 from getting well into  
the dangerous level, because our consumption of oil and gas alone  
will take us close to the dangerous level. And oil and gas are such  
convenient fuels (and located in countries where we can't tell people  
not to mine them) that they surely will be used. So why build old- 
technology power plants if you're not going to be able to operate  
them over their lifetime, which is fifty or seventy-five years? It  
doesn't make sense. Besides, there's so much potential in efficiency,  
we don't need new power plants if we take advantage of that.

Second, and this is the hard recommendation that no politician seems  
willing to stand up and say is necessary: The only way we are going  
to prevent having an amount of CO2 that is far beyond the dangerous  
level is by putting a price on emissions. In order to avoid economic  
problems, it had better be a gradually rising price so that the  
consumer has the option to seek energy sources that reduce his  
requirement for how much fuel he needs. And that means we should be  
investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies at  
the same time. The result would be high-tech, high-paid jobs. And it  
would be very good for our energy independence, our national security  
and our balance of payments.

But a price on carbon emissions is not enough, which brings us to the  
third recommendation: We need energy-efficiency standards. That's  
been proven time and again. The biggest use of energy is in  
buildings, and the engineers and architects have said that they can  
readily reduce the energy requirement of new buildings by 50 percent.  
That goal has been endorsed by the US Conference of Mayors, but you  
can't do it on a city-by-city basis. You need national standards. The  
same goes for vehicle efficiency. We haven't had an improvement in  
vehicle efficiency in twenty-five or thirty years. And our national  
government is standing in court alongside the automobile  
manufacturers resisting what the National Research Council has said  
is readily achievable--a 30 percent improvement in vehicle  
efficiency, which California and other states want to adopt.

The fourth recommendation--and this is probably the easiest one-- 
involves the question of ice-sheet stability. The old assumption that  
it takes thousands or tens of thousands of years for ice sheets to  
change is clearly wrong. The concern is that it's a very nonlinear  
process that could accelerate. The west Antarctic ice sheet in  
particular is very vulnerable. If it collapses, that could yield a  
sea-level rise of sixteen to nineteen feet, possibly on a time scale  
as short as a century or two.

The information on ice-sheet stability is so recent that the  
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report does not adequately  
address it. The IPCC process is necessarily long and drawn out. But  
this problem with the stability of ice sheets is so critical that it  
really should be looked at by a panel of our best scientists.  
Congress should ask the National Academy of Sciences to do a study on  
this and report its conclusions in very plain language. The National  
Academy of Sciences was established by Abraham Lincoln for just this  
sort of purpose, and there's no reason we shouldn't use it that way.

The final recommendation concerns how we have gotten into this  
situation in which there is a gap between what the relevant  
scientific community understands and what the public and policy- 
makers know. A fundamental premise of democracy is that the public is  
informed and that they're honestly informed. There are at least two  
major ways in which this is not happening. One of them is that the  
public affairs offices of the science agencies are staffed at the  
headquarters level by political appointees. While the public affairs  
workers at the centers are professionals who feel that their job is  
to translate the science into words the public can understand,  
unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case for the political  
appointees at the highest levels. Another matter is Congressional  
testimony. I don't think the Framers of the Constitution expected  
that when a government employee--a technical government employee-- 
reports to Congress, his testimony would have to be approved and  
edited by the White House first. But that is the way it works now.  
And frankly, I'm afraid it works that way whether it's a Democratic  
administration or a Republican one.

These problems are worse now than I've seen in my thirty years in  
government. But they're not new. I don't know anything in our  
Constitution that says that the executive branch should filter  
scientific information going to Congressional committees. Reform of  
communication practices is needed if our government is to function  
the way our Founders intended it to work.

The global warming problem has brought into focus an overall problem:  
the pervasive influence of special interests on the functioning of  
our government and on communications with the public. It seems to me  
that it will be difficult to solve the global warming problem until  
we have effective campaign finance reform, so that special interests  
no longer have such a big influence on policy-makers.


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On Sep 14, 2007, at 10:40 AM, market-farming- 
request at lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> Message: 6
> Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 10:00:43 -0400
> From: "Sharon and Steve" <shopkins at tdstelme.net>
> Subject: Re: [Market-farming] are you a global warming deniers?
> To: "Market Farming" <market-farming at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Message-ID: <003e01c7f6d7$a5ddda50$1a0e8045 at your4dacd0ea75>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
> 	reply-type=original
>
>
>>
>> Are you denying the objective data showing the world's temperatures
>> are getting warmer?
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> No,and I am sure enjoying it, but the increase is minimal and the  
> effect is
> more in the area of moderation in my area, I am getting a month  
> frost free
> at each end of the season here.
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>
>> Are you denying the objective data that the world's ice packs are
>> rapidly disappearing?
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> No, an activity that started over 150 years ago, half of the ice  
> fields were
> gone by the early 1900's.
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>
>> Are you denying the data showing the effects of burning massive
>> amounts of coal?
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Sure the main effect is a hell of a lot of electricity.
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>
>> Are you denying the effect of  humans running hundreds of millions of
>> atmospheric heaters  (automobile engines) each and every day?
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Here again the main effect is that a lot of folk get to and from  
> places they
> want to go. as far as the heat generated: a year of it is less energy
> generated that a few minutes of a sunny day.
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>
>> Are you denying the objective data that thew world is significantly
>> warmer where humans exist in concentration  (cities) as opposed to
>> where they aren't as concentrated?
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> See above.
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>
>> Are you denying that the human population has doubled in our (well at
>> least my) lifetime with the concomitant increase in heating, food
>> production, transportation, clothing, housing needs?
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Not in the least, and I think we are doing a fine job of feeding,  
> clothing
> and feeding them. It is just too bad that so many have to live under
> opressive left wing governments that choose to steal the resources  
> rather
> than let all prosper.
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>
>> Are you denying the millions of tons of exhaust  from the massive
>> engines needed to transport the millions of large aircraft that are
>> in the worlds skies at any moment?
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Nope, have not flown in years, dont plan to.
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>
>> Are you denying the effect of the hundreds of millions of tons human
>> biological waste that are dumped into the worlds oceans and rivers
>> every hour?
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> No, it is a damn shame.
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>
>> Are you denying the effect of human activity that that modifies the
>> worlds ecosystem by
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Far enough right there, are you denying that it takes a hell of an  
> ego to
> think that man can significantly (your word so assign the value of  
> your
> choice)
> alter the climate of this planet? I will bet it even takes  a  
> bigger ego
> that lets one think thay have a way to fix it.
>
> If you intend for me to think that man has much to do with the  
> recorded one
> half of one degree C increase that has occured in recent decades I  
> will need
> a few answers:
>
> Why has energy recieved from the sun increased more than the
> heat generated by man?
>
> Why has the temperature on other planets in the solar system (where  
> we have
> the facility to measure) increased?
>
> If earths  temp increase is primarily due to natural cycles (and it  
> is) in
> the earths way of doing things what gives Algore followers the  
> right to mess
> with it, I dont want eco dreamers designing my weather.
>
> MAsteveINE
>
>
>
>



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