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FOOD CRISIS: By 2040, global warming will heat up the growing season enough to begin to reduce crop production.
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In summer 2003, more than 52,000 Europeans died from heat-related ills, 30,000 in France alone, during an unrelenting heat wave that featured temperatures 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit (3.6 degrees Celsius) higher than normal. Crops also suffered, with corn production down by 30 percent and wheat by 21 percent, among other foodstuffs. And a similar hot spell in Ukraine in 1972 led to a wheat shortage that prompted that staple's prices to more than triple by 1974. But even without record-breaking heat, recent years have seen food riots from Bangladesh to Haiti as world agriculture was pushed to the breaking point by a combination of greater demand for food, biofuels and poor weather.
Such disruptions in the world's food supply may become even more the norm by the end of this century, according to a new analysis published today in Science. Climate modeler David Battisti of the University of Washington in Seattle and food security expert Rosamond Naylor of Stanford University used the results of 23 climate models to determine that there is a more than 90 percent chance—in other words, it is very likely—that the lowest growing season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics by the end of the century will be higher than the highest temperatures at present.
That area includes the southern U.S., Central America, southern Europe, central Asia, northern Australia and all of Africa, according to Battisti. "Although it had not been calculated before," he says, "it was not surprising to find that for most of the tropics and subtropics, the future summer temperatures would be out of bounds compared to what we have ever experienced."
Planning meetings for the Global Seed Vault in Norway spawned the idea of looking at average summer temperatures, which climate models can project relatively reliably and which have a large impact on crop yields—between 2.5 and 16 percent less wheat, corn, soy or other crops are produced for every 1.8–degree F (1–degree C) rise. "The impacts we will see on yield, combined with a growing population that depends greatly on agriculture for food and income, will demand a profound level of adaptation, which might include moving hundreds of millions of people," Battisti says.
According to the projections, the temperate zones, like most of the continental U.S., will also be affected. "By the end of the century, however, the seasonal growing temperature is likely to exceed the hottest season on record in temperate countries (equivalent to what France experienced in 2003), and the future for agriculture in these regions will become equally daunting," the researchers wrote.
To date, concerns about climate change's impact on agriculture have focused on drought—another likely outcome of warming world. As a result, plant scientists have researched ways to develop drought-resistant strains of various crops, such as a variety of corn that agriculture giant Monsanto Company and chemical company BASF have submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval.
Funding for such agricultural research in general has been dwindling in recent years, according to the Washington, D.C.–based International Food Policy Research Institute.
"Current levels of agricultural research are not adequate to help developing countries to adapt to climate change," says IFPRI water resources expert Claudia Ringler. But "the dire picture in the paper assumes no adaptation. Adaptation will certainly happen. Farmers in Russia will change the time of wheat planting [for example], and may switch to a different crop if the hot summer of today becomes the norm of the future."
Battisti and Naylor, however, assumed greenhouse gas emissions lower than the present output and the fact that more carbon dioxide (CO2), the most common greenhouse gas, will boost plant growth may not help. The forecasted CO2 boost—as much as 10 percent—in crop growth will be more than offset by the 20 to 40 percent drop due to higher temperatures alone—and will be further exacerbated by any drying, Battisti warns.
That means the future of agriculture as the climate changes could be even worse than this prediction—and that's before taking into account other factors such as the effect of pests.
"We want to look at the impact of climate change on the distribution of pests and pathogens that affect crops," Battisti says, "starting with maize in Africa." With three billion people living in the affected regions, at least a billion of whom are already malnourished, figuring out how to adapt agriculture to global warming couldn't be more urgent.
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66 Comments
Add CommentMy god. Does thw artic ice cap have to increase by a 1000 feet before you give up this global warming religion?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLook up the term "confirmation bias". It seems to be your intellectual "process".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGlobal warming would have increased crop yields and prevented millions from starving. Unfortunately, the planet has been cooling for the last 10 years and there is no end in sight to this cooling. Look at what the failure of China's rice crop because of a cold winter and a cold spring did last year. 50 million people have starved to death. Burning food for biofuel did not help. But keep it up. Do you care how many people you kill? I think not.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe environmentalist movement is racking up a huge death toll. 100 million dead because of the ban on DDT. 50 million have staved to death because of buring food for biofuel. Lets add the 8,000 in the World Trade towers who died because the insulation of the steel girders had to be stopped because the environmentalists do not like asbestos.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would love to blame them for the current cooling period but I cannot because humans cannot change the climate.
Remember though that cold kills far more people than warm. We may have some more deaths in the Northern US this year because of cold and lack of electricity. The lack of electicity we can blame on the environmentalists.
Save the planet. Kill an environmentalist.
"We underestimated the risks ... we underestimated the damage associated with temperature increases ... and we underestimated the probabilities of temperature increases." -- Sir Nicholas Stern, author of "The Stern Report," April 17, 2008
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Few seem to realise that the present IPCC models predict almost unanimously that by 2040 the average summer in Europe will be as hot as the summer of 2003 when over 30,000 died from heat. By then we may cool ourselves with air conditioning and learn to live in a climate no worse than that of Baghdad now. But without extensive irrigation the plants will die and both farming and natural ecosystems will be replaced by scrub and desert. What will there be to eat? The same dire changes will affect the rest of the world and I can envisage Americans migrating into Canada and the Chinese into Siberia but there may be little food for any of them." --Dr James Lovelock's lecture to the Royal Society, 29 Oct. '07
"Food riots terrify the elites much more than energy riots. Marie Antoinette was beheaded because bread, not wood or coal, was so scarce for the poor. The Roman Emperors provided free bread to a third of the population of Rome, not free wood, because they were very fearful of the hungry and jobless mob. For an increasing number of third world nations civil unrest, including violence, as a result of food and energy deprivation is now the most significant threat to regime continuity." --Vinod K. Dar, Right Side News, 18 June 2008
"Prehistoric and early historic societies--from villages to states or empires--were highly vulnerable to climatic disturbances. Many lines of evidence now point to climate forcing as the primary agent in repeated social collapse." -- Harvey Weiss and Raymond S. Bradley (Science, Jan. 26 2001)
'Many good scientists say that by 2050, almost every summer in Europe will be as hot as it was in 2003.' --'The illness in Planet Earth,' BBC, 6 July 2006
"I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't: we may not be able to stop global warming. We need to begin curbing global greenhouse emissions right now, but more than a decade after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the world has utterly failed to do so. Unless the geopolitics of global warming change soon, the Hail Mary pass of geoengineering might become our best shot." --Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine, 17 March 2008
"The alternative (to geoengineering) is the acceptance of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself but in the hot state." --Dr James Lovelock, August 2008
"Look at what the failure of China's rice crop because of a cold winter and a cold spring did last year. 50 million people have starved to death. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisreally? i don't think so.
Putting aside this is all "modeling" and not based on actual science. If this does happen and traditional farm areas become less desireable areas, I would hope our human selves would be slightly more motivated than to just sit around and wait for riots. Perhaps areas that used to be cooler would now be good farm areas. All these scare tactic articles seems to ignore the fact that we can actually change with our planet. I guess climate "scientists" (quotes used as these people don't seem to do real scientific work, they just make computer models) don't think we're very smart or motivated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, it is very convenient how the impact of cold winters are left out when citing these death statistics. How many die during severe winters? Will Flu deaths lessen if the planet warms? All we hear are possible negative consequences based on models and speculation. Again, no real scientific inquiry as to how the balance of disease will change on a warmer planet.
If climiate change proponents want people to listen, they should present a balanced picture based on science and look at solutions to probable scenarios, not just potential doom associated with worst case scenarios. This type of article is just insulting.
BTW, I'm not referring to planetary sun shades or any of these other massive cooling ideas. These are downright scary as the potential downside to messing with forces we simply don't understand could be the only real catastrophe that global warming brings to our planet. What ever happened to simply solutions like, stop building on the coast in areas considered under threat, start taking soil samples in areas that may become suitable for farming, investigate methods of irrigating land that may become dry, make large scale investments in renewable energy (a novel concept), mandatory recycling, require high efficiency AC and Heat in new houses, etc. There are so many simple and real activities we could do to offset and actually be ready for warmer temperatures that don't require risking the plant or scaring small children.
I guess my rant is done.
Wow, I'm convinced! All the evidence you have cited has caused me to re-think my positions in favor of more DDT and Asbestos... heck I'll even start a new company selling a cereal sprinkled with them, since clearly they are so good for us!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClearly man cannot affect his environment. The world today is as pristine as it was 10,000 years ago. Pollution and global warming are just figments of the crazed environmentalist imagination! You Go girl... keep up the rational dialog!
With warmer temperatures flu may decrease but tropical diseases may fill the gap.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs farm as moving farming to cooler climates there is little room left. As far as north america we have most likely gained maximum impact from the current warming by having a large increase in Candian yeilds with minor distrubance to US yeilds. At some point soon we loose more than we could hope to gain.
There is always Siberia but that presents two issues. First if siberia became suitable for widespread farming the methane that is currently trapped in the tundra may be released and cause a larger change. Second we could only hope that we could continue to bicker on научный русский язык (Scientific Russian).
You don't think so?? Are you only concerned about the small area you live in? Did you notice the news reports of food riots in Europe, Africa, China etc last year. Did you hear about the people starving in Africa? Did you notice prices here went up for all grains and grain products. Did you think this had stopped. It hasn't and since this year is colder than last, it will happen again and again and again. As for moving farm land north, forget it. We will have to move farm land south. Soon this planet will be too cold to support the current population. Had it warmed, it could have.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe steel girders of the Twin Towers were to be covered with a fire retardant that contained asbestos. No one suggests you sprinkle it on your cereal. The fire retardant would have allowed the buildings to stand for 4 hours. However, since environmental groups protested the fire retardant, the upper floors were not done and the towers fell in under an hour. All the people who died could have been saved if the fire retardant was used on all the floors. That is why those 8,000 deaths are at the hands of the environmentalists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for DDT, it is so safe you can drink it. Africa was spraying with DDT and had nearly wiped out the mosquito. Then DDT was banned, because of environmental group protests. Since then the mosquito has returned. Malaria has killed 100 million (low ball figure) since then. Each year more die from a disease which was almost eradicated. Each year more people starve to death so both the 100 million from malaria and the 50 million deaths from starvation continue to rise.
But you people are only concerned you might get too hot? Go north, we are freezing.
Go ask the Greenland Norse whether global cooling helped them. Oh yeah they all died; reduced to eating the hooves of the cattle and sheep when the climate got cold again (as it is now).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWarmer weather is better. If you doubt it, answer me why tropical rainforests exhibit such a great diversity of plants and animals compared to the tundra.
Quite the the contrary. SCIAM, a previously respected journal, has actively encouraged "Closure' on the subject of global Warming - insisting that any data contrary to the prevailing hysteria about rising seas, catastrophic consequences, etc. is not worthy of consideration.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is unbelievable how ignorant some of these people are on topics which they think they are qualified to give an absolute, authoritative opinion. But that’s the case isn't it? People who are incompetent do not have enough knowledge to know they are incompetent. We are all guilty of that I guess whether it is yelling out directions to the sports team on TV or criticizing our politicians for policy decisions. Somehow we seem to believe that the little information we have about a subject is enough to make us an authority, and that our opinions should not only matter, but should dictate policy. If you find yourself overly confident about something that you do not do as part of your career, or your field of study you really need to step back and ask yourself, do I really have any clue what I am talking about?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Confirmation Bias", is a logical error in which a person overvalues confirming evidence and undervalues contradictory evidence. An example, "We've had more snowfall in my region this year than the last two years combined! There's obviously no such thing as global warming." Meanwhile they ignore the IPPC finding that, "Global mean surface temperatures have risen by 0.74°C ± 0.18°C when estimated by a linear trend over the last 100 years (1906–2005). The rate of warming over the last 50 years is almost double that over the last 100 years (0.13°C ± 0.03°C vs. 0.07°C ± 0.02°C per decade)" which is only one among many pieces of supporting evidence.
This is also a case of the "Straw Man Fallacy" in which the opponent’s position is misrepresented in order to make it seem obviously flawed. In this case, by oversimplifying the concept of global warming to mean that everywhere in the world should experience warmer temperatures everyday, they can use local variability to support their claim. It is like trying to prove an east flowing river is actually flowing west by finding a small eddy flowing in the opposite direction.
The one thing I have to ask the global warming deniers; and it's the same question I ask the creationists, space alien visitation believers, conspiracy theorists, what have you actually done to prove your point? What science have you done? It is quite arrogant to think the world should take notice of you when you have done nothing. Everyone is entitled to their opinion but there are processes that help us determine which opinions are more likely to be right such as; the scientific method, logic and critical thought (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking). My advice, the hypothesis you should try hardest to disprove, is the one you find easiest to believe.
I do not want to get into arguments that center on "process" - specifically whether I am capable of correctly evaluating data. But funny you should mention those straw man fallacies. It is precisely the barrage of references to global warming as an explanation for every weather event, that leads me to the conclusion that we are dealing with religious faith - not scientific method science
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow, dude I am impressed. Well done!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJess
www.privacy.es.tc
OMG dude that is so way cool!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.privacy.es.tc
I don't know what "straw man" has to do with the media citing Global Warming every time there is a storm. That's just plain sensationalism. Scientists have routinely stated that specific weather events cannot be tied directly to Global Warming. Don't blame science for the irresponsibility and scientific illiteracy of main-stream media. Blame the general public for gladly paying for and swallowing that crap. Even so, I don't see how some stupid headlines invalidate literally tonnes of core samples taken around the world, or the insight provided by high resolution satellites, biochemistry, or scientist’s boots on the ground. I was just in Africa and the locals there are concerned about the changes they are seeing and few of them have ever heard about global warming. Once again, confirmation bias, your one piece of “evidence” against, doesn’t outweigh the vast amount of evidence for.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs far as global warming being a religion, that would be an ad hominem attack. It has no merit. Unlike religion, if you don’t like what the establishment is saying, you can go do your own scientific research and prove them wrong. In fact, scientists make a name for themselves by discovering something new, not by agreeing with each other. Argument is a crucial part of the process. On the other hand, trying to prove religion wrong, even today, can get you tortured or murdered. Furthermore, I would suggest that no religion has invested anything into proving the existence of their respective god(s) whereas tremendous amounts of time and money have been spent all over the world studying climate. Based on all the data, the international scientific community has reached a consensus that Global Warming / Climate Change is real. You may not like that, I know I don’t, but since when does the universe care about what we think.
It is a religion in the sense that to not agree with the prevailing beliefs results in ridicule, exclusion, etc., and I never said there was NO global warming. There is a considerable body of evidence that it is an entirely natural sequence and not man made. Again, SCIAM should be open to contrary evidence and equally valid postulations about the subject.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"whereas tremendous amounts of time and money have been spent all over the world studying climate. Based on all the data, the international scientific community has reached a consensus that Global Warming / Climate Change is real. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo, the IPCC has determined that Global warming is real. This is a political body whose mandate is to prove global warming. This is not the international scientific community. Those scientists you will find signing the OregonProject and the Scientists against Global warming Project. I am not surprised that SCIAM is encouraging Closure. This scam is done.
However all you global warming believers are allowed and encouraged to take yourselves of the power grid.
They won't get any more grant money if they state the fact that Global warming has stopped, or that humans put out less than 3% of the total carbon dioxide, or that the CO2 increases follow the temperature increase. Since decaying plant matter is the largest cause of global warming it would seem to me that we could cut off a big source of global warming by burning down the rainforest. Lets keep the gravy train coming and predict some more doomsday scenarios. We wouldn't want these "climate scientists" to lose their grant money and get real jobs. It was hotter than this during the medieval warm period and humanity flourised because of the abundance of food availiable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's not whether or not the planet's getting warmer, it's the way it's being portrayed. The doom and gloom approach that is being force fed is what is so insulting. Everything is a disaster and every little local event is because of trees getting cut down or coal plants. The tropics are the warmest parts of our planet and they have the most abundant amount of life. Warm is good for our planet. Vegetation flourishes, why we think warmer means dry and cropless is a little baffling to me. We need to learn how to take advantage of it instead of spending our time spreading fear and trying to scare everyone on the planet. Our planet will change, we can either bark at the wind or focus our efforts on how we will adapt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOut of force of habit I continue to turn to SciAm for science reporting; unfortunately everytime I do, their articles are hyped-up pseudo-science like their continued promotion of the global warming myth--this magazine's sacrament to Al Gore and the political left. Time for me to kick a bad habit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBlechten: "why we think warmer means dry and cropless is a little baffling to me." That's because you have no idea what you are talking about. Global Warming is not just about temperature increases but about the way climate will change as a result. Some places will become dryer, some will become wetter. Also, species are adapted to their specific environments. Heating things up doesn’t make them happy, it stresses them. Try reading a book on ecology.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScottyds: The "grant money is fuelling the status quo and preventing people from knowing the truth" argument is lame as are all conspiracy theory type arguments. The only way to keep a secret between two people is to kill one of the people. Conspiracy theories are the refuge of those without evidence to support their views. The good news, there are treatments for paranoia, seek help.
Decaying plant matter does contribute to global warming, specifically plant matter that has been frozen in permafrost. But the reason it is decaying is because it is no longer frozen. The reason it is no longer frozen is because temperatures have increased. Are you suggesting that plant decay retroactively causes temperature increases? Plants are also part of the short carbon cycle. The CO2 from decay is the same amount or less than what the plant fixed while alive. CO2 from fossil fuels comes from the long carbon cycle. We are liberating carbon over a period of tens of years that was taken out of the environment over a period of tens of millions of years and sequestered hundreds of millions of years ago.
“it would seem to me that we could cut off a big source of global warming by burning down the rainforest”, That is one of the stupidest comments I have ever heard.
Eve: You have made your agenda very clear. "Save the planet. Kill an environmentalist". Knowledge can’t help you until you get that chip off your shoulder. You had made some good points but comments like that marginalize you as a fanatic.
John: "It is a religion in the sense that to not agree with the prevailing beliefs results in ridicule, exclusion.” I guess gravity must be a religion too because if I disagree with that I’ll be ridiculed. Same goes for the idea that the earth is flat and at the centre of the universe. Sometimes ideas are ridiculed simply because they are ridiculous. In all the cases that I know of where a scientist has been ostracized because of their belief it has actually not been because of their belief but because of the poor quality of their science, and/or the unsupported conclusions they have drawn.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisContrary to what you claim, there is no evidence that there are natural causes to Global Warming. In fact, the whole “natural causes” argument was offered without any evidence. The argument was simply, climate has changed in the past because of natural causes therefore the changes today must be natural. When we look at what has caused climate change in the past, volcanism, solar activity, change in earth’s orbit, changes in geography, meteorite impact, we see none of those in play today.
Clearly you people have made up your minds. Your comments only show how little you know about the subject so I have to conclude that you have no interest in the truth. But, why don’t you try this as an experiment, look for all the evidence you can to prove yourself wrong. Make a list of all the arguments against global warming and then look for evidence to prove those arguments flawed. If you can pass that test, then you’ll actually have reason to be confident in your beliefs.
John – "It is a religion in the sense that to not agree with the prevailing beliefs results in ridicule, exclusion.” I guess gravity must be a religion too because if I disagree with that I’ll be ridiculed. Same goes for the idea that the earth is flat and at the centre of the universe. Sometimes ideas are ridiculed simply because they are ridiculous. In all the cases that I know of where a scientist has been ostracized because of their belief it has not been because of their belief but because of the poor quality of their science, and/or the unsupported conclusions they have drawn.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisContrary to what you claim, there is no evidence that there are natural causes to Global Warming. In fact, the whole “natural causes” argument was offered without any evidence. The argument was simply, climate has changed in the past because of natural causes therefore the changes today must be natural. When we look at what has caused climate change in the past, volcanism, solar activity, change in earth’s orbit, changes in geography, meteorite impact, we see none of those in play today.
Clearly you people have made up your minds. Your comments only show how little you know about the subject so I have to conclude that you have no interest in the truth. But, why don’t you try this as an experiment, look for all the evidence you can to prove yourself wrong. Make a list of all the arguments against global warming and then look for evidence to prove those arguments flawed. If you can pass that test, then you’ll actually have reason to be confident in your beliefs.
I approach global warming like I do atheism. I would not adopt the tenets of atheism, because there would be the chance that there is a god. Because of this, I like to hedge my bets and keep an open mind, not an uninformed one. The posters here who are SO sure that the final shoe has dropped on man-made GW should similarly hedge their bets. "Expert" postulations by the scientific community have a long history of biting the experts in the rear end.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank You Robert. Excellent and well thought out!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJohn, hedging your bets, while prudent in some cases, is not the strongest method for reaching a correct answer. There likely is not a green moon beast that controls our destiny from afar, but if we decided to pretend that IF it did exist and we didn't believe in it, that would be catastrophic, then by your rules it would make sense to "hedge our bets" and just believe in it anyway, no matter how unlikely or ridiculous. There are an infinite number of unlikely and absurd things we could think would affect affect us negatively if we made a mistake and they turned out to be real... how do you choose which highly unlikely imaginary thing to hedge your bet on?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRobert, I just may be a fanatic about stopping a group of people called environmentalists from killing any more people on this planet. I am past the point of turning a blind eye to the damage they are doing. I don't know who these people are and why they are doing this but they have not gotten one cause right in their history.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am comfortable with them either taking themselves off the planet or off the power grid. Either way they will help the planet.
Don't you ever wonder who these people are and where they came from?
tharriss - I am hedging my bets, not on a single solution or a ridicul;ous one, I am keeping all my options open and not becoming a raving proponent of any particular point of view, which is what I think SCIAM ought to do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEve, it is difficult to know where to start with your comments. First of all, there isn't some secret group of "enviromentalists" planning take over the world and kill as many people as possible. Sure chemicals like DDT can have a positive effect (thus their widespread deployment), but that doesn't mean they don't have a huge unintended negative effect. The fact that some people have identified the dangers, which caused the use of these things to be curtailed, doesn't mean they are trying to prevent the good effects, they are simply looking for ways to achieve the positive results without an equal or in many cases in the long term, greater damage being done by the unintended consequences of those products. Yes, people might die because DDT isn't more widely deployed, but how many people were saved over time by preventing the other consequences of using it, or do you just ignore that?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnvironmentalists aren't some crazed group that are trying to halt all progress, although there are some strange fringe elements to any type of group of humans on the planet. The fact is, we live in a complicated world, and sometimes when we apply what we think are solutions across a wide area, they turn out to be worse than the original problem. I don't know why you seem to hate environmentalists so much, since clearly we all need a sustainable environment to live in, and all environmentalist means is a person who is working to protect and preserve the environment we all need to live. Just because you personally (and in some ignorance) don't understand the full pros and cons behind the things environmentalists are fighting for, doesn't mean they are in the wrong. Please pick any single issue that you are upset about and STUDY it in more detail, learning the pros and cons from an unbiased source, and you likely to find the environmentalists are as crazy as you paint them.
John, do you keep all your options open about the existence of gravity too? While it is good to keep an open mind in general, that doesn't rule out coming down on the side of the strongest case.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is no reason not to proceed from a working assumption that there is no god, as all reasoning, statistics and facts lean strongly in that direction, but keep enough of an open mind that if one day god shows up and says "hi" you can adjust your worldview at that time.
An open mind doesn't have to mean you refuse to decide, it can simply mean you are willing to change that decision if new facts present themselves. Otherwise you can never really decide about anything, and then where are you?
and, while funny, clearly I meant "aren't" in the above post
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Please pick any single issue that you are upset about and STUDY it in more detail, learning the pros and cons from an unbiased source, and you likely to find the environmentalists are as crazy as you paint them."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI already know they are as crazy as I paint them.
I do not doubt the existence of gravity. It is measurable. BUT, I would not give you 2 cents for any current postulations about the nature of gravity as to how it fits into a possible unified theory of the Universe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIncreased atmospheric CO2 content has made it possible to feed the world's burgeoning population.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks tharriss, I was beginning to think I was alone here. These conversations can be very frustrating. You think that if you use reason and facts you'll get through to people. I don’t expect people to agree with me, just to really look at the facts and be informed but when you hear comments like, burning down the rain forest will stop global warming, you know that person has read nothing on the subject. Or when you hear, environmentalists are responsible for the 9/11 WTC deaths rather than the Islamic fundamentalists that hijacked the planes, you know you are dealing with someone who has such a blind hatred inside them that nothing short of anti-psychotic drugs can budge them from their mindset. John has decided to embody the Heisenberg uncertainty principal and to a certain extent I can respect that. But, if he is really uncertain maybe he should refrain from making absolute statements like Global Warming is a religion. I am always amazed that people with such a mistrust and even hatred of science come to this site and take the time to make comments. Maybe they think they are helping us see the truth. The only problem is, we can see right through them for what they are, scared and ignorant. Thanks for sharing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr. Gortenbull what are your sources?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree that increased CO2 can contribute to increased plant growth but CO2 alone is not enough. Plants also need more water and nitrogen. Unfortunately, it is predicted that areas closer to the equator (including the US grain belt) will experience lower levels of precipitation, which we may already be experiencing now, while areas further from the equator (Canada) will experience increased precipitation (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=southwest-america-drying-climate&page=2). So, an increase in primary productivity due to elevated CO2 may ultimately be more than offset by drought caused by Global Climate Change. And for anyone thinking that what US loses Canada gains so everything balances out, think again. Such dramatic changes in resource distribution over the globe will result in significant political unrest. Darfur is only the beginning of the type of conflict we should expect to see as arable land shifts away from high population areas to more remote regions. The ultimate threat from global warming may not come from catastrophic ecological collapse, drought and famine, or even an ice age precipitated by changes to ocean currents. Instead it may come from global conflicts over water and food security.
Maybe Robert, you are the one who should study a subject before you talk.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWTC collapse due to environmentalism?
Fire, heat weakened asbestos-free steel columns of towers
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25385
Try reading that.
As for C02, not only does it increase plant growth but it also decreases water loss. Therefore less water is needed. I notce that you do not know that because of the above comment. You may want to read this.
http://www.purgit.com/co2ok.html
As for C02, contributing to the warming of the planet (which is actually cooling) read this.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/pastandfuture2.pdf
Try not to be so rude when you do not know what you are talking about. No one else on here is being insulting, just you and tharriss.
Some comments about DDT from a book by Spielman.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisp.165-166
No chemical compares to DDT as a weapon against the resting mosquito. First, it is potent. Just two grams of DDT per square meter of wall surface is more than enough to kill a mosquito within its usual one-hour resting period. Second, it is inexpensive. It is also easily stored and transported, and relatively safe for the person doing the spraying. Best of all, it remains effective for many, many months.
The total ban on DDT’s use in the United States deprived American public health officials of a weapon that could have been safely used. Even today, when there are many chemicals available to kill mosquitoes, DDT retains many advantages. It is the ideal insecticide of first use. This is becacuse the resistance that mosquitoes develop after being exposed to DDT does little to protect them against the other, more expensive insecticides that wait on the sidelines. However, mosquitoes hit first with one of those other compounds - such as malathion, sevin, or permethrin - develop a broader resistance that partially protects them from DDT as well. A spray program based on the use of chemicals in any of these alternatives also tends to be about three times as expensive as one based on DDT. When used correctly and with restraint, DDT appears to be irreplaceable in antimalarial programs.
In the year 2000, DDT was nearly outlawed worldwide under the terms of a United Nations Environmental Program treaty. It was to be classified as one of the unsafe “dirty dozen” of the Persistent Organic Pesticides, known as POPs. In December 2000, however, a treaty conference held in South Africa agreed to a “dirty eleven”. DDT was excluded from proscription. The chemical is now manufactured only in China and India, and it is to remain available solely for use in antimalaria programs. This most recent battle over DDT’s status was intense and the outcome crucial for helping to protect human health around the world.
p. 204
The second cause is our mishandling of the medicines and insecticides that now are available. Indiscriminate and haphazard use of these chemicals has spurred the evolution of resistant strains of disease agents and vector insects. This woeful proess continues worldwide. Our best antimalarial drug, chloroquine, is losing efficacy. And the most powerful arrow in our antimalarial quiver, DDT, is being outlawed.
A worldwide ban on DDT would be a mistake. When properly used, DDT can be uniquely helpful, especially in less developed countries where public health funding is exceeingly restricted. But the ban imposed by the United States and fierce advocacy by organizations devoted to environmental improvement have severely restricted its use. DDT is a prisoner of politics and may never escape. If it is banned worldwide, human lives would be placed at risk while this tool, which is safe when used properly, could save them.
Environmentalism has killed tens of millions of people, if not hundreds of millions, and could soon kill many more. Environmentalists’ jihad against DDT sentenced millions to death from malaria in the Third World, their opposition to dams destroyed New Orleans, and their abasement of auto safety has mangled and killed tens of thousands. Even the World Trade Center towers destroyed on 9/11 would have remained standing far longer, enabling more people to escape, if it were not for an environmentalist scare about the most efficient fire retardant known to man for millennia.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Christmas card portrays two cavemen having a discussion. One says, “Something’s just not right—our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past thirty.” The CEI card makes, in a brief, humorous, but unanswerable way, the point that without civilization, our lives would indeed be nasty, brutish, and short. The sort of “return to nature” promoted by environmentalists would strip us of our progress and reduce us to the state of the animals they so adore.
What are the most egregious death-dealing policies promoted by environmentalists? Topping the list must be the banning of DDT, a miracle pesticide unrivaled for its efficacy, longetivity, inexpense, and safety. That’s right, safety: DDT has been studied for decades and never been shown to have ill effects on human beings or significant bad effects on beasts, birds, or trees. It kills what it is intended to kill, insects. As Berlau explains—and despite reading a good deal about DDT before, I did not know this—DDT halted budding typhus epidemics during World War II, potentially saving millions of lives including thousands of American troops.
DDT’s biggest claim to fame, however, is the amazing job it did combating malaria in Africa and other Third World regions. Inexpensive and harmless to people, DDT can be sprayed once on an African hut, and that will be enough to kill or drive away malaria-laden mosquitoes for a year. Though DDT is over 50 years old, no cost-effective pesticide has yet been invented to take its place.
Thanks to the lies contained in Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and those, such as Al Gore, who hopped on the anti-DDT bandwagon, DDT was banned from country after country in the 1970s. As a result, malaria has made something of comeback, forcing some African nations to defy their aid benefactors in Europe and allow limited spraying of DDT—the only thing that works.
Bloodcurdlingly, Berlau cites several prominent environmentalist leaders who explained that their opposition to DDT was based on their desire for Third World people to die. For example, Sierra Club Director Michael McCloskey said in 1971 in order to explain his organization’s opposition to DDT, “By using DDT, we reduce mortality rates in underdeveloped countries without the consideration of how to support the increase in populations.” Alexander King, co-founder of the Club of Rome, wrote in 1990, “So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem.” That’s right—prominent and influential environmentalists oppose DDT because it saves human lives.
The population control agenda is a prominent subtext of the environmentalist one, and it has largely succeeded. Birthrates have plummeted around the world, prompting the United Nations to release reports with titles such as “Confronting the Global Aging Crisis.” The Western world is fast committing suicide with extremely low birthrates. Even relatively fecund Americans’ fertility rate is slightly below replacement level. Yet environmentalists are undeterred.
As the evidence in Berlau’s book makes clear, hatred of the human race lies at the bottom of the environmentalist agenda. This is not to say that there are no pressing environmentalist concerns, from mercury pollution to Latin American deforestation—but genuine concerns are based on human welfare, not the pagan worship of harsh, wild nature indifferent to life that not even radical environmentalists want to live in personally.
Berlau also walks his readers through evidence showing that asbestos would have been used to protect the World Trade Center if it had not been for environmentalist objections, citing highly-respected scientists—and Donald Trump—to buttress the argument that the towers would have remained intact much longer with asbestos, and perhaps would not have collapsed at all.
He also describes the emerging scientific consensus that shows that trees, not cars, are the primary generators of smog, just as Ronald Reagan suggested. As America continues to reforest under environmentalist pressure, and as more wilderness areas are set aside to be unmanaged, the United States will suffer from more forest fires, more insect-born diseases, and more atmospheric hydrocarbons. And Berlau outlines how environmentalists conspired to prevent the building of the dam needed to protect New Orleans, with the terrible consequences known to every American today: The unnecessary loss of American lives and much of a great, unique American city.
It is true that we need a return to nature, but not to the primitive bestial nature that murderous environmentalists desire. We need a return to human nature, both in our interior souls and outside them, as described by Western philosophers such as Aristotle and developed most perfectly by historic Christianity. Then we will strike the beneficial balance of letting animal nature flourish under the guidance of the spirit of man.
Hurricane Katrina need not have been the tragedy it was. In 1977, the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build large steel and concrete "sea gates" below sea level to prevent hurricane force winds driving storm surges into Lake Pontchartrain, overflowing into low-lying New Orleans. Such gates have been enormously successful in the Netherlands. But the Environmental Defense Fund, which had been a party to the lawsuit leading to the banning of DDT, persuaded a judge that the sea gates would discourage the mating of a certain fish species. Fishy romance trumped the lives of 3,100 Orleanians. "If we had built the barriers, New Orleans would not be flooded," says Joe Towers, who was counsel for the New Orleans District of the Corps
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe alleged "solution" to the Texas blast, according to industry critics, is still more regulation, even though regulation was the ultimate cause of the accident (and many others that have occurred in the industry). Fact: not a single new oil and gas refinery has been built in the U.S. since 1976; the last one built was in Garyville, Louisiana that year. Worse, today there are 54% fewer oil and gas refineries in the U.S. (149) than there were in 1981 (321). Why? Not only have environmentalists lobbied government to block new refinery construction; they've also lobbied to have refineries decommissioned. Moreover, environmental regulations have materially raised the cost of operating refineries, making many of them unprofitable. It has been estimated that today it would take seven years, 800 permits and $2.5 billion to build a new refinery; nearly half of that cost is due entirely to the arbitrary and unnecessary costs imposed by environmentalists and their obstructionism. The National Petrochemical and Refiners Association reports that environmentalist-related costs have totaled $47 billion over the past decade; that's enough to have built 19 new refineries (even at today's bloated cost of $2.5 billion per unit), or 13% more refineries than exist in the U.S. today.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen environmentalists and their regulatory lackeys aren't impeding the construction of new refineries, they are, of course, also impeding the building of new transmission pipelines which efficiently move refined product to wholesalers and retailers. Environmentalists also impede the building of nuclear plants, which provide a safe energy alternative to oil and gas. As in the case of refineries, not a single new nuclear plant has been built in the U.S. since 1979, due to costs imposed by environmentalists; today there are only 95 such plants and five have been decommissioned since 1979. What about hydro-electric power? Environmentalists call for tearing down existing dams.
To their great credit, refiners have tried to offset the immense harm done by environmentalist restrictions in recent decades and have worked hard to provide consumers with oil and gas by getting the most they can out of a shrinking number of facilities. In many cases the capacity and productivity of the dwindling number of refineries have been increased; whereas in 1981 the average refinery produced 60,000 barrels of gasoline per day, today the average refinery produces 113,000 barrels per day. Yet despite this near-doubling of productivity – made possible by great feats of science and engineering – overall, 10% less gasoline today is refined per day in the U.S. (16.8 million barrels) compared to 1981 (18.6 million barrels). No wonder the price of gasoline has been rising, both in nominal and real terms. But who ever blames the environmentalists for this? Had their obstructions not been offset, in part, by oil companies, a gallon of gas today would cost $5, not $2.
How do these facts relate to accidents, deaths and injuries at refineries? A steadily-declining number of refineries, coupled with an ever-growing demand for the products of refineries, means companies must push their plants to the limit; many today operate at 95% of capacity, well above the norm for industry in general. That leaves little time for the maintenance, repair or upgrade of existing plants. This necessarily leads, in turn, to less-safe equipment and less-safe operations. Obviously, more regulation and more fines cannot possibly solve this problem. They caused it. The restraint we need today is not restraint on oil companies (let alone more restraint); that approach has been tried – and it's been both deadly and economically costly. What we need is restraint on the destructive environmentalists and their lap-dogs at the EPA. If lawsuits are to be filed and fines imposed, let them be filed and imposed on the real enemies of production and safety: the environmentalists. And let's see oil executives show some backbone – by identifying the real perpetrators of these accidents.
The American people need to wake up – mentally and morally – and reconcile their blatant contradictions. They are morally right to want to drive their gas-guzzling SUV's, heat their homes and raise their living standards; but many today are dead wrong (in more ways than one, recalling last week's deadly blast) to continue condoning, funding and applauding the obscene, inhumane and criminal environmentalists. Last week's blast led some people to surmise that perhaps terrorism was to blame. In fact, terrorism was to blame – the terrorism inherent in environmentalism.
Stop the war on poor families
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnvironmentalist anti-energy policies impose immoral burdens on our poorest citizens
Monday, November 10, 2008
by Niger Innis
Liberal politicians and environmental activists continue to say we must switch to "green" energy. Oil, gas, coal and nuclear must go, they insist.
Informed voters support conservation and alternative energy. But they know fossil and nuclear fuels created health and living standards unprecedented in history.
Over two-thirds of American voters support increased onshore and offshore drilling. They know world energy demand is surging, while US production is prohibited and declining. They realize anti-drilling policies don't just cause unemployment and cost us trillions in lost lease bonus, royalty and tax revenues.
Those policies also wage an immoral war on poor families. They destroy jobs, erode civil rights gains, and force minority and elderly households to choose between food, fuel, rent and medicine.
Since 2006, the cost of driving a 25-mpg car 10,000 miles has risen $600. Heating and air-conditioning costs – and the price of everything we eat, wear and do – continue to soar. While higher income families spend a nickel of every dollar on energy, families at the bottom of our economic scale spend up to half of their incomes on gasoline, heating and cooling.
This is intolerable and unnecessary. We have centuries' worth of oil, gas, oil shale, coal and uranium – and we can develop them without harming the environment.
But environmental radicals in and out of Congress refuse to let us do so. They want to force us to switch to renewables, even though there is a yawning chasm between 0.5% of US energy produced by wind and solar power – and 93% produced with hydrocarbon and nuclear power.
The eventual switch to alternative energy is obviously decades away. Meanwhile, we are sending up to $700 billion a year to Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and other countries – in the midst of our worst economic crisis in memory.
People are justifiably angry that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to allow a debate or vote on ending congressional drilling bans. The only "energy" bills she supports would open few areas, while adding more taxes, regulations, lawsuits, delays, price hikes, and renewable-energy mandates and subsidies. They will produce little or no new energy.
Wind farms with hundreds of gargantuan, unreliable turbines have to be located where the wind actually blows, usually hundreds of miles from cities. That means long transmission lines, often through forests and scenic areas. And that means opposition, delays and lawsuits from the same environmentalists who "support" wind and oppose power plants that actually produce abundant, reliable, affordable energy.
It's increasingly obvious that the only power environmentalist pressure groups and their legislative allies want is power to control our lives, and curtail energy use and economic growth.
Their latest ploy involves claims that the greatest threat facing minority families is climate change. Not drugs, teen pregnancy, deadbeat fathers, gangs, murders, frightening dropout rates, AIDS, or skyrocketing energy and food prices. Climate change!
"Our very health and economic well-being are at stake," claims the president of the DC-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. The Center has teamed up with the Natural Resource Defense Council and other extreme environmental groups to convince minorities that "costly" global warming will have "disproportionate impacts" on minorities.
Temperatures are higher in cities, they argue, due to the "urban heat island effect" – and air-conditioning use among black families is half the rate for white Americans. Therefore, global warming will cause more heat-related deaths among minority families, they claim.
This attempt to justify anti-energy policies by promoting climate change hysteria is embarrassing nonsense.
The disparity in heat-related deaths has nothing to do with climate change, whether human or natural in origin. It's due to the inability of poor families to afford air-conditioning and electricity. The disparity in cold-related deaths is even more striking, and likewise due to energy affordability.
Lock up our energy, take away fossil fuel and nuclear power, impose cap-and-trade policies – and you drive prices even higher. You make heat and electricity less affordable. You force more people to depend on unreliable, nonexistent wind power. You force more to choose between heating and eating. You destroy jobs and trample on civil rights. You cause more to die.
But radical greens want to reduce access to the fuels that produce 93% of our energy. They want to increase energy costs.
They call this "energy conservation." I call it "economic enslavement" – and worse.
Moreover, global temperatures have barely risen for 10 years, even as global CO2 levels soared. Many experts say we are heading for a period of falling temperatures, because of declining solar intensity. Over 31,000 scientists say there is no credible evidence that carbon dioxide emissions cause climate change, much less global warming disasters. And China and India are not about to end their fossil fuel use.
Punishing poor families in the name of speculative climate chaos is insane.
We need to bring sanity and compassion back to our energy policies. Drill, mine and use American energy. Demand that politicians and environmentalists end their war on poor families. And vote accordingly.
Niger Innis, a CFACT advisor, is national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality.
The Science magazine report by Battisti and Naylor on which this article is based makes use of twenty three global climate models used by the IPCC 2007 assessment to predict the climate at the end of this century. No way can this be done. Even if their climate model made sense (which it doesn't), the land-based temperature records they use as input to their programs are in error as shown by comparison with satellite data. Direct comparison is possible for the period between 1979 and 1997 and gives the following results: UAH MSU lower troposphere - no warming in the eighties and nineties; RSS MSU lower troposphere - no warming in in the eighties and nineties. HadCRUT3 (ground-based, from Hadley Center in UK) - warming rate is 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade (one degree per century). Quite a difference. But surprise! - World temperature then takes a giant leap with the 1998 "Super El Nino") which is followed by the "twenty first century high" in 2001, a temperature plateau that is 0.4 degrees higher than the effective temperature was before the 1998 peak. It ends in 2007 with a temperature downturn that bottoms out in 2008 and is on the way up again. These are empirical observations, none of them comprehensible to "climate science" as practiced by the IPCC. The output of their computers that Battisti and Naylor use in Science is just pure GIGO, not just because their input is wrong but because they have no idea of what the actual climate is doing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisArno Arrak
This fear-mongering is characteristic of the EPA:, which since its inception over the years, has evolved into a bully pulpit of regulations backed by environmentalists and trial lawyers, who often ignore research data, and show no sense of proportion in trading one risk against another.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEver since the initial EPA ban on asbestos, U.S. regulators have thrown scientific data out the window and banned all forms of the mineral, even though asbestos in the U.S. has not strongly been linked to health problems. But the chilling possibility will always endure that the Sept. 11, 2001 WTC building collapses may have been preventable had asbestos been used, which could have prevented the spread of fire to the upper floors.
Steel melts at 2,750* Fahrenheit, but it will start to bend and buckle at temperatures as low as 600 degrees if the fireproofing is inadequate. It is increasingly clear that disproportionate regulations at federal, state, and local levels, obviously cost a disastrous number of human lives on that September 11 day of infamy.
The irony remains that there is no evidence that anything was gained from the ban in terms of health benefits. The original concerns were that indoor air in the skyscrapers would be contaminated by circulating air passing over asbestos fireproofing. As a result, it was only used up to the thirty-eighth floor of the first WTC tower, and not at all in tower 2, with horrific results.
Asbestos has qualities that set it apart from any other material. It is virtually indestructible. It has been used since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and was prized for its heat-resistant properties. The history of asbestos is its reliability as an insulator and fire-stopper.
Before World War II, asbestos was widely used to insulate the boilers of steam locomotives, but otherwise it was not in widespread use until the 1940's. Untold numbers of American sailors' lives were saved during the war because of asbestos used in ship-building.
After World War II, the asbestos industry in the U.S. literally exploded. According to estimates, over 100,000 schools and 700,000 public and commercial buildings used asbestos for insulation, decoration, and fireproofing. But once the EPA entered into the picture in the early 70's, the over-regulation concerning asbestos began to snowball.
In 1986, Congress passed the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act (AHERA), mandating that schools be considered as "high priority buildings", and all asbestos containing materials be identified and maintained in a condition so as to not present a health risk.
So after 1986, many well a well-constructed post-war school building was demolished unnecessarily because of AHERA, and cost many a states' taxpayers needlessly in the construction of sterile, new post-modern classrooms, that are testimony to the folly of asbestos scaremongering run amok across the nation.
Asbestos is not dangerous unless airborne. Thus the ACTUAL dangers historically have been largely limited to those who worked in the mines or at places that produced asbestos products. These workers were exposed to large amounts of airborne asbestos, and they brought the dust into their homes for their families to inhale or ingest in their food.
But even if airborne, many studies of asbestos workers indicate that it takes much more than casual exposure to cause disease, even over periods as long as 15 to 30 years. Asbestos doesn't radiate; so its mere existence in low levels is not automatically cause for alarm. If the asbestos is solid, the consensus is that there is no discernable risk to health
Over time, the rules and regulatory laws of the EPA can be compared to evolution of prescription drugs. Both have had unintended consequences, which are known as side effects. And the side effects of Clean Air Act of 1970 put new regulations in place that over the last 38 years, would see an unprecedented expansion of the Environmental Protection Agency's authority that impacted every corporation, small business, and eventually reached down to every individual U.S. household. So where will it all end?
In July, 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency announced the 'Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking' (ANPR), which would regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. This is likely the largest, most far-reaching regulation ever.
Regulating carbon dioxide means regulating 85% of the energy we use, which comes from sources that emit CO2. And regulating these sources of energy will increase prices to consumers (e.g. electricity and gasoline). This greatly reduces efficiency in the economy, leading to job losses and large reductions in economic growth.
But just like asbestos, allowing the EPA to move forward with this far-reaching regulation denies whether carbon dioxide actually DOES endanger human health. Obviously, the concept of regulating carbon dioxide could be the largest regulatory intrusion into Americans' personal lives-- a nightmare scenario.
How did air pollution regulations get this way? A number of analysts have shown that a complex, centrally controlled, and process-focused Clean Air Act serves the interests of environmental activists, federal and state regulators, and even many regulated businesses.
Environmental activists gain power, prestige, and increased funding in a centralized, coercive regulatory system, with many administrative decision points. This assures the continued need for large numbers of state and federal regulators, who wield massive and unconstitutional power over Americans' lives.
And with the ever-popular Barack Obama in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency after Jan. 21, the EPA would classify carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant, and use the Clean Air Act to curb emissions by power plants and manufacturers. Such a move could halt construction on as many as half of the 130 proposed new coal-fired power plants across the country.
These Stalinist-like, EPA-proposed decrees would require permits to 'emit' carbon dioxide from the majority of American small businesses, farms with more than 25 cows, and even large single-family homes, as well as schools, hospitals, and public buildings. So, according to the wisdom of EPA, 24 cows are okay, but if one were to become pregnant--LOOKOUT!
So look for the Obama administration to carry on the mantle of the EPA tradition--economic destruction under the liberal mantra of, "It's the right thing to do".
Perhaps the EPA could be better described as the EDA (the Economic Destruction Agency). Over the past 38 years, they've become a natural predator to our economic development. And like the Sept.11 fiasco, EPA-generated regulations will continue to destroy untold amounts of wealth, generate unemployment, and bring economic misery to Americans for years to come.
Big Brother is alive and well in the career ranks of the EPA. The radical environmentalists such as Greenpeace, Earth First, and the Sierra Club, have become the tail wagging the dog of the U.S. economy.
The original regulatory action of the EPA banned lead tetra-ethyl as a gasoline component for use as an octane booster. In banning the additive, the EPA performed an unprecedented amount of good in eradicating air pollution. But like the proverbial poker player, perhaps it would have been much better for America if the EPA had quit while they were ahead.
Regarding deaths from heat,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"While summers in the UK became warmer in the period 1971 - 2003, there was no change in heat-related deaths, but annual cold-related mortality fell by 3% as winters became milder - so overall fewer people died as a result of extreme temperatures.
A seriously hot summer between now and 2017 could claim more than 6,000 lives, the Department of Health report warns. But it also stresses that milder winters mean deaths during this time of year - which far outstrip heat-related mortality - will continue to decline. The report is to help health services prepare for climate change effects. — However, even 6,000 deaths pales in comparison with the number of cold-related deaths, which in the UK currently average about 20,000 per year."
That is just the UK. If I had the time I would look up the stats on every country in the world. The difference between cold related deaths and heat related deaths globaly would be immense.
Re food riots...they happen when it is too cold to grow food which may be coming.
Marie Antoinette was beheaded during a cold period, the Dark Ages I think, when food was not available because it could not be grown. The Roman Empire quote must be from the end of the Roman Period which ended because...the Roman Warm Period had ended and it had cooled, again..no food.
Why do you think all the great civilizations ended? The Roman empire, the Minoan empire, the Aztec empire, etc. They ended because the climate shifted to cold.
Eve, I’m not the one calling for the death of people based on their beliefs. To me that is psychotic. So, if you don’t want to be called psychotic, don’t act that way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn regards to Asbestos;
It has been definitively linked to malignant mesothelioma, lung cancer, and asbestosis (also called pneumoconiosis). So to "potentially" reduce the loss of life in the WTC (because we all saw that coming when they banned the substance in 1972) you would have gladly killed many more around the nation by allowing this toxic substance to continue to be used. Clearly killing isn’t a problem for you as long as they don’t all die at the same time.
In regards to decreased water consumption with increased CO2;
According to the article you referenced the plants that do benefit from elevated CO2 do so by reducing the size of the stomata which helps them conserve water, but also reduces CO2 consumption. Stomata size reduction is also used to handle drought conditions;
"So in the warm year, the temperature goes up and causes more evapotranspiration from the plants," he told BBC News.
"But plants have evolved to 'know' that when it gets dry they should curb their water loss, so they reduce the apertures of their stomata (pores) to conserve water, and that constrains the amount of CO2 they can take up (by photosynthesis)." (source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7620921.stm)
So again CO2 consumption is reduced!
I would also like to point out that the article you cited includes the following quote;
"There is no question that the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere has been rising, and that this rise is due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels and to deforestation."
So, I guess you now accept man made global warming as true seeing as you cite this article as an authority.
In regards to your global cooling reference;
Here are more recent findings than the ones you sited;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7327393.stm
You are cherry picking Eve. You are grabbing little bits here and there that support your claims when the source documents themselves don't agree with each other. One of your sources says global warming is man made, the other says we are experiencing global cooling caused by the sun. That is exactly what I was talking about, confirmation bias. Instead of grabbing sound bites, why don’t you propose a complete theory, that is self consistent, and that address all the data we have today? Because that is what the current consensus on global warming does.
Eve, I do partially agree with you about DDT. I don’t think it should be used outdoors but limited use indoors may help with mosquito born pathogens and also Cimex lectularius (bedbugs) which have been reappearing in North America.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI found some of the numbers for cold related deaths. I leave it to others to look up North America.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPortugal has the highest seasonal variation in mortality in Europe, with a winter increase of some 28% above the average mortality rate, equivalent to 8,800 premature winter deaths each year.
Ireland has an increase of some 21%, or 2,000 excess winter deaths annually.
Spain: 21%, 19,000 excess annual deaths.
The UK: 18%, or 37,000 annual excess winter deaths.
Greece: 18%, or 5,700 premature winter deaths annually.
Italy: 16%, or 27,000 excess winter deaths.
The percentages for the EU are: Austia 14%, Belgium 13%, Denmark 12%, Fu=inland 10%, France 13%, Germany 11%. Greece 18%, Luxemberg 12%. Netherlands 11%.
There is a “paradox of excess winter mortality”, namely, “higher mortality rates are generally found in less severe, milder winter climates where, all else equal, there should be less potential for cold strain and cold related mortality. This result indicates that the typical, inverse relation normally found between cold exposure and rates of (all year) mortality does not hold for excess winter mortality”, perhaps due to differences in housing standards, noting that “countries with comparatively warm all year climates tend to have poor domestic thermal efficiency. Because of this, these countries find it hardest to keep their homes warm when winter arrives. This is especially the case in Portugal, Spain, and Ireland, where winter temperatures are comparatively mild and excess mortality rates in winter are very high. Conversely, countries with severe climates-such as those in Scandinavia-have to maintain high levels of thermal efficiency, as temperatures demand that houses must retain warmth
Eve
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"While summers in the UK became warmer in the period 1971 - 2003, there was no change in heat-related deaths, but annual cold-related mortality fell by 3% as winters became milder - so overall fewer people died as a result of extreme temperatures.
You are looking at the UK to compare heat related deaths to cold related deaths???? Why not look at Sweden, Finland and Iceland while you're at it? I wonder how many cold related deaths there were in Ethiopia?
Of course, you are once again acknowleging global warming as a real phenomenon by citing that quote but then again...
" food riots...they happen when it is too cold to grow food "
The fact that civilizations have suffered under cold conditions does not mean they will not suffer under hot conditions. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
Once again, your world is both warming and freezing. If you can prove it is both round and flat I'll be really impressed!
I have showed the stats for Finland and Denmark. You may also noice, if you read my post, the cold related deaths are higher in warm counties. I am sure there were some in Iran, South Africa and Saudia Arabia last year and will be again.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince you are unable to read or understand or both, stop posting.
First off, I can't read what isn't there. Your stats didn't show up until long after I sent my response to your earlier post.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI still don't get your point. People die when they get too cold. More people die, the less they are prepared for severe weather. Do you understand that cold countries are less likely to get hot enough, often enough to cause health problems? Regardless, you seem to be saying we should be causing global warming because that will reduce cold related deaths. Perhaps we should also promote heart disease to avoid cancer related deaths. Then we can promote guns to reduce heart disease related deaths. You just don’t get it. You grab hold of one little comment that confirms your prejudices and ignore everything else, and somehow think you’ve manage to solve the world’s problems. Like they say, you know enough to be dangerous. You don’t understand any of these systems enough to appreciate their complexities. Do you really think you can take a patchwork of ideas from people who don’t agree with each other and assemble a national policy that should somehow be intuitive to everyone else? The big picture doesn’t seem to matter to you. You’re not looking for a solution. You’re just looking for anything that will help you discredit your arch-enemy the environmentalist. It doesn’t matter that your evidence is inconsistent, unsubstantiated or discredited. The only think that matters is that you can point to something that on the surface justifies your hatred. Tell you what, I will stop posting, because there is nothing more to be said. Certainly nothing you will listen to.
Please read. We cannot change the climate. People die when it gets too cold. When it warms less people die, therefore warming is good, cooling is bad. But we cannot change the climate. More Co2 is good, less Co2 is bad but we have no ability to change that either.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever I have a real problem with people who want the price of fuel and electricity to go up because of this scam. The planet is not too hot and people who think that are fools. It was warmer during all of the past warm periods. This one is the coolest. Causing fuel and electricity prices to go up in a cooling climate is barbarian. Or did you not read or understand what I posted?
I also have a real problem with environmental lobbiests who are doing this for money. Those people are my arch enemy, the ones causing harm for personal gain. How do you get your money promoting this scam?
Please don't tell me you are in charge of developing a national policy. I would have to leave the country.
"Things should be made as simple as possible but no more."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEve, the glaciers are disappearing quite quickly supported by the evidence of photographs and memory. The rate is alarming because many think it is anthropogenic. Warm does not equal good; like most issues it is not that simple. Perhaps a gradual warming is good, I don't know. But sudden changes in food availability is not stable and the fact that it is hard to model sudden change should frighten us if we are being responsible.
Just because the earth has been hotter or cooler at different times is besides the point. The age we live in now, the present, will suffer for sudden changes - we are adaptable but should not invite disaster because using oil has been a blessing until now. Situations change. Being intelligent means constantly analysing the environment and adapting in meaningful ways. So in a way we are better-off for having your minority opinion.
I looked at your articles and I didn't notice many references. Perhaps some may think that the minority position ("More Co2 is good") is being clandestinely blocked by lobby groups. Environmentalists must be kept under the microscope if they are to affect our welfare, but I find it very hard to believe that the environmentalists lobbying for less Co2 could come close to the lobby efforts of large corporations.
Where do they get all the money? Trees? I believe in parsimony: it is easier to believe that the majority of scientists are not being duped by environmental lobbyists funded with imaginary money than it is to believe that oil corporations are not lobbying for more Co2 (private profit) despite public cost. Corporations can privatize profits and commonalize costs whereas the environmentalists champion a cause that most cannot directly profit from. It is a stretch (like delusional conspiracy theorists) to think that environmental scientists with preferences for sustainability are not independently guided by natural observation but by some ill intent. Why create evil where there is none? Do you really believe anyone on either side is 'murderous'? Or that some want a return to savage nature? There are different interests/stakes, but demonizing either side can't help us have a balanced scientific look at the issue. Wanting profits is not immoral; neither is hoping for a sustainable population. This does not mean that I'm taking sides, by the way. It just means I am keeping an open mind.
I read what you wrote with interest and you did cause me to re-evaluate DDT.
Scientist should review the Vostok ice core data (extending back 420,000 years) before they conclude that earth is cascading into a Venusian Hell. This data indicates that the current Holocene period is near its end and that earth's climate will soon be headed in a colder direction. The 12,000-year Holocene period has been a boon to mankind. It would be a huge tragedy for mankind if modern economies are destroyed based on minimal time series and Global Warming religious fervor trumpeted by non-scientists like Al Gore who stand to make millions off of carbon trading schemes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is the point. Scientists know better. That is why 131,000 in the US have signed a protest against Kyoto.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll of this nonsense is coming from environmental lobbiest groups (Al Gore included) who profit from it. They are not doing this because it is getting to warm for them. In fact it is not getting to warm for anyone but it is getting to cold for a lot of us. They are doing it for money. Everything I posted earlier on DDT, ther refusal to allow the damn that would have save New Orleans, the World Trade Towers, etc, all by environmentalist lobbiests who are doing this for money. They don't care who they kill.
Robert, pay attention because they won't care if they kill you either. How do you think this scam got so big? Not by any grass roots environmental movement.
Anybody notice that there were food riots due to the misguided attempt to turn food into fuel? The various governments of the world screwed that up royally, as well as the sub-prime scandal and Bernie Madoff. Do you really think that they can control the weather? I think that they think they can.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI did notice that. The use of food for fuel along with the failure of China's rice crop because of cold, killed 50 million in Africa and caused riots in Africa, South America, the middle east, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for GISS not fudging the data:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt didnt take long. About two hours later, Lubos Motl, of the Reference Frame posted his results obtained independently via another method when he ran some checks of his own:
David Stockwell has analyzed the frequency of the final digits in the temperature data by NASAs GISS led by James Hansen, and he claims that the unequal distribution of the individual digits strongly suggests that the data have been modified by a human hand.
With Mathematica 7, such hypotheses take a few minutes to be tested. And remarkably enough, I must confirm Stockwells bold assertion.
But thats not all, Lubos goes on to say:
Using the IPCC terminology for probabilities, it is virtually certain (more than 99.5%) that Hansens data have been tempered with.
Here you go Eve, just in case you want to base your opinions on something other than propaganda:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Climate_change_skeptics/common_claims_and_rebuttal#The_climate_is_cooling
Why would I read that? Then I would be reading the propaganda you read rather than the truth. Did you know that this Dec averaged 32.5 degree's F, 0.9 degree's F lower than the 20th century baseline. 2008 was the 14th coldest year in 30 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't have to read global warming propoganda to know that it is really really really cold outside. I also remember the last 30 years of cooling. Unfortunately I was not alive for the 30 years of warming before that, because I sure like warm temperatures over these freezing temperatures. As I am sitting here, it is minus 17 outside.
I just wish your global warming was real.
Eve : You say that Scientists promote Climate Change as a way to get research grants. But just think about the AGW lobby : It includes the World's biggest energy companies, the CEOs of which say that their role is not to protect the environment, but their shareholders! They fund AGW people (who are often not scientists at all) to produce non-refereed AGW reports.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhich side risks to gain the most lucre from their work?
After reading comments here I have to reconsider our first amendment. It may be better to have less free speech. But then I don't have to read all this garbage do I. I'll exercise that right and go back to reading science backed reference like Thomas Friedman's excellent work, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." Temperatures WILL rise and the effects WILL be felt BEFORE the Atlantic conveyor belt, among other things, causes a probable return to an ice age. Then the earth, and any remaining humans, may be blessed with lessening the effect and become Cool, Curved and Less Crowded and the earth can then again breath.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJohn O'Brien, the Antarctic Ice sheet is progressively shrinking, as anybody who actually cares about these issues already knows. As for cold weather, you denialists still don't get it. Weather is not climate. Climate represents the entire system over time. Weather is what happens to a particular place at a particular time. They are not the same thing. And the global climate is progressively warming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsider it this way. Fill a bathtub halfway and let it sit until it reaches room temperature. Room temperature in this example represents climate as we have known it. Now turn on the hot water tap. The area near where the hot water is flowing in will grow hotter than the rest of the water. Now set the water circulating. The hot spot near the tap will travel around the tub. A microscopic observer standing at the midpoint of the tub will experience a rise in heat as the hot spot circulates past him or her, which will be followed by a cooling off as the hot spot goes by. That cooling off doesn't mean that the water overall in the tub is getting cooler, because in fact the opposite is true. The Earth is a more complex system than a tub, but the same principles apply. Sometimes cold deep ocean waters surface to cool the weather on the land. But the net gain of heat in the Earth's system means that the cold deep ocean waters will get less cold over time, just like the water in the tub farthest from the tap will get less cold over time. Overall and inevitably the system warms, regardless of short term temperature fluctuations. Constantly rising ocean temperatures are proof of this. Weather fluctuations mean nothing except in the sense that our weather systems are getting more extreme over time -- a result predicted by current climactic models.