Climate Change and Copenhagen

[cooran]

Hello all,

Green odyssey takes cyclist to Copenhagen

Mr Nguyen cycled through 22 countries on his way to Copenhagen.

An Australian cyclist who has spent 16 months cycling from Brisbane to the UN climate talks in Copenhagen says the journey has given him a host of accounts of how global warming is changing lives for the worse.

Kim Nguyen, 28, says he first realised the severity of climate change talking to farmers in East Timor.

"They were telling me that during the last three years they had not been able to grow enough food to eat and survive because the rains that usually came at a certain time of the year were not coming," he said.

"And then when they did come they came in a deluge and there were floods."

On a worn map of the world that he used throughout his 18,000-kilometre trek, Mr Nguyen's finger traces the 22 countries he covered on his journey.

His trip covered East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, then eastern and central Europe before finally reaching Denmark.

"The bike started falling apart after 6,000 kilometres so I still had 12,000 kilometres to go," he said.

"I fixed things by myself but I travelled really long distances with poor components that I eventually only could fix when I arrived in Europe."

Mr Nguyen said he usually biked 100 kilometres a day three days in a row, then took a day off before hopping on the saddle again.

He came up with the idea for his adventure 18 months ago after a friend told him about the UN climate conference.

After seeing first-hand severe flooding in south-east Asia, the spreading of the Gobi desert in Mongolia and dried up riverbeds in north-eastern China, his observations of the planet's woes pushed him to transform his adventure from a one-man affair into a joint action.

"It came out of my thoughts when I had been cycling for quite some time, thinking, actually one guy on a bike isn't much of a big deal," he said.

"Even if he's coming to Copenhagen how is that going to achieve anything."

So in each big city where he stopped, he decided to contact the local branches of environmental groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, his sponsor, to help create a network of people who followed his journey and collected his testimony of climate change around the world.

News of his adventure began to spread, and he found himself making friends on the road near the end of his trip.

When he arrived in Copenhagen on Sunday, some 60 cyclists followed him into the city centre.
[.............................] - AFP
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009 ... 766600.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

metta
Chris

[pink_trike]

I'm also no longer entirely convinced that the warming we're experiencing is primarily human-caused. And I'm old enough to know that when there are politicians, scientific researchers, international relations, and business interests as central players then we are basically looking at something akin to Alice in Wonderland where appearances mean nothing and truth is always very far from evident and remains undisclosed to the masses.

About 7 years ago I began research for a book that required an examination of premodern civilizations and their oral/folk/mythic records. One of the first things that really jumped out at me was that they were obsessed with climate, and that climate drove their lives. In our modern world of push button climate-controlled environments we forget how primary (even visceral) the relationship humans have with climate really is. In an effort to better understand the premodern's relationship with climate and its emphasis in their meticulous records that frequently matched on opposite sides of the globe, I began researching the part of the geological record and ice core samplings that reflect climate patterns over the last 100,000 years - and I was really surprised by what I learned.

- Periods of climate extremes ranging from decades to 1500 years and longer are not rare. In fact, extreme variations are the norm when looked at with some distance.

- The warming predictions that have been driving the "global warming" debate...a 3-6 degree F warming over this century, are quite mild when compared to warming periods found in the geological record and in ice core samplings which show repeated warming periods, some as high as 27 degree fahrenheit within the previous approx. 10,000 years (a nano-blink of the eye in global time). Interestingly, our premodern ancestors throughout the Americas record a time within the last 10,000 years when it become so hot that rivers and streams evaporated away killing most of life except those that lived deep under the soil and in underground caves (where some humans survived). And, in what is now Turkey there are well-preserved underground cities that are now dated to at least approx 10,000 BCE that extend down 18 stories below the surface of the earth, connected by miles of tunnels, that would have housed up to 200,000 people - complete with extensive stables and ventilation systems (young archeology described these as a defense against warring neighbor countries, an explanation that falls apart with even the slightest critical examination and that is generally no longer accepted within the field). These underground networked cities with thousands of "apartments" maintain an even cool temperature even in the hottest days of summer.

- The geological record also shows regular periods of extreme drought, and extreme rain. The human genetic record preserves evidence of a monumental die-off of the human race that corresponds with a severe (from our perspective) drought that reduced the human population to several thousand survivors in Africa around 70,000 BCE (another nano-blink of global time). Premodern First People in the Americas matter-of-factly record a witnessed time when raindrops as large as human heads inundated the land for a long period of time, driving living beings up to mountain tops to survive - while the geological records shows countless layers of repeated massive flooding all over the globe periodically throughout the previous 10,000 years.

- Premodern traditions on opposite sides of the globe speak of those times when the seasons are reduced to just two - harsh cold and harsh heat. And other extended periods of times when climate is wildly chaotic and unpredictable.

- It's recently been discovered that Earth's climate is affected by the climate of other planets (no, you probably didn't read about this in the daily news - but if you read science journals or visit other than "pop" science sites you may have). Oddly, I haven't seen any mention of this in the ongoing discussion regarding "global warming"

- There's much debate among climate physicists regarding what is causing Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, Triton, Venus, and other worlds in our solar system to also warm. I find it interesting that our premodern ancestors spoke of those times when the solar system travels in succession through hot, cold, wet, windy, and dust/gravel periods as it travels through its galactic orbit. It follows to reason (at least to me) that the galaxy would also have climate zones that would affect Earth's climate.

In light of these things, I've started to look differently at the "global warming" debate. Certainly our premodern ancestors didn't cause all of those previous extreme warming periods and the other countless climate extremes and periods of climate chaos. There's no doubt that modern human civilization has devastated the ecosystem and messed with the fragile balance between land, oceans, and atmosphere - but in light of what the geological record, ice core samples, genetic record, astrophysics, and premodern records reveal - I too am becoming more skeptical of the idea that humans are the primary cause of "global warming" ("global chaos" is a more precise way to describe the climate situation) on Planet Earth. My guess is that "we don't have a clue" is a better answer, and that the debate likely masks special interests related to funding streams, profit streams, strategic international relations, and manipulation of voting blocs to preserve and advance entrenched power...a part of the debate that the common masses aren't privy to.

[BlackBird]

200,000 person underground cities in Turkey - 10,000BCE?

I'm not doubting you PT, but do you have a link there?

[pink_trike]

Hi Jack,

Way past my bedtime, so I grabbed this from google.

http://www.cappadociaturkey.net/undergroundcities.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

If I find time, I'll dig out some info from my library.

If you research it further online, keep in mind that all archeology dates have been challenged during the last decade, and that the earliest evidence of civilization by strict anthropological criteria now stands at 85,000 BCE. Most non-scholar articles online don't reflect current knowledge. These are extraordinary times...even as young as you are, much of what you were taught in school is out of date. Education can't keep up with the information age.

[cooran]

Interesting post PT.

Could you give links to most of the statements you made? ....like to look further into it.

metta
Chris

[pink_trike]

More

[pink_trike]

Interesting post PT.

Could you give links to most of the statements you made? ....like to look further into it.

metta
Chris

I'll try to find some. Most of my info re: premodern records and the geological record come from books and journals. I find much of what's online to be distorted, dated, and unreliable.

[BlackBird]

Oh no hurry Jeff. Getting some rest is actually far more important than satiating my worldly thirst for knowledge

I'm quite fascinated by these concepts you have put forth, which seem to directly challenge the idea that any civilization during this period was necessarily hunter/gatherer, and at least partially nomadic.

[retrofuturist]

Greetings,

Whether naturally occurring or not, greenhouse gases sure do warm things up!

Just ask our Venusian friends...

Venus has an extremely dense atmosphere, which consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen. The atmospheric mass is 93 times that of Earth's atmosphere while the pressure at the planet's surface is about 92 times that at Earth's surface—a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of nearly 1 kilometer under Earth's oceans. The density at the surface is 65 kg/m³ (6.5% that of water). The CO2-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar System, creating surface temperatures of over 460 °C (860 °F). This makes Venus's surface hotter than Mercury's which has a minimum surface temperature of -220 °C and maximum surface temperature of 420 °C, even though Venus is nearly twice Mercury's distance from the Sun and thus receives only 25% of Mercury's solar irradiance.

Studies have suggested that several billion years ago Venus's atmosphere was much more like Earth's than it is now, and that there were probably substantial quantities of liquid water on the surface, but a runaway greenhouse effect was caused by the evaporation of that original water, which generated a critical level of greenhouse gases in its atmosphere

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Atmo ... nd_climate" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Metta,
Retro.

[pink_trike]

...which seem to directly challenge the idea that any civilization during this period was necessarily hunter/gatherer, and at least partially nomadic.

This idea is quickly dying, if not dead. I don't want to hijack this thread, so maybe I'll start another thread later and post some of the archeological finds from what is now Germany that date to around 30,000 BCE. (by the way...that image of the shepard with the staff is a very ancient symbol...neither the position of his arms or the staff have anything to do with sheep and far far predates Christianity).

...or from the Balkin foothills that date from 5,000 BCE, like these:

[Lampang]

The warming predictions that have been driving the "global warming" debate...a 3-6 degree F warming over this century, are quite mild when compared to warming periods found in the geological record and in ice core samplings which show repeated warming periods, some as high as 27 degree fahrenheit within the previous approx. 10,000 years (a nano-blink of the eye in global time).

That’s quite a claim. Do you have a link for that?

Interestingly, our premodern ancestors throughout the Americas record a time within the last 10,000 years when it become so hot that rivers and streams evaporated away killing most of life except those that lived deep under the soil and in underground caves.

As is that. You’re not talking about a drought, right? It was too hot on the surface of North America for life? A link would be interesting.

It's recently been discovered that Earth's climate is affected by the climate of other planets (no, you probably didn't read about this in the daily news - but if you read science journals or visit other than "pop" science sites you may have).

Can you let me have one for this, too?

Premodern First People in the Americas matter-of-factly record a witnessed time when raindrops as large as human heads inundated the land for a long period of time, driving living beings up to mountain tops to survive - while the geological records shows countless layers of repeated massive flooding all over the globe periodically throughout the previous 10,000 years.

Raindrops as big as a human head would be quite something, but more generally, why would anyone think that any of this had any bearing on theories of anthropogenic climate change? Historical variations in temperature will all have causal explanations and there’s absolutely no reason to think that what explains one period of warming will explain another. We know CO2, methane, etc are greenhouse gases. We know that concentrations of these gases have increased. We know that temperatures have increased and in the absence of any other explanation – and there is an absence of any other explanation – the best explanation for the warming is the rise in concentrations of greenhouse gases. (A pathologist who, presented with a corpse riddled with bullet holes, claimed that the cause of death was cancer, and based this argument on the undisputable fact that cancer has killed lots of people in the past would be laughed out of her job.) And you'd still have to explain why almost every climatologist believes that ACC is a fact. Is it a conspiracy - the complexity of which would make even Dan Brown blush - or is it a mistake - and a very odd mistake at that because all the mistakes tend to provide supporting evidence for every other mistake - which only the great intellects of Fox News have been able to uncover?

the debate likely masks special interests related to funding streams, profit streams, strategic international relations, and manipulation of voting blocs to preserve and advance entrenched power.

Yes. I’m sure everyone can all agree with this. The ten most profitable companies for 2008 - whose combined profits were around 150 billion dollars - were:

Wal-Mart
Exxon
Shell
BP
Toyota Motor
Chevron
ING
Total
General Motors
ConocoPhillips

Eight of them – although a pretty solid argument can be made for making that nine, with the inclusion of Wal-Mart - are directly dependent on the burning of fossil fuels for their astonishing profits. And we all know how Exxon like to spend their money.

[Sanghamitta]

I am a agnostic/sceptic also concerning the human input into climate change. My first degree was in a science subject (microbiolology ) so I am not unaquainted with the scientific method, and I remain unconvinced. There are a number of alarm bells ringing for me. The first is the range of well recorded phenomena which simply do not fit a model of a semi stable climate until human activity upsets it it , such as that alluded to by PinkTrike above. There are other examples such as the widely observed phenomenon in northern Europe in the early 18th century where for a perod of some years temperatures soared giving values in the order of 70 degress F in DECEMBER. Neither are these phenomena rare or even uncommon. The facts concerning them though are kept well clear of the global warming debate by its advocates. The earths climate is enormously complex and we are only just beginning to understand some of its features. The other factor which gives me pause for thought is less tangible and more to do with mass psychology. Its the fact that the Emporers New Cloths aspect to accepting man made climate change has reached a level where to question its premises is to invite insult and ridicule , This is dangerous in my view. If the facts are so self evident then why is it necessary to generate such an overarching and all pervading groupthink on the issue. I smell a number of well intentioned rats, and I have no time at all in normal circumstances for conspiracy theories. This whole thing smacks to me of a number of interlocking political agendas together with a real and well founded degree of concern about atmospheric pollution. What we have here i suspect, is a post christian need for salvation from sin. A collective emoting. A need to belong. I happened to be in London on saturday when the Climate Change march was going on. While not questioning anyones motives it was clear to me that this kind of mass action has a purpose which only incidentally coincides with its official one.

[appicchato]

Our esteemed friend Bhikkhu Bodhi has, I'm told, made the journey there (Copenhagen) to attend...

[pink_trike]

The warming predictions that have been driving the "global warming" debate...a 3-6 degree F warming over this century, are quite mild when compared to warming periods found in the geological record and in ice core samplings which show repeated warming periods, some as high as 27 degree fahrenheit within the previous approx. 10,000 years (a nano-blink of the eye in global time).

That’s quite a claim. Do you have a link for that?

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/ ... ey2000.txt" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This is all I can find online right now, but it will give you some idea of the consistent and relatively rapid extreme increases and decreases in temperatures reflected in Greenland ice core samples

Interestingly, our premodern ancestors throughout the Americas record a time within the last 10,000 years when it become so hot that rivers and streams evaporated away killing most of life except those that lived deep under the soil and in underground caves.

As is that. You’re not talking about a drought, right? It was too hot on the surface of North America for life? A link would be interesting.

When I have some time I'll scan some journals.

This would seem to indicate a simultaneous drought and extreme increase in temperature.

It's recently been discovered that Earth's climate is affected by the climate of other planets (no, you probably didn't read about this in the daily news - but if you read science journals or visit other than "pop" science sites you may have).

Can you let me have one for this, too?

I found this online. There's likely more online.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/19 ... 090305.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Premodern First People in the Americas matter-of-factly record a witnessed time when raindrops as large as human heads inundated the land for a long period of time, driving living beings up to mountain tops to survive - while the geological records shows countless layers of repeated massive flooding all over the globe periodically throughout the previous 10,000 years.

...but more generally, why would anyone think that any of this had any bearing on theories of anthropogenic climate change?

Because we don't live in an isolated vacuum of "current time" and the circumstances of this current time may not be unique at all. If frequent extreme variations of temperature, precipitation, methane count all extend far back in time and are the norm not the exception, why wouldn't we factor this into any theory of anthropogenic climate change? More likely, the relatively stable and favorable climate conditions of the last 1000 or so years is the anomaly.

Historical variations in temperature will all have causal explanations and there’s absolutely no reason to think that what explains one period of warming will explain another. We know CO2, methane, etc are greenhouse gases. We know that concentrations of these gases have increased. We know that temperatures have increased and in the absence of any other explanation – and there is an absence of any other explanation – the best explanation for the warming is the rise in concentrations of greenhouse gases.

http://www.stanford.edu/~meehan/donnellyr/3000bc.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"3250 BC: Global; Atmospheric methane

Atmospheric methane from GRIP ice core with lowest value 580 ppbv at 5.2K yrs. BP followed by rapid increase of 40 ppbv over 200 years; variously attributed to clathrate or permafrost outgassing, decrease in tropospheric oxidation, or abrupt increase in low-latitude wetlands. Blunier, T, et al, Nature, 374 47 (1995)."

This is just one example of methane increase. It appears to be a relatively common occurrence with varying increments of increase/decrease.

And you'd still have to explain why almost every climatologist believes that ACC is a fact. Is it a conspiracy - the complexity of which would make even Dan Brown blush - or is it a mistake - and a very odd mistake at that because all the mistakes tend to provide supporting evidence for every other mistake - which only the great intellects of Fox News have been able to uncover?

How did Westerners (even scholars) end up believing at one point in time that the Earth was flat when there is ample evidence that show that far older cultures around the globe knew that the Earth was spherical?

How did the Western world come to build a massive consumer culture, particularly over the last 30-60 years, that is utterly dependent on oil when researchers knew as early as the 1940s that the world's oil supply was finite and projected to peak in the 70s and then rapidly decline after that ?

Conspiracy? Mistake? Mass delusion? All of the above? Dunno...there is no solid ground to be found when dealing with humans. In my graduate level statistics class the professor asked everyone to choose some "fact" that was amply supported by statistical evidence. We then set about to disprove these facts with equally valid statistical analysis. Our success rate was 100%, largely because she showed us the many sophisticated ways that statistical data can be manipulated to convincingly prove just about anything.

Imo, there is some significant information being left out of this debate that is carefully defined between two ideological political poles.

[poto]

This is the one position that we can be completely sure is not true. We're putting tens of gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Some of it is absorbed (some of it is causing damage by lowering the pH of the oceans for example) while much of it remains there. We can measure pretty well how much remains. Checking the composition of the CO2 by isotopes indicates that the added CO2 is produced by our burning fossil fuels, not some natural source secretly churning it out. CO2 does not magically cease to absorb infrared light when we put it into the atmosphere just because it's inconvenient that it does.

It's unreasonable to suppose that this activity would fail to warm the atmosphere unless it had some other effect that compensated. For instance, the one skeptic at M.I.T. always used to argue that the atmosphere could get dried out by this process in such a way as to compensate (since water vapor is also a greenhouse gas). Other skeptics have been known to say that maybe we'd get increased cloud cover instead, and that this would compensate (by reflecting the light). None of these notions have panned out. Not only have they not panned out, all the evidence is in favor of there being more of a positive feedback loop (espcially by warming causing there to be more water vapor in the atmosphere, amplifying the warming) than a negative one. Additional positive feedback loops are proving to be stronger than originally expected.

But even more fundamentally, even if one of these "skeptical" notions were correct, it wouldn't mean that we were not "driving" a change in the climate; it would just mean that we were changing it in a different way than by warming. More cloud cover, a drier stratosphere... these are changes too. Nobody has provided a reasonable scenario on which putting tens of gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year could be doing just nothing, nor can they.

CO2 has been much higher in the past, and the oceans didn't turn into pools of acid. IMHO, it's probably more likely that sulfur emissions are to blame for changes in ocean pH levels. We've done a great job of limiting those type of emissions here in the states, but countries like China are cranking out lots of sulfur, which is a valid problem that needs to be addressed.

Decaying plant matter releases more gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year than humans do. I did look for data on natural CO2 sources vs. human emissions, but I couldn't find the stuff I'd seen before. People like to throw around the gigaton thing, but when put into perspective to the natural world, what we emit is only a tiny fraction of the global carbon content. Also, it's flawed logic to assume that all the CO2 we put into the atmosphere will just hang around forever.



The IPCC has been pushing a lot of flawed models.

There has been no evidence of a positive feedback loop. The fact that temperatures have been flat and trending downward for the last decade disproves the possibility of a positive feedback loop caused by humans.

People have been measuring the changes in solar output, and gathering evidence about its past changes. The Planck institute produced a paper on this. The past 60 years or so have had higher solar output than there had been before, helping to explain why the 1940s were as warm as they were (comparatively). The past 30 years or so have had even a bit more. The sun also changes in output during the solar cycle (as the number of sunspots rises and falls). But the last few solar cycles have not seen much change in the output of the Sun. It has essentially nothing to do with the recent observed changes in global average temperature. The recent changes also stand out relative to most of the changes that have occurred for a long time.

The people behind the misinformation campaign about these issues are very fond of trying to get people to think of warming as a question of some temperature data (which they might try to cast doubts on) going in search of an explanation. That way, the hapless layperson who is their victim can be led to suppose that attention paid to one explanation (the effect of CO2) is due to bias leading researchers not to take other explanations seriously enough. "It's so complex! How can we be sure which explanation is correct?"

But this ignores what we know of physics. CO2 due to its physical properties changes the radiation balance in the atmosphere. That this is likely to produce warming was predicted around a century ago, and now we see the prediction coming true. For this not to result in warming, there would have to be a compensating other effect produced by CO2. For decades people have looked for such a thing.

Now, suppose hypothetically that no warming were occurring. Then this would require some explanation, some cause for the trapped heat to be released some other way, or for the energy not to be arriving in the first place. Unless one found a connection between CO2 and this (hypothetical) other mechanism, the safest conclusion would be that we had both warming due to the CO2 and cooling due to some other mechanism that were canceling each other out. To some extent, the warming has been canceled out by aerosol-caused cooling.

Suppose hypothetically that some auxiliary cause for warming were found. That also would not be sufficient reason to imagine that CO2 was having zero effect. As it happens, however, despite a lot of hunting (and some wishful thinking) no such alternative explanation has serious evidence behind it. Yet you have no trouble digging up sources that pretend that there is... because so many of those sources are based on lies.

What warming was being predicted a century ago? The furthest back of any climate predictions I can recall is the global cooling scare and predictions of a coming ice age in the 1970s.

Also, as Pink Trike mentioned, how do you explain the warming on other planets? Surely our emissions can't be to blame for the warming on Mars. Also, the sun's energy is more complex than just the number of sunspots. There is also the solar wind and how solar radiation interacts with the earth's geomagnetic field. Cosmic radiation from outside the solar system may also play a part in our climate system, particularly in cloud formation, which we still understand very little about. To say that our knowledge of physics is advanced enough to understand all these things is false. Hopefully, someday we will be able to understand everything, but we're just not there yet.

There are sources of propaganda on the American political right that seem to be extremely keen on producing caricatures of what their opponents are saying, and they describe objective climate scientists as if they were as you say, people who try to scare us by forecasting "thermageddon". Try looking at what people are actually saying, however, not what one end of the political spectrum is portraying them as saying. What you see is people who believe there is a problem, and want to enlist others of us in helping to solve the problem. If anything, there is a tendency for them to try to put an upbeat spin on all of it, by implying that just a few "green" changes in habits will suffice to solve the problem. The fact that they are not cheerfully forecasting that everything will be fine without our doing anything at all is because they are avoiding lying, in spite of some nice monetary incentives that have been put in front of them to do so.

Probably you can find some shrill people engaging in scaremongering, but you can also find such people on the other side. Who is claiming that we will be ruined economically if we put a tax on carbon emissions? Who sees it as the first step toward tyranny? Almost all the manipulation is coming from that side.

The lying that certain of the (best informed, especially) self-proclaimed skeptics have been engaging in is what is absurd and offensive. Having been refuted on a point, there remain sources who just keep repeating the same claim as long as it continues to sway the public. All of their own vices (being motivated by greed and politics, being willing to distort the data, trying to stifle the opposition, playing on emotions) they attribute to the other side. Mainly, though, it's just unfortunate that so many people have been misled by them.

I am not attached to either right or left wings. I tend to dislike politicians no matter which party they are with.

The opening video for COP15 has a bit of doomsday scaremongering in it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGGgncVq-4" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

There are plenty of legitimate environmental concerns, but this bit with CO2 is political and not based in fact. I would like to see the legitimate environmental problems addressed. Unfortunately, the global warming hysteria tends to overshadow real pollution issues.

The original sources of this kind of thinking (not to suggest you are like this yourself, mind you), for the most part have no interest in serious third world economic development; not in the first world yielding up any of its advantages in international trade to the third world, in our paying them any more for their resources (such as oil) that we consume; or in our spending more than about 0.1% of our GDP on helping them out. They also tend to support the U.S. being the country that produces half the world's armaments and supplies them around the world, including to oppressive regimes that they think are "pro-U.S.", especially if they're good oil-exporters. That the revenue gets controlled by a little oligarchy is just fine as well. If islands and coastal areas are getting inundated, well, they say this is not our fault, so we should not do much to help.

Now, however, they want to claim that one of the best ways to encourage peace and prosperity for those poor, is for us to burn fossil fuels in an unrestrained way. This is all supposed to be good for the world, because if we (especially executives and share-holders in oil companies) become richer (able to consume ever more consumer luxury items) that economic growth is supposed to trickle down to the third world... someday.

Don't let them fool you. If you would be half as skeptical of them as you are of climatologists, I bet it'd do the trick.

Fig Tree

There's been a lot of talk of sea level rise, but none of it is actually happening. This is probably due to the fact that global ice content has not dropped. Of course, at sometime I would expect the sea level to change, as it does change from time to time. Our towns and cities will not last forever. I think clinging to a city or piece of land is wrong. These things are impermanent.

Speaking of oil companies. They have been funding global warming research and backing carbon trading schemes. The big corporations and governments stand to benefit the most from carbon trading and taxes. A carbon derivatives market would make them a whole lot richer and more powerful.

I guess I just don't share your trust in politicians. All I see are politicians who are motivated by greed and lust for power. I don't think adding taxes on energy will help the developing world develop any faster or cleaner. And I doubt those politicians have the best interests of the people or the planet in mind.

If I missed anything, please let me know. I couldn't find the sources or exact numbers for what I wanted to, probably because I'm kinda tired. If you want I can look again for you later.