Being the kind of person I
am, I have to look at things pretty closely to decide if it's real or
hype. I've spent a lot of time looking at the data, and the sources
of that data, and decided that global warming is real, and that
mankind plays a significant role in it. Global warming is one of
those wonderful subjects that raises the hackles of our government,
who insist that humans play little or no part in increasing the
average temperature of the planet. They cite past examples when the
planet was hotter and point out that humanity hadn't evolved then.
They point to sunspot activity, geologic cycles and other such
examples as evidence humanity has no role in the process.
But what the government doesn't tell you is that they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. And when I say vested, I mean oil money. Politicians get a lot of it. And the oil and other energy companies like coal spend a lot of money funding scientific studies to prove that the burning of their product has little or no impact on the world's temperature.
Now, when you pay a scientist to prove one thing, generally speaking, they can find something they call proof. It's not what you'd call good science. It's more like good propaganda. But what convinced me about global warming and humanity's impact on it were two studies. Both of these studies were done by independent groups of respected scientists decades apart and if I find the specific ones again, I'll post the links.
The first study was on on the cycles of ice ages. According to the regular meteorological cycles of weather on Earth, we should be heading toward another ice age. This was all the talk in the early 1970's - along with how limited the earth's oil reserves were. According to leading NOAA scientists at the time, the Earth was supposed to start cooling down over the next few centuries.
Fast forward 30 years to today. Satellite photographs and other space-based instrumentation show that the ice at the poles is thinning at a rate that is unexplainable by 'cycles' in the Earth's weather patterns. All over the earth, glaciers are shrinking (except in a few isolates spots, and that's mostly because the disruptive weather patters have changed snowfall levels in different areas of the world), average temperatures are increasing (of the hottest years on record, 7 of them have happened in the last 10 years), species migrations are taking place where animal life and vegetation from the tropics and sub-tropics are increasingly being found in more northerly latitudes.
This does not sound like a planet that's cooling off.
Let's add to this heat-up a semi-linear increase in the relationship between the earth's average temperature and the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by human activity. That was the second study.
Now, while few past instances of global warming were human-caused, there's no doubt that THIS instance of global warming IS.
So, why the debate? 95% of the scientists who study the matter and are qualified to draw any conclusions agree that our current situation is primarily human caused. The only reason we have a debate at all is because a multi-trillion dollar industry has invested a lot of time, money and effort in building an infrastructure that directly contributes to the current cause of global warming and they don't want to lose that investment.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen and all of the ships at sea, money makes the world go round and as long as those who have a vested interest in denying the cause of global warming have the money, there will be a debate. Even while their grandkids are starving in a world unable to cope with the weather changes.
Corporations live from quarter to quarter, requiring a profit in each in order to better their standing in the corporate world and please their investors and survive. This means, they must maintain the status quo until the status quo is unsustainable. Look at Chrysler Corporation. They kept building vehicles that were not in demand and now can't sell enough to offset the costs of staying in business. They will have to invest billions to revamp their product lines and are still only going to be playing catch-up with the companies who have already gone to leading edge trends to sell their cars. Unless they do something radically different from their past business model, Chrysler will probably fold within the next five years. Just my opinion. They can't sustain $2 billion a year losses.
The oil companies are flush with funds now because they have an infrastructure that deliberately limits the amount of gas that can be produced, thus, with the supply of gas as controlled as it is, they can set whatever prices they want. This is a quarter-to-quarter mentality to maintain high (and obscenely high, if you ask me) profits. Do they use these profits to fund research into alternative, eco-friendly, renewable and non-polluting fuel and energy sources? Of course not. Capital investment in such things is extremely high and that will eat into their profits.
This means they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - look for more oil in deeper, harder to find locations and develop the technology to get at it. It's easier to fund development of better drilling and extrication techniques than it is to fund research into new ways of making a car go, then building the infrastructure to get that to the masses. Doing so would, "Ruin the economy."
To this, I say, "Bullshit".
The oil and coal and energy industry is dominant in American politics, and since what America does (besides use 24% of the world's energy for less than 5% of the world's population) tends to influence the other countries, while the oil and energy companies of America hold sway, nothing substantive will be done by the US government to demand cleaner burning fuels. In fact, Bush has recently signed an executive order deferring the EPA from acting on requests by the states to allow them to require cleaner emissions standards than the federal guidelines state until 2008 - near the end of his current term.
And the Bush family has long, deep and lucrative ties with the Saudi's and Texas Oil. After all, it took a Presidential order to allow the Saudi's to fly out of the country on September 12th, 2001 when no other civilian aircraft were allowed to fly.
So global warming isn't so much an environmental issue as it is a political issue to these companies and especially to the current administration. We know it's happening. We know we're causing it. We know what we need to do about it to help lessen the impact (The general consensus is that the process can't be reversed, but it can be lessened). But the government, suckling at the teat of big oil, doesn't want to give up that source of funding, so it denies it, defers it, refuses to discuss it, lies about it.
So, in 30 or 50 years, when we're all looking at the flooded gulf coast, after evacuating Miami and most of Florida, and after 250 million or more people have died due to starvation and disease and when a billion people are living in temporary shelters because the land they used to occupy is under water and people are dying at the rate of a million a day, we can thank the oil and coal companies, George W. Bush and the short-sightedness of Corporate America's business practices for the problems.
The really sad part is that for those with vision and a little intestinal fortitude, entirely new, and very profitable, energy industries can replace oil, coal and natural gas. All it takes is the investment of funds and a government willing to back them. People will do the rest. We know our government isn't going to in the reasonably near future. It's up to the rest of us to act.
But what the government doesn't tell you is that they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. And when I say vested, I mean oil money. Politicians get a lot of it. And the oil and other energy companies like coal spend a lot of money funding scientific studies to prove that the burning of their product has little or no impact on the world's temperature.
Now, when you pay a scientist to prove one thing, generally speaking, they can find something they call proof. It's not what you'd call good science. It's more like good propaganda. But what convinced me about global warming and humanity's impact on it were two studies. Both of these studies were done by independent groups of respected scientists decades apart and if I find the specific ones again, I'll post the links.
The first study was on on the cycles of ice ages. According to the regular meteorological cycles of weather on Earth, we should be heading toward another ice age. This was all the talk in the early 1970's - along with how limited the earth's oil reserves were. According to leading NOAA scientists at the time, the Earth was supposed to start cooling down over the next few centuries.
Fast forward 30 years to today. Satellite photographs and other space-based instrumentation show that the ice at the poles is thinning at a rate that is unexplainable by 'cycles' in the Earth's weather patterns. All over the earth, glaciers are shrinking (except in a few isolates spots, and that's mostly because the disruptive weather patters have changed snowfall levels in different areas of the world), average temperatures are increasing (of the hottest years on record, 7 of them have happened in the last 10 years), species migrations are taking place where animal life and vegetation from the tropics and sub-tropics are increasingly being found in more northerly latitudes.
This does not sound like a planet that's cooling off.
Let's add to this heat-up a semi-linear increase in the relationship between the earth's average temperature and the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by human activity. That was the second study.
Now, while few past instances of global warming were human-caused, there's no doubt that THIS instance of global warming IS.
So, why the debate? 95% of the scientists who study the matter and are qualified to draw any conclusions agree that our current situation is primarily human caused. The only reason we have a debate at all is because a multi-trillion dollar industry has invested a lot of time, money and effort in building an infrastructure that directly contributes to the current cause of global warming and they don't want to lose that investment.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen and all of the ships at sea, money makes the world go round and as long as those who have a vested interest in denying the cause of global warming have the money, there will be a debate. Even while their grandkids are starving in a world unable to cope with the weather changes.
Corporations live from quarter to quarter, requiring a profit in each in order to better their standing in the corporate world and please their investors and survive. This means, they must maintain the status quo until the status quo is unsustainable. Look at Chrysler Corporation. They kept building vehicles that were not in demand and now can't sell enough to offset the costs of staying in business. They will have to invest billions to revamp their product lines and are still only going to be playing catch-up with the companies who have already gone to leading edge trends to sell their cars. Unless they do something radically different from their past business model, Chrysler will probably fold within the next five years. Just my opinion. They can't sustain $2 billion a year losses.
The oil companies are flush with funds now because they have an infrastructure that deliberately limits the amount of gas that can be produced, thus, with the supply of gas as controlled as it is, they can set whatever prices they want. This is a quarter-to-quarter mentality to maintain high (and obscenely high, if you ask me) profits. Do they use these profits to fund research into alternative, eco-friendly, renewable and non-polluting fuel and energy sources? Of course not. Capital investment in such things is extremely high and that will eat into their profits.
This means they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - look for more oil in deeper, harder to find locations and develop the technology to get at it. It's easier to fund development of better drilling and extrication techniques than it is to fund research into new ways of making a car go, then building the infrastructure to get that to the masses. Doing so would, "Ruin the economy."
To this, I say, "Bullshit".
The oil and coal and energy industry is dominant in American politics, and since what America does (besides use 24% of the world's energy for less than 5% of the world's population) tends to influence the other countries, while the oil and energy companies of America hold sway, nothing substantive will be done by the US government to demand cleaner burning fuels. In fact, Bush has recently signed an executive order deferring the EPA from acting on requests by the states to allow them to require cleaner emissions standards than the federal guidelines state until 2008 - near the end of his current term.
And the Bush family has long, deep and lucrative ties with the Saudi's and Texas Oil. After all, it took a Presidential order to allow the Saudi's to fly out of the country on September 12th, 2001 when no other civilian aircraft were allowed to fly.
So global warming isn't so much an environmental issue as it is a political issue to these companies and especially to the current administration. We know it's happening. We know we're causing it. We know what we need to do about it to help lessen the impact (The general consensus is that the process can't be reversed, but it can be lessened). But the government, suckling at the teat of big oil, doesn't want to give up that source of funding, so it denies it, defers it, refuses to discuss it, lies about it.
So, in 30 or 50 years, when we're all looking at the flooded gulf coast, after evacuating Miami and most of Florida, and after 250 million or more people have died due to starvation and disease and when a billion people are living in temporary shelters because the land they used to occupy is under water and people are dying at the rate of a million a day, we can thank the oil and coal companies, George W. Bush and the short-sightedness of Corporate America's business practices for the problems.
The really sad part is that for those with vision and a little intestinal fortitude, entirely new, and very profitable, energy industries can replace oil, coal and natural gas. All it takes is the investment of funds and a government willing to back them. People will do the rest. We know our government isn't going to in the reasonably near future. It's up to the rest of us to act.
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