Global Warming Chutzpah
IF President Bush had unveiled his goals for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at the beginning of his administration instead of in its waning months, he might have actually played a role in linking the United States to global efforts to curb climate change. But the proposals he made yesterday, which in 2001 could have been a starting point for negotiations with advocates of stronger action in Congress, are now too belated and too weak to be more than a historical footnote. All three remaining presidential candidates are committed to much more stringent, mandatory reductions in carbon dioxide.
Bush’s plan would allow emissions to increase until 2025 and provides no specifics on how they would be limited after that. Bush rules out new taxes on gasoline pur chases or carbon emissions, but his aides said his plan would allow cap and trade rules, in which an industry-wide limit is set on emissions by utilities. Utilities that can’t meet it must buy carbon credits from cleaner generators.
The challenge in cap and trade is setting a cap that forces utilities to use less coal, the fuel that emits the most carbon dioxide but also produces half of all US electricity. Bush would let utilities’ emissions increase for as long as 15 years, raising the risk of droughts, floods, and increased insect-borne diseases due to global warming. He specifically opposes a tougher Senate plan.
Bush deplored the possibility that recent court decisions will force the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department to take aggressive steps against greenhouse gas emissions. But courts would not be forcing the agencies to act if Bush had ever pushed Congress for action on global warming. His complaint now calls to mind the old joke about the child who kills his parents and then seeks clemency because he is an orphan.
The president said the United States should make any congressional action on climate change dependent on comparable measures by China, India, and other fast-growing countries. While it is true that preventing the worst effects of global warming will require steps by those countries, it will first require leadership by the United States.
This country is a world leader in both total emissions of greenhouse gases and emissions per capita. It is long past time for it to set an example by taking the problem seriously and, at the same time, developing the new green industries that will be part of the solution. Yesterday’s proposal falls far short. The president who makes the United States a world player in combating global warming will be Hillary Clinton, John McCain, or Barack Obama – not George Bush.











This post plaigarizes the Boston Globe: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2008/04/17/global_warming_chutzpah/.
What global warming?
Correct this simple assumption, but, if the temperature of something is already cooling, then how can we tackle it’s warming? it is tackling it all by itself already.
The earth’s temperature peaked in 1998 then went into stasis for a few years only to fall precipitously for the last 14 months. It may rise again? it might not? That is just the thing.
From all the dire predictions from all the sophisticated climate models, NOT ONE predicted the cooling we are witnessing for real! NOT ONE!
Neither did any of them predict that sea levels would fall, as they did in 2006 according to a long time study of the Pacific Atolls. The study was only abandoned last year as the sea levels never rose by so much as a centimetre in 16 years, according to the study.
Neither did they predict that the ice levels in the Arctic would come back to levels greater than last years, rescuing polar bears who where never under threat, after the “record” melting. (In reality the worst melting in only 30 years, when the records started)
Neither did any of them predict the results of the ARGO sub-sea probes, that have consistently shown a very mild cooling of the oceans during this past decade
Neither did they predict that the Aqua system would show temperatures at various altitudes as cooling too.
The mechanism at the heart of global greenhouse warming climate models is seriously flawed. the assumption that CO2 would keep increasing temperature as concentrations increase due to increasing levels of water vapour being a more powerful greenhouse gas, is flawed.
It is an assumption that has not been questioned and many models are built on top of this, but the NASA Aqua system has finally proven it wrong.
According to the latest data from the NASA Aqua satellite system as it measuring the raw data of water vapour and temperature from the only real model we have, the earth, is showing that the high level “tropospheric heat island” that is necessary to reflect heat back to earth in a positive feedback loop, does not exist outside of computer models.
It is NOT there.
The CO2 HAS warmed the atmosphere, slightly, this had warmed the oceans slightly, this had increased the amount of water vapour, but instead of this additional water vapour rising high into the troposphere, to bounce heat back to the surface, it forms lower level rain and snow clouds creating a minor cooling effect. Without this mechanism in place, the earth would have already long ago fried to a crisp!
Who’d have thought a system, of which CO2 has been a part for billions of years before man got here, could regulate itself without man doing it for it?