From the very beginning when scientists talked about global warming and that it was a threat, and the product of the burning of fossil fuels, morons like Hannity and Limbaugh and other regressives have been denying global warming as a real and genuine threat, and the product of man's use of fossil fuels. What a bunch of fucking idiots! I hope it is not too late.... Bush Admits Climate Changes At Least Partially Man Made By John Daniszewski and Ron DePasquale, Times Staff Writers LONDON -- As world leaders prepared for a major summit, President Bush said Monday that he would not substantially change his stance on global warming to reward British Prime Minister Tony Blair for his support of the war in Iraq. "I really don't view our relationship as one of quid pro quo," Bush said. "Tony Blair made decisions on what he thought was best for keeping the peace and winning the war on terror, as I did." Reiterating his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol that mandates targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, Bush told Britain's ITV1 television that he would reject any measures that "look like Kyoto." Although the U.S. is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, Bush has rejected the treaty because its provisions, he said, would "wreck the U.S. economy." Blair is hosting the Group of Eight summit that begins Wednesday in Gleneagles, Scotland, and he has made fighting climate change and increasing assistance to Africa the top two priorities of the meeting. The annual gathering has in recent years attracted protesters denouncing the Iraq war, globalization and capitalism. Demonstrators clashed with police Monday on the streets of Edinburgh, the nearest big city to the exclusive golf resort where Bush, Blair and the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia will meet. Thousands of police were being rushed to the area to cope with an expected onslaught of demonstrators. In the days leading up to the summit, aides to Bush have sought to dispel his image as an international cowboy. His administration has announced plans to double development aid to Africa by 2010, although not in the way Blair and other G-8 leaders had proposed. While rejecting any "quid pro quo" on climate change, Bush nevertheless acknowledged that human activity is at least partly behind the apparent warming of the planet in recent years. And he said that there may be other compromises the United States and other nations can make to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being produced. In the past, European leaders have been frustrated that U.S. officials have disputed scientific evidence of accelerated warming, and questioned whether the phenomenon poses a real threat to the planet. Asked in the interview whether climate change is "manmade," Bush replied, "To a certain extent it is, obviously." "You know, look, there was a debate of Kyoto, and I made the decision -- as did a lot of other people in this country, by the way -- that the Kyoto treaty didn't suit our needs. In other words, the Kyoto treaty would have wrecked our economy, if I can be blunt." Bush denied, though, that he was putting U.S. economic interests above the interests of the planet. "My hope is ... to move beyond the Kyoto debate and to collaborate on new technologies that will enable the United States and other countries to diversity away from fossil fuels so that the air will be cleaner and that we have the economic and national security that comes from less dependence of foreign sources of oil," he said. "To that end, we're investing in a lot of ... research on hydrogen-powered automobiles. I believe we'll be able to burn coal without emitting any greenhouse gases," he said, also citing his backing for "more nuclear power." The Kyoto Protocol took effect in February with ratification by 141 countries -- including every industrialized nation except Australia and the United States. It aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to roughly 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. In addition to economic concerns, Bush has rejected the pact because of objections to the way it divides emissions cutbacks between developed and undeveloped countries. However, American officials say the United States is making progress to meet its own goals for reducing carbon emissions. British Foreign Minister Jack Straw said U.S. opposition to the Kyoto treaty was long-standing and well-known, but he remained optimistic that the meeting of the summit would still yield results. "Each country comes to these negotiations ... with its own national perspective," Straw said at a news conference. But he said it was "remarkable how far sentiment has moved in the period since the prime minister identified aid to Africa and climate change as the key" issues to be addressed. Lower-ranking government officials involved in the summit planning worked throughout the weekend, hammering out wording on communiques covering both climate change and aid to Africa. Michael Jay, a Foreign Office official, told reporters that the weekend talks had been "pretty intense" and that Britain remained hopeful that a "consensus agreement on climate change" will be signed at Gleneagles. The Financial Times reported Monday that the eight countries would adopt a joint "action plan" on climate change, although it would stop short of making specific emission-reduction targets. The statement would also contain language referring to a growing consensus among scientists about the problem, the paper said. On the subject of helping Africa, the leaders appear already to have reached an agreement to raise assistance and eliminate debt of the poorest African countries.
Is there really such a thing as 'fossil fuels'? ...It appears that, unbeknownst to Westerners, there have actually been, for quite some time now, two competing theories concerning the origins of petroleum. One theory claims that oil is an organic 'fossil fuel' deposited in finite quantities near the planet's surface. The other theory claims that oil is continuously generated by natural processes in the Earth's magma. One theory is backed by a massive body of research representing fifty years of intense scientific inquiry. The other theory is an unproven relic of the eighteenth century. One theory anticipates deep oil reserves, refillable oil fields, migratory oil systems, deep sources of generation, and the spontaneous venting of gas and oil. The other theory has a difficult time explaining any such documented phenomena... --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Excerpt 1: The notion that oil is a 'fossil fuel' was first proposed by Russian scholar Mikhailo Lomonosov in 1757. Lomonosov's rudimentary hypothesis, based on the limited base of scientific knowledge that existed at the time, and on his own simple observations, was that "Rock oil originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform into rock oil." Two and a half centuries later, Lomonosov's theory remains as it was in 1757 -- an unproved, and almost entirely speculative, hypothesis. Returning once again to the Wall Street Journal, we find that, "Although the world has been drilling for oil for generations, little is known about the nature of the resource or the underground activities that led to its creation." A paragraph in the Encyclopedia Britannica concerning the origins of oil ends thusly: "In spite of the great amount of scientific research ... there remain many unresolved questions regarding its origins." Does that not seem a little odd? We are talking here, after all, about a resource that, by all accounts, plays a crucial role in a vast array of human endeavors (by one published account, petroleum is a raw ingredient in some 70,000 manufactured products, including medicines, synthetic fabrics, fertilizers, paints and varnishes, acrylics, plastics, and cosmetics). By many accounts, the very survival of the human race is entirely dependent on he availability of petroleum. And yet we know almost nothing about this most life-sustaining of the earth's resources. And even though, by some shrill accounts, the well is about to run dry, no one seems to be overly concerned with understanding the nature and origins of so-called 'fossil fuels.' We are, rather, content with continuing to embrace an unproved 18th century theory that, if subjected to any sort of logical analysis, seems ludicrous. Excerpt 2: A more accurate review of Kenney's work appeared in The Economist ("The Argument Needs Oiling," The Economist, August 15, 2002). Millions of years ago, tiny animals and plants died. They settled at the bottom of the oceans. Over time, they were crushed beneath layers of sediment that built up above them and eventually turned into rock. The organic matter, now trapped hundreds of metres below the surface, started to change. Under the action of gentle heat and pressure, and in the absence of air, the biological debris turned into oil and gas. Or so the story goes. In 1951, however, a group of Soviet scientists led by Nikolai Kudryavtsev claimed that this theory of oil production was fiction. They suggested that hydrocarbons, the principal molecular constituents of oil, are generated deep within the earth from inorganic materials. Few people outside Russia listened. But one who did was J. F. Kenney, an American who today works for the Russian Academy of Sciences and is also chief executive of Gas Resources Corporation in Houston, Texas. He says it is nonsense to believe that oil derives from "squashed fish and putrefied cabbages." This is a brave claim to make when the overwhelming majority of petroleum geologists subscribe to the biological theory of origin. But Dr Kenney has evidence to support his argument. In this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he claims to establish that it is energetically impossible for alkanes, one of the main types of hydrocarbon molecule in crude oil, to evolve from biological precursors at the depths where reservoirs have typically been found and plundered. He has developed a mathematical model incorporating quantum mechanics, statistics and thermodynamics which predicts the behaviour of a hydrocarbon system. The complex mixture of straight-chain and branched alkane molecules found in crude oil could, according to his calculations, have come into existence only at extremely high temperatures and pressures-far higher than those found in the earth's crust, where the orthodox theory claims they are formed. To back up this idea, he has shown that a cocktail of alkanes (methane, hexane, octane and so on) similar to that in natural oil is produced when a mixture of calcium carbonate, water and iron oxide is heated to 1,500o C and crushed with the weight of 50,000 atmospheres. This experiment reproduces the conditions in the earth's upper mantle, 100 km below the surface, and so suggests that oil could be produced there from completely inorganic sources. Kenney's theories, when discussed at all, are universally described as "new," "radical," and "controversial." In truth, however, Kenney's ideas are not new, nor original, nor radical. Though no one other than Kenney himself seems to want to talk about it, the arguments that he presented in the PNAS study are really just the tip of a very large iceberg of suppressed scientific research. This story really begins in 1946, just after the close of World War II, which had illustrated quite effectively that oil was integral to waging modern, mechanized warfare. Stalin, recognizing the importance of oil, and recognizing also that the Soviet Union would have to be self sufficient,launched a massive scientific undertaking that has been compared, in its scale, to the Manhattan Project. The goal of the Soviet project was to study every aspect of petroleum, including how it is created, how reserves are generated, and how to best pursue petroleum exploration and extraction. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=777158
Hilarious- and he would have a foggy clue -how, again? And what was that thing in his suit in the kerry debate, anyway? Site might have been posted elsewhere, but i think it was www.dubyaspeak.com, best laugh in ages. Funny, yet disturbing:eek:
There's Global Warming and Global Dimming.The increased particulates in the atmosphere causing a drop in the amount of sunlight reaching the surface has reduced the effect of Global Warming quite substantially.We've made a real mess of things and it will take someone other than the oilmens' puppet to grasp the situation and try to make a start at solving it.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ, From what I have seen the global warming models used to predict human impact on global temps do not even predict the actual climate over the past 60 years. In simple terms, the models predict global temps increase proportionate to CO2 concentration which has doubled since the end of WW2. Actual temps show a DECLINE into the mid 70s at which point climatoligists made headlines by proclaiming the next ICE AGE was upon us. After the mid 70s , temps increase. The models predict that the polar regions would see the biggest increase, but measurements going back to the 50s show little or no trend and maybe even a slight downward trend at the poles. I'm not saying that humans have no impact on climate but that the models are deeply flawed. Maybe the real culprit is the little studied effect soot has on global albedo. Or maybe the perceived global warming is due to natural but not understood causes or more likely a combo of both. Even in NYCs Central Park, where there is a fairly long record, current temps are running slightly less than in the 1820s. This has happened despite the localized warming caused by the well established urban heat island effect. I don't see how you concluded that we are in a period of human caused global warming. Where is your supporting data? DS
Leading scientists disagree with your assessment. http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/global_warming/index.cfm Global warming is real and under way... Support U.S. action on global warming. Tell your senators to support action to address this serious threat. The mainstream scientific consensus on global warming is becoming clearer and more compelling every day: changes in our climate are real and are under way. Now. But we can do something about it. The evidence that human-induced global warming is real cannot be ignored. Consider: * Since the beginning of the 20th century, Earth's mean surface temperature has increased by about 1.1°F (0.6°C). * Over the last 40 years, which is the period with the most reliable data, the temperature increased by about 0.5°F (0.2-0.3°C). * Warming in the 20th century is greater than at any time during the past 400 to 600 years. * Seven of the 10 warmest years in the 20th century occurred in the 1990s. In fact, the hottest year since reliable instrumental temperature measurements began was 1998, when global temperatures spiked due to one of the strongest El Niños on record. In addition, changes in the natural environment support the evidence from temperature records. * Mountain glaciers the world over are receding. * The Arctic ice pack has lost about 40 percent of its thickness over the past four decades. * Global sea level is rising about three times faster over the past 100 years compared with the previous 3,000 years. * A growing number of studies show plants and animals changing their range and behavior in response to shifts in climate.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa012&articleID=000AF150-3FEA-1271-BFEA83414B7F0000 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000DA7C0-FBE9-1239-BBE983414B7F0000 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000E3A5C-D9D8-101E-990A83414B7F0123 nitro