Before we get to this I just want to jump in and thank everyone for all the well wishings I've received regarding the CPA. It's always nice to feel supported! I guess I now have to think about the next crazy scheme I want to get myself involved in. Now on with question #2!
Put yourself in one of the following camps regarding climate change: it’s not happening, concerning but is blown way out of proportion, a big problem but we can overcome, or a dire emergency? Without getting into all the statistics, briefly state what has led you to that conclusion.
John:
Have to go with dire emergency. The carbon emissions in the air today won’t be broken down for another 30 years; meaning we have already committed ourselves to at least 30 more years of damage. Add in that China and India are ramping up production of coal-powered plants and the fact that we have just recently reached consensus that climate change is real and the depth of the problem becomes clear. Finally, for the first time we have an election where both sides have vowed to act, but it may be too little too late. I’m not predicting the apocalypse, but without significant advances in carbon sequestration in the next decade we will be looking at massive levels of refugees and probably an additional 25% of populated land being rendered uninhabitable by 2050.
Mike:
Can I put myself in neither camp? I’d like to because I feel this way about climate change: We may have had something to do with it, but probably not. However, because of that possibility, and the additional financial benefits of finding alternative forms of energy, we should explore ways to limit our impact on the climate. Conservatism should include, as a cornerstone, preservation and conservation of nature and its resources.
Eric:
I believe that climate change is happening, but is a problem we can overcome. I am still not convinced, however, that global warming is entirely the fault of humankind. Weather has been around since the Earth was formed, and yet we only have reliable data that goes back 100 years. From a scientific standpoint, this is not a large enough sample size to accurately provide irrefutable proof of anything. That being said, the combination of a rise in CO2 emissions and deforestation are sure to have effected some part of the global ecosystem.
Becky:
I believe the scientists when they say Earth is warming more rapidly than it ever has before, that humans are a significant cause, and that we need to put corrective measures into place. I trust in science and believe that scientists simply aim to find out the truths of the universe—that they aren’t out to prove a point for some political purpose (as alleged by some conspiracy theorists).
As to whether we can overcome it or not, I can't be sure. Various sources have put the point of no return anywhere between 10 to 200 years, so I don't know what to think. If we only have a few years to bring carbon emissions down, realistically that's not enough time for the human race to get its act together. For my own sanity, therefore, I have to choose to believe it's not as dire as some say, either because we have more time than some scientists have calculated, or because they overestimated the influence of humans. If it's too late to fix anything and we're all doomed, we may as well all just go straight into the hoarding of resources, jockeying for power, and general warring and bloodshed.
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28 comments:
John: 133 words.
Mike: 71 words.
Eric: 93 words.
Becky: 199 words.
Maybe I just take Climate Change with a grain of salt because I remember all the fuss about the weakening of, and the hole in, the Ozone layer. This was such a big thing 15-20 years ago, and now it gets almost no attention. Did we fix the problem? Did tech improvements to air conditioners, replacing aerosol cans with pump action cans, and cutting down on styrofoam do the trick? I guess it is possible that global warming encompasses the threat and cancer risk of a depleted ozone layer, but who knows. Honestly, I'm just not that educated about environmental concerns. I didn't even see An Inconvenient Truth.
As an American though, here is the problem:
India and China.
India: 1.1 billion people.
China: 1.3 billion people.
US: 0.3 billion people.
I know, I know, the US leads the world in carbon emissions, but it is not going to stay that way for very long, and those two countries have a population EIGHT TIMES that of the US and their people are already calling out in greater and greater numbers for cars and oil.
The bad part of this is that while the US has already taken steps to start confronting the problem, it doesn't seem like China and India have.
From Wikipedia:
In 2004 the total greenhouse gas emissions from the People's Republic of China were about 54% of the USA emissions. However, China is now building on average one coal-fired power plant every week, and plans to continue doing so for years. Various predictions see China overtaking the US in total greenhouse emissions between late 2007 and 2010, and according to many other estimates, this already occurred in 2006.
This is scary, considering that much of their population would be considered rural poor in the US, and therefore make per capita figures somewhat meaningless.
The problem with these two countries (and other rapidly industrializing nations) is that they are still considered to be 'developing nations' by economists. Under the Kyoto Protocol these nations have no responsibility other than tracking and reporting emissions figures.
Something has to give.
(25% of populated land uninhabitable in 40 years? God John, you've really been drinking the kool-aid.)
He's been reading the Greenpeace web site:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/01/AR2006060101884.html
Read it. It's funny.
Haha, that is pretty funny.
Am I drinking the kool-aid? Well then dispute it! Otherwise your argument boils down to "Wow, that sounds really bad so that can't be true." My opinion is based on extensive research from the following: An Inconvenient Truth (which I will never cite due to the inevitable Gore backlash), 4 books (The Weather Makers, Collapse, Gaia, and The Revenge of Gaia), and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from last year.
Now, where specifically does the 25% come from? Admittedly there's a lot of conjecture in that because the interplay of all the causes with a multitude of ecosystems is not fully understood yet. It could be less severe or it could actually be more severe. I'm hoping we won't have to find out.
In any case, the one thing that is scientifically certain is that climate change is happening and it has been largely caused by man. I'm sure you can find some scientists to dispute that. You can also find some scientists to dispute evolution, but the verdict is in on both and there is a right and wrong side. The only thing that is really up for debate is how bad it is going to be and what we can do to stop it.
Here are just a few things to ponder. First is the albedo, which is the fancy name for polar ice. The white ice makes a good reflector of the sun and helps keep the earth cool. Well, the ice has started to melt (definitively at around 3% per decade since 1978). As the ice melts, the albedo shrinks and we lose some of that relecting ability, which causes the earth to heat slightly and ice melts faster. So it is a positive feedback loop. So, of course, the obvious effect is a rise in sea levels. But that's not the biggest problem (at least in the short term). The biggest problem is the potential shutdown of the Gulf Stream current. There is a great explanation of how this can happen here: (Gulf Stream Current) but here is the jist: The current operates because warm water originating from Africa is driven by the wind up through northwestern Europe (giving them a temperate climate). As it travels north, the water on the surface cools, becomes more dense, and starts to sink, and this powers the current. Creating a large influx of fresh water from polar ice caps has the potential to completely shut down this process (since fresh water is less dense than salt water and thus doesn't sink) and, indeed, that's exactly what's been noted (Slowing of the current) as the stream has weakened significantly in recent years. The key point to take away from this is that if the stream shuts down northwest Europe actually gets COLDER (yes, global warming in fact causes cooling in places). That is certainly bad news for agriculture in that region (among other things).
The final point is perhaps the most alarming one of all. The 100-year rise in surface temperature has been equal to ~.74 degrees Celcius and 11 of the last 12 years rank among the 12 warmest years on record (since 1850). What is alarming about that? Well, there are a ton of cities across the Earth that exist where they do because they are at a sufficient elevation to be above where insects (namely, disease carrying mosquitos) are able to breed (Mexico City is one example off the top of my head). A small warming now opens up those areas for insects and, in the case of many of the poorest countries, you are now dealing with a huge potential for an outbreak of disease (namely malaria).
OK, I have a lot more but I'm going to stop there. I think the thing that astounds me the most with respect to this is how so many people can still not really have an opinion on it. I went to see An Inconvenient Truth with the idea of ridiculing Al Gore. When I walked out of the movie I was determined to find sources disproving him. While it's certainly far from a perfect film and is sometimes misleading, what I found was that the message was pretty much dead on and a vast majority of the facts are indisputable. Many of the lingering doubts that existed up until as recently as about 5 years ago simply aren't there anymore. As is the case with most pessimists, I yearn to be proven wrong. I have asked everyone I've spoken to this about over the past several years to please point me towards some sources that dispute my conclusions. I'm still waiting (for something credible at least).
I still hate Al Gore though . . .
IPCC Report
BTW, I will get to my thoughts on dealing with the problems of China/India, but I wanted to truncate it while it was still just a novella and before it reached epic novel status.
Dispute it?
Come on, I’m not a climatologist, and the time needed to research sometime like that vastly extends beyond the timeline of this discussion. But I’ll answer your declarative ‘Dispute it!’ with a question: If 25% of inhabitable land will become otherwise in the next 40 years (that is .625%/year in an admittedly naïve quick calculation) then what percentage of inhabitable land has become otherwise in the last 40 years? I’m not saying that the numbers for the previous 40 and the upcoming 40 can be compared, but since climate change is a decades old problem that is just being recognized, I’d like to see some comparable data instead of just being told that sometime in the future the sky will fall.
I like this statement:
“the one thing that is scientifically certain is that climate change is happening and it has been largely caused by man.”
Then what was the point of asking the question? I disagree with the premise that it is a certainty that it has ‘been largely caused by man.’ I’m not saying that it isn’t true, I’m just saying that I haven’t yet taken the small amount of data we have and rushed to judgment. I remember seeing a video when I was in elementary school about garbage and landfills. The video said that if we don’t curb the amount of trash we create that we will run out of landfill space in 20 years. I also remember being told that if I didn’t shut off the faucet for the 60 seconds I brushed my teeth that the world would run out of water.
I’ll ask again (and this is a serious question) What happened to the problem with the ozone layer? It was supposedly thinning and the hole was getting bigger and we were all supposed to have cancer by now. Heck, come to think of it, Dr. Evil threatened to do it. It was such a hot button issue just 10 years ago that it was referenced in Austin Freaking Powers.
I had a hard time concentrating while reading your paragraph on the Gulf Stream. I am busy packing for a trip. I have to walk from Washington DC to NYC. It seems my son is trapped in a blizzard of mammoth proportions and I have to save him. He is holed up in the public library. He can’t go outside because it is too cold. And there are wolves. Wolves that won’t let him at the antibiotics. I’m busy next week too. It seems I have to travel to the center of the Earth with a pilot that crashed the space shuttle in an aqueduct. I don’t have all the details yet, but I’m told the core of the earth has stopped spinning or something. I hope I meet some mole-people.
I will stop this at novella size as well, but only because I can't stop giggling at my satire.
On the ozone, I couldn't remember all the specifics from what I've read but this seems about right from what I recall. Basically, thanks in part to the Montreal protocol we banned CFCs in the developed world and stopped the hole from growing (although it hasn't really begun to heal itself).
This is a brilliant demonstration of 2 things. One, we can actually work together globally to solve a problem, but rather than using that as a point of pride and motivation a lot of people just assume that the problem never existed and it was all just a hoax (the Y2K bug is another example). Secondly, this is the tragedy of crying wolf; when the wolf actually appears, no one believes you.
We do not have a "small amount of data" anymore. In addition to the 150 years of temperature readings, we've now been specifically studying the possibility of climate change since the early 70s (that's over 35 years of research devoted to specifically this question), and thanks to ice core drilling in Antarctica we have data on the ice shelves over the last 10 million years. I'm not sure exactly what other data you are waiting for.
As for comparing the last 40 years with the next, that is a bad analogy. There are not smooth transitions; similar to chemical reactions there are violent shifts to new equilibriums. One such shift would occur if the West Antarctic ice shelf collapses. Also, there are a lot of areas in the world that depend on glaciers for their water supply. The ice melts in the summer and provides water for the people living below. Well, you might not notice as the ice gets smaller and smaller over time; you just notice when one day there is no more water. And that's starting to happen in a number of places. Finally, you are getting too hung up on the 25% thing. No, I don't really believe that's going to happen, but only because we have actually now started to somewhat take the problem seriously (though not seriously enough) and at the very least we should be able to avoid the worst possible outcomes. I will stand by my statement, though, that it is a realistic assessment if we do absolutely nothing to curb emissions.
Why did I ask the question? Well, perhaps you should re-read the question and my answer. I was looking at this from the standpoint of "do people think we're screwed or can we overcome this?" and frankly I was surprised to see responses along the lines of "I'm still not sure it's us causing it."
I know I am coming off as unusually harsh on this, but it's something I believe in very strongly. After reading a lot of books about it a few years, I actually got very depressed, became convinced that we were all doomed, and was to the point where I almost decided it wasn't morally just to have kids. I have gradually become more cautiously optimistic, but only in the context that I believe once we finally have consensus on the gravity of the situation we can collectively move forward and solve it. As such, I get very passionate about trying to rally people so that either 1)they can realize the potential catastrophe looming ever-closer or 2)they can prove me wrong and I can sleep better at night.
John, you gave us multiple choice. And one of the choices was "it's not happening." Then you claim it is a scientific fact. If you don't want to discuss the possibility that it isn't happening, don't give us the choice. Basically you asked our opinion when in practice all you wanted to do was discuss YOUR view.
And, I don't know if this is the case or now, but much like the nuclear issue, it seems that your research only include sources that agree with you.
What other data do I want? Data that is unavailable and can not be retrieved. I want CO2 levels and global temperatures from the last 50 million years. Data from 150 years out of even only 5 million years is a ridiculous sample size of 0.0001%
And to prove I actually look at some of your links, when pointing out that we have data from the ice shelves I read this:
"Greenish rock layered throughout the "time capsule" indicates periods of open-water conditions, suggesting that the Ross ice shelf retreated and advanced perhaps as many as 50 times over the last 5 million years in response to climate changes"
Holy crap! There was climate change 5 million years ago? But how can that be? There were no coal plants and no cars 5 million years ago.
So what these ice shelve samples prove is that there are periods in the Earth's history where the climate cools and warms up all on its own.
Is it so far fetched to even admit the possibility that while there are some man-made things that are helping it along, this may just be a naturally occurring process?
(And I don't care if you're coming off as overly harsh. When a normal discussion in real life gets heated it normally turns into "loudest is rightest" and one person storms off in a huff. On the internet it shows passion and the ability to reason. Often times on the internet you have a greater opportunity to legitimately make a person think or even *gasp* change their mind on something. It also makes it really fun to play devil's advocate which is about 10% of what I'm doing in the this thread.)
(Besides, I've already decided that the next time I see you I'm going to spit in your face. ass.)
My intent was to ask an unbiased question; as such I couldn't eliminate all the options I didn't agree with and the attempt at multiple choice was to help with the 100 word limit. But I did want to discuss it; if not I would have just pontificated all this in a regular post like I do with most of my other ramblings.
Absolutely the Earth has undergone tremendous climate shifts throughout its history. In fact, the south pole used to be tropical. You want the last 50 million years of data? Well, all I could find quickly was the last 800,000 years. The key from observing these ice samples is that "carbon dioxide and temperature rise and fall in step." So, we know conclusively that rising CO2 levels cause warming, and we know that we are responsible for the current increases in CO2. So, I'm sorry, I guess I should have been more specific in saying that man is responsible for THIS climate change.
You keep saying that I only list sources that agree with me. Well, facts are funny that way; they tend to all tell the same story. If we were having a debate about intelligent design vs. evolution, I fear I would only be able to produce credible sources backing evolution.
I do like Lewis Black's quote: "George Bush now believes in global warming and as a result, I'm not so sure anymore."
Weir... even though I know you're just playing devil's advocate to John's point, I have to believe you're actually buying some of what you're selling. It gives me hope that other's are questioning the hype.
John... I feel your pain when it comes to the concern of any truth behind the aforementioned hype. I agree with Weir though that your research:
A) lacks enough data, and
B) that your research and sources, while well intentioned, lack objectivity
There are quite a few people who are far better educated than we about these matters that disagree with the idea that global climate change is caused by human interaction. For a nice list of the scientists and PHDs you can go to www.petitionproject.org
Click on the summary of peer reviewed research, and maybe you'll start to understand why I'm skeptical of human impact on climate.
And of course there's the position that anyone who disputes the claims of the global warming crowd is either in the pocket of those who would benefit financially from armageddon, or they're an idiot who can't see the writing on the wall. I just don't buy that either because it takes what could be a logical discussion and reduces it to "you're dumb. No, you're dumb." as a debate tactic.
This is why, despite your research, I can't completely sign off on humanity as the cause.
Once again, I do advocate reducing our impact on nature, but it needs to be done with the understanding that it's for the good of humanity and that each measure we take to conserve and "save" the planet makes sense fiscally and environmentally.
A good study of what seems like a no-brainer is the prius vs. hummer debate. Early reports stated that the environmental impact of a prius was far greater than a hummer. While the truth shows that the hummer actually IS worse for the environment it does raise some good questions. How about instead of hummer vs. prius we look at civic vs. civic hybrid? Or Prius vs. Yaris?
In these cases, the civic standard and the yaris both have signifigantly lower impact on the environment, not to mention the wallet, when you compare the reality of a birth to death lifecycle of the cars.
Benfits that aren't mentioned, though, are the advancement of the technology through increased use. Every time toyota gets a dead battery back they tear it down to find out how to make it work better. This will advance the state of the art through the next few years and will effectively make hybrids more efficient, and this would not happen without consumers buying the cars. They will also get cheaper as time goes on, and this will allow the less advantaged of us (the poor) to buy a used one.
Today I read an article on Sodium Ion battery theory. It's got me excited about the future of battery technology because as you might have noticed, salt is frickin everywhere. BTW, John McCain's $300M incentive plan got me thinking about it, but I saw that someone else was working on it. There goes my new prius.
Weir, I'm not editing this in honor of you.
Anyone here ever heard of the Milankovitch Theory?
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html
It is funny you bring up the McCain $300M initiative. How exactly is he going to pay for that? He says that his budget will have no pork, but then says the $300M will come from cutting 3 pork projects out of his first budget. There is a disconnect here somewhere.
Anyways, I really liked what you had to say, John, about people coming together through innovation and conservation to retard the ozone issue. Also the Y2K problem. I remember I did a Y2K report in the fall of '98 for a rhetoric class and came down on the side of complete chaos. After a month of research I actually concluded that we would conservatively be looking at a 30% drop in the stock market. A funny thing happened in the following 14 months though: a concerned, dedicated, and well paid portion of the population got together, worked hard, and almost completely eliminated the problem. I still stand by my initial claim that if nothing had been done there would have been a crisis.
Anyways, I already conceded that mankind has contributed to CO2 levels, global warming, and climate change. But I do think that humans are possibly just exacerbating an existing problem.
The thing is, that there are many reasons to decrease our dependence on oil. (Yes, oil, not just foreign oil.) One is environmental, one is economic, one is political, and another is that it is simply the right thing to do. I remember having a heated debate in some science class (it could have been back as far as middle school) about renewable resources and whether or not paper/trees were renewable. The argument being that it takes only minutes to cut down a tree, but centuries to regrow. The question boiled down to "How renewable is something if it takes longer than a lifetime to renew?" It was a fun little argument and I don't remember what side I came down on, but the argument doesn't work for coal or oil. We are not getting anymore. Ever, ever, ever. So lets find something that we can grow or renew.
And while I was using the second amendment as a (admittedly bad) example of an arcane Constitution, and I really didn't want the debate (yet) it seems the Supreme Court wants to weigh in.
We spoke briefly about defacto legislation through both the legislative and executive branches of government, but I think the Court, in the last four years, has done a TON of legislating through interpretation. I haven't read Scalia's 64 page ruling for the majority, but I have no idea how they can take the 2nd amendment and interpret it to mean legality for home defense. We may be getting into a 'where the comma falls' argument, but it truly blows my mind when Scalia claims:
"an individual right to bear arms is supported by "the historical narrative" both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted." (that is from the yahoo article.)
Historical narrative from 250 years ago? There were like 45 people in the country back then. Chicago has over 12k people per square mile.
*sigh*
Ok, I'm off topic.
OK, well the petition project. I'm not sure where to start with this one.
First, when you say that there are "people who are far better educated than we about these matters" you seem to imply that you are deferring to them. If that's the case that's fine; but from now on I will expect you to defer to me on all economic matters since I have two business degrees. And, anyway, if you were going to defer, wouldn't you want to defer to the millions of scientists in agreement rather than the few thousand outliers? Consensus doesn't mean unanimity; it just means vast majority.
Next, I actually take issue with the fact that all these people are more educated about these matters. The qualification to sign the petition is simply to hold a degree in a "scientific field" and this includes engineering (where 1/3 of the signatures come from). My brother is an engineer, and he certainly isn't more educated about it than me. I also went to school with a lot of engineers and other science majors, and I know they were not "experts" in climateology at the time, and I don't think they suddenly became so after taking their final exams. I'm not denying that there are indeed 100s of names on the list that have looked at more data than me, but I don't accept the conclusion that all (or even the majority) are more educated than me about it.
Next, a quick google search reveals that this petition has been circulating since 1998. As I stated before, there were a lot of legitimate questions about climate change up until probably 4-5 years ago and I (along with a lot of other people) was a skeptic until about 2005. If offered, I probably would have signed this before then. I can't say conclusively, but the site offers no information on removing your name if you change your mind.
Lastly (and this one's my favorite), the FAQ page is extremely vague about who organized the petition. The only names you can gleam from the entire site are the ones on their peer-reviewed article. That article is attributed to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which is run by Dr. Arthur Robinson (whose name also appears at the top of the article. Want to know where else Dr. Robinson's name appears? A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism. That doesn't by itself make him wrong, but I am extremely skeptical of any scientist who still isn't sure about evolution.
Volcanic eruptions reshape Arctic ocean floor: study
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080625/sc_afp/sciencegeologyoceansvolcano;_ylt=Av6XoFlrFDxfQbiwcRGOdB4DW7oF
Sorry, it won't copy and paste properly.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/
20080625/sc_afp/sciencegeologyocean
svolcano;_ylt=Av6XoFlrFDxfQbiwcRGOdB4DW7oF
OK, well to segue into a slightly different angle, I think the only things we need agreement on are:
1) Climate change is occurring
2) Carbon emissions (whether from man or natural) have a warming effect and are thus contributing.
If we have some kind of consensus on that then it makes sense that we need to 2 things:
1) Strive to reduce carbon emissions
2) Explore ways to remove carbon that are already in the air (i.e. carbon sequestration)
There has been (and continues to be) a lot of positive developments towards sequestration in the past couple years, both from the standpoint of trapping the emissions before they leave the power plant and in chemically altering carbon in the atmosphere that can then be captured. The technology is there; all that really remains is to make it more cost effective and solve some additional problems like long-term storage of the trapped carbon.
Part of the reason why I have spent so much energy arguing that this change is man-made is because that is a crucial part of what I think the eventual solution will be. *IF* we accept that the change is man-made, then it's clear that up till now the Western world is almost entirely responsible for the damage up to this point (or at least the damage up through ~1990). As such, it makes sense that we (meaning the U.S. and western Europe) would supplement India and China in installing scrubbers for their coal plants that will trap the carbon before it is released into the atmosphere. While that is not going to be a popular choice among the paying nations' populace, I really don't see any other practical means to get this accomplished. China and India simply aren't going to act in time on their own.
Whether we do that or not, the best course of action is for the U.S. to lead by example in reducing its own emissions and increasing contributions to the development of alternative energy and furthering sequestration. It will be difficult to take the moral high ground with other nations on this issue until we can demonstrate conclusively that we have taken care of our own house first.
I feel the need to say this with no prompting:
Clean Coal is a myth.
I think you meant "glean"
Yes; yes I did. I must have had Christian Slater on my mind (please tell me that at least one person gets that reference).
of course someone gets that comment. now if i can just get you to make a comment about R.A.D.D. we'd be all set.
I don't remember R.A.D. (it's just one D) well enough to reference it, but I do remember Thrashin' quite well.
Ironclad law of movies: any movie whose title ends with an apostrophe is instantly awesome.
And just FYI, those 2 deletions were mine. For some reason, I couldn't get the Thrashin' hyperlink to work right. I think blogspot is biased against bad 80s skateboarding movies.
i dont believe ive ever seen Thrashin'. But anything with a Twin Peaks alum (Sherilyn Fenn) is OK in my book.
Want to know where else Dr. Robinson's name appears? A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism. That doesn't by itself make him wrong, but I am extremely skeptical of any scientist who still isn't sure about evolution.
Hehehe...he must be a christian scientist...get it?
I know I am delayed in posting about this topic and chances are noone will read this but ya'll hear about the Artic melting completely this summer? Yeah, it could be just apart of Earth's climate cycle, but it still doesn't sound like something we shouldn't be taking seriously. Do we even know what to expect from that?
I was outside smoking just now and a guy walking down the sidewalk stopped and talked to me. He started with "I was just talking to a 16 year old, can I get your opinion on something?"
For some reason I asked how old he thought I was, and he said "Mid 40's." Fucking Really? Damn, I suck.
Anyway, his question was if I thought drilling was good. That was it. I tried to get him to modify his question, but he wouldn't. I said "In ANWR?" And he said "No, anywhere."
So anyway, he gets me into a LONG conversation about oil and global warming, and the right/left argument etc...but mostly about global warming.
I'd like to say THANK YOU for giving me some ammo to throw at this guy, because I felt the need to argue with him about everything, even if I agreed with him. I even trapped him by leading him down the Ice Core Sample train of thought and then trapping him with his own logic.
Anyways, his whole spiel was to get me to look
at this website.
He wasn't happy when I said that the website was biased.
Me: Yeah, I'm sure that website is all fact and has no slant at all.
Him: How can you say that without even looking at it?
Me: It has the word SWINDLE in the url.
It was truly a hilarious conversation, and the website is pretty damn funny too. I stumped him on some stuff. He wasn't happy that he couldn't lecture me on T. Boone Pickens because I already knew a lot about him. He wasn't happy the few times I trapped him on things. And he REALLY wasn't happy when I quoted something from MSNBC. God, he hated that station.
More floggin of a torpid equine:
More information on "The Great Global Warming Swindle":
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/to-greens-i-was-worse-than-a-child-abuser-889524.html
And an interesting anecdote from someone who did research the issue because they wanted to find the truth:
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/TransPlanet/Curious.htm
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