>> ^maestro156:

Very cleverly written propaganda.
What he leaves out, of course, is that the bill doesn't overturn "pollution". It overturns the definition of carbon dioxide and water vapor as pollution.


At higher amounts, carbon dioxide becomes a contaminant which upsets the balance of the ecosystem. This is pollution. yes, it is naturally found in the ecosystem. But so are any other number of molecular structures composed of different elements.
It is, however, only one of the by-products of burning millions of years worth of jurassic carbon deposits in a very short time. We are introducing high amounts of substances from a by-gone age and ecosystem into the atmosphere that our CURRENT ecosystem must now adjust to in order to find balance and stability. Just as the human body seeks homeostasis with it's environment....so does the ecosystem. The planet's balance and stability however comes at our expense, as well as the expense of all other species of plant and animal life.

some people "believe" in global climate change. some people believe in god-man in the sky too. but then there is probability and reality. and in the end, it doesn't matter what you believe.

Very cleverly written propaganda.

What he leaves out, of course, is that the bill doesn't overturn "pollution". It overturns the definition of carbon dioxide and water vapor as pollution.

Great video.

The IBM ad at the end claims US traffic creates 45% of the world's air pollution. I think a congestion tax makes economic sense, but that stat sounds like nonsense.

The entire US, including not just automobile transportion but also industry, generates 21% of the world's carbon dioxide,1 which is less than China. None of the most polluted cities are in the US.

That dog won't hunt, monsignor.

In reply to this comment by urstoopid:
Typical liberal idiocy. They keep screaming "Look at the facts! Look at the ice! Look at the polar bears!" Yet they totally ignore the REAL FACTS. The "facts" are right there in the emails you f*$#ing idiots! THEY ARE ADMITTING TO LYING AND OMITTING DATA!!!! How stupid do you have to be??? Only complete dumba$$es such as yourselves can be told, the earth is going through a 10 year cooling period due to global warming!!! Only idiots and hypocrites can see all these "climatologists" going to Copenhagen in all their private jets and limos and still believe the earth is in danger! If you honestly believe carbon dioxide is the problem, go hold your breath as long as you can, or stop breathing!

In summation, you're a complete idiot and a jack@$$!

Why would I watch a television show that takes a professor that's a marine and atmospheric scientist, and an expert in processes that affect atmospheric carbon dioxide and oxygen concentrations, and puts him in a debate with a political "communications director".

Rule of thumb: When one side of a debate is the consensus of knowledgeable people in the field, and the other side of the debate is... something else... it's pretty easy to decide who to trust.

I want to make sure I understand. The polar ice caps are melting, the sea level is rising, permafrost is melting in effect releasing more carbon dioxide, methane is being released from fresh water bodies all over the world, species are losing habitat, the food web is unraveling, biota is being effected, 50 years of research from tens of thousands of scientists all points to one thing. But never mind that. It's all a corporate conspiracy.

A politician talking about science has about as much validity as a homeless man touting about the apocalypse. I urge anyone that finds truth in this man's words to please, for the love of humanity, kill yourself.

But the thing about science is that you are supposed to give out information willy-nilly. A central ideal of the scientific method and scientific experimentation is repeatability. You make a hypothesis, design a controlled experiment to test that hypothesis, and publish in an extremely open way the steps and procedure of those experiments so that other people can repeat what you've done, perform the same tests and verify your results for themselves.

So much of global warming science comes from computer climate models. The problem with modeling something as complex as climate with computers is that it is nearly impossible to understand the whole system well enough that you can isolate one experimental variable to vary and compare to a control group. As time goes on, we keep learning about more and more variable inputs to the whole system of climate. Carbon Dioxide, Methane, and other gases create a greenhouse effect. The sun has a periodic sunspot cycle and other random (as near as we can figure) fluctuations.

Climate Science is a good thing, because we will gradually learn to understand more and more of those contributing variables. But before anything radical is done in reaction to computer models, those models have to be proven viable. One way that can be done is to feed old, recorded data into the model and see if it can accurately "predict" the past.

For that to be done, the system that the computer models use must be fully disclosed, open, and accepted.

Johannes Kepler came up with some scientific, mathematical equations to describe the physics of how bodies in space interact with gravitational pull. By applying those equations, we've sent men into space and to the moon, maintained orbits of satellites, and done all sorts of fantastically useful things. Until climate science can take data from 2 decades ago and accurately describe what happened 1 decade ago, I think it makes sense to be at least a little skeptical in our reactions to what those models say will happen 10-100 years from now.

2+2=Allah

The process by which carbohydrates are synthesized from carbon dioxide and water, using sunlight, is called Allah.

E=mcAllah

The number of moles in a molecule is Allah.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

It's CO2. O as in Oxygen. It's Carbon diOxide.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'carbon dioxide, atmosphere, global warming, polar ice cap' to 'carbon dioxide, atmosphere, global warming, polar ice cap, bill mckibben' - edited by fissionchips

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I've never heard that carbon dioxide is a harmless gas. I never heard Michelle Bachman say it. You know where I heard it? On your show Keith Olbermann! Keith Olbermann, WHY DO YOU HATE EARTH?!

Yeah, and the voices are stupid.

>> ^KnivesOut:
WP your argument is based entirely on the preconception that humans have to continue to use at least as much if not more energy that we currently do.
With the increasing cost of energy, the demand for it will be reduced. Economics 101.


The global population is not decreasing, it's growing exponentially. Add to that the fact that developing countries like China and India have done a u-turn and are now more capitalist than we are. That is enabling more of them to outbid us for resources to power their new cars and homes and appliances, we didn't have to compete with that before. There is a global shift of capital happening from the deeply indebted and welfarist west to booming capitalist countries in Asia. If you tax fossil fuels here, Asia will be happy to take them off our luddite hands. You cannot artificially induce a transition to technologies that are hopelessly inefficient and expensive, you will be kicking people out of their cars, homes, off their computers.

70% of our oil is imported and we haven't built a nuclear power plant in decades to prepare for a transition to electric cars. Even if it were possible to snap our fingers and make every car and tanker electric, our electric grid is completely incapable of that load, we're getting blackouts in California already. How are we going to keep the cost of transportation and products as cheap as it is now without a massive, massive amount of nuclear power?

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ahoy! I replied to this note, and attempted to maintain civility. cheers!

In reply to this comment by BansheeX:
Forget about stupidity on both sides, you people always pick a punching bag who can't defend their position to make your own dumb viewpoint seem like the right one.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/co2_fairytales_in_global_warmi.html

CO2 is a fundamental building block of life, and current levels are NOWHERE NEAR where they have been in the past. Moreover, the correlation of CO2 and Earth temperature is deeply flawed. It's far more likely that temperatures rise and fall in the short term as a result of solar cycles or some other phenomena, and that increased CO2 levels are a corresponding RESULT of temperature change rather than the cause. That's what gives the idiots that nice correlating graph where they can claim the opposite. A more detailed look at ice core graphs show us that temperature changes occur BEFORE changes in CO2 levels. The global warming crowd has it completely reversed that CO2 is driving temperature.

Moreover, the last century's warming trend has been a mere .8 celsius, well within natural expectations given the last 1000 years. I suppose the vikings were also somehow responsible for the even larger climactic swing in temperature known as the Little Ice Age from 1000 to 1200 AD? From 1940 to 1970, there was a cooling trend which led to a global cooling scare. We were all supposed to be frozen in ice by now.

The idea that mankind is capable of affecting earth's temperature is just laughable. If it was even possible to have globally banned coal and oil the last 200 years, the only thing you'd have accomplished is a complete eradication of 200 years of human progress towards cleaner, more efficient technologies like nuclear (which you luddites have also blocked while countries like China and France kick our freaking asses).

http://www.dailytech.com/Chinas+Nuclear+Power+Efforts+Surge+Ahead/article14911.htm

So what exactly are we supposed to do? We can't do nuclear because you boneheads don't want to recycle or store the voluminously small captured waste, you'd rather burn your fuel and disperse it into the atmosphere than put something in a single mountain for a thousand years until we jettison it into the sun. You herald wind power, which takes massive amounts of steel, land, and maintenance for relatively little power output. You'd have to cover an area the size of Montana with windmills just to meet TODAY'S domestic power demands. That's how bloody inefficient it is relative to nuclear, and unless you magically discover a magical material like steel that is way cheaper and 1% as heavy, it's going to hit a wall pretty soon. Wind is fine for the wind belt and rural areas in Iowa, solar is fine for the desert in Arizona. But to say that wind and solar can themselves provide even a majority of our national need for cheap power is pure insanity. It's pure insanity, and anyone who's looked at the numbers knows it.