Dang, I guess Al Gore was right

Peer-review literature is specificallt designed AGAINST the echo chamber effect, winger. If there is not a single article arguing a point of view in the peer-reviewed literature, the odds are overwhelming that the point of view is incorrect. And as people argue time and time again, I can't conclusively prove that continents move, but they do.

And Lomborg, as you undoubtedly know, is a statistician, not an environmentalist, and has had his own problems with people who actually know what they're talking about.

 

MW and I agree wholly and totally re Kyoto. No way can US sign the thing, in its present form.

But this remains a problem where we cannot afford to be wrong, no matter how the WSJ and
Forbes try to spin it, in their absurd fashion.

 

You know, another serious problem is people spitting in the ocean. Peer-reviewed journals state that if people keep spitting in the oceans, the water level will rise to the point that New York is under water.

We must act now to ban humans spitting in our oceans!!!!! If we don't, it may be too late!

 

One thing you don't often hear discussed is the simple effect of population growth. Forget the big bad U.S. and its greedy, happily polluting people for a moment. In the last 100 years, there's been what? Roughly two billion people added to the world's population? That's a lot of CO2 added to the air just from them breathing every second of the day, before they even hop in a car or go to work at a factory. Think that might have something to do with higher CO2 levels and temperatures?

 

This sort of ... miscalibration, shall we say, of the local cable weather isn't that uncommon, I guess ... All Things Considered (ugh, my wife made me listen) had a report about a week ago about a California forecast that called for it to be, as I recall, 5,000 degrees below with a wind chill of 15,000 below.

Impossible, due to the laws of thermodynamics, of course, but good for a chuckle.

 

For an alien, you're pretty cool.

 

I'm old enough to think "Uncle Martin" when I think of aliens, not, well, "Aliens."

 

I know you're being facetious and blindly dismissive, but I nonetheless feel compelled to say that isn't even close to the truth. The world's entire population could occupy Texas with a density lower than New York City. As such, you could dump every living human in the ocean and barely make a ripple, nevermind their saliva. The volume of glacial and polar ice melt is exponentially greater.

So expectorate to your heart's content.

 

Is anyone here old enough to remember all the gloom and doom stories in the mid-70s when the "leading" scientists of the day were warning us about global COOLING? The first item on the list of things we had to do to prevent this event that would wipe out civilization as we knew it was:

MELT THE POLAR ICE CAPS.

So had we listened to those august gentlemen back then, under the current theory that melting ice caps at the poles are a bad thing in 2007, we'd have been royally screwed.
I'm betting in 2037 we'll be looking back at those wacko scientists and their crazy "global warming" nonsense the same way we look back at the 1975 global cooling crowd today.

 

I don't recall exactly, but one of Olbermann's "Worst persons in the World" last night was a guy who claimed there's a "Northeast bias" to the global-warming phenomenon, as most of the northeast is enjoying its mildest winter in at least half a century, while the midwest is being socked with snow. Talk about a dumbass.

I am a New Yorker who worked on a rag in central Kansas in the early 90s, and I recall the winter of '92, with massive blizzards and unseasonably cold Canadian air poring over the region, which in effect, caused flooding the following spring/summer. I also recall the weather back home in the northeast being mild and rainy, and being envious.

I took a P/T job at a local weather observatory in Kansas (my $190/week salary really wasn't cutting it) and became friends with a career meteorologist who explained this happens as a result of a 'La Nina,' which really is the opposite of an 'El Nino.' Though he also said it was a relatively weak La Nina.

The current one that's happening seems relatively strong. I am hoping not, as I saw firsthand the damaging effects of an unusually wet winter/spring in the region. A similar pattern would devastate the region and could cause flooding that rivals Katrina.

Info here:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2572.htm

 

I hope you're right, but I wouldn't ignore evidence just because people were wrong before. The once wrong, always wrong defense doesn't hold much water, pardon the pun.

 

Of course, this kind of environmental panic has been consistently wrong -- without one instance of being right -- for at least 200 years, since Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population. It's the Erlich-Simon wager a couple decades ago all over again.