Machinesworking wrote:
How about voting for people who actually seem to stand by their beliefs and are capable of realizing when they're wrong? Like Nader on the left or Ron Paul on the right? At least you have the knowledge that you tried then.
That's about all you can do, unless you want to try an end-run around the system by revolution or by manipulating the masses through the media.
Machinesworking wrote: Also, again, I think it's not really logical to call anything Obama's doing right or wrong until we see the results. He's going to do it anyway, might as well see how it plays out. I can as we all seem to be abel to, say that I think it's a band aid on a shotgun hole, but it's not going to change the fact that they're going to buy a lot of band aids.
^^^^^^
We need a shrug emoticon for political threads.
Well, I have to disagree with that philosophy. You
can use past results of a course action to determine whether to go ahead with the same course of action in the present. I learned not to stick my fingers in an electrical outlet. The question is whether or not our government is smart enough to avoid sticking our fingers into the electrical outlet again. Have they learned from the past? Has any stimulus package passed thus far actually stimulated the economy? Rhetorical questions...
But I agree that a shrug emoticon would be useful for those times when you want to indicate "yeah, well, what can you do? The system is broken and we're all screwed."
Machinesworking wrote:Again, with the Al gore quote up there, I realize it's a joke, but if it at all seems like logic to you, then realize that Global Warming was/is a misleading term, it's more like "global raise the temperature a few degrees over all which sends the whole earths climate into crazy weather patterns and eventually destroys the coast lines". Doesn't fit into a sound bite though.
The question is not whether global warming (and cooling) exists. The phenomenon of global temperature variations throughout the Earth's history has pretty much been accepted by all scientists in climatology. The question is whether global warming is anthropogenic. There is by no means a consensus that this is fact.
To the contrary, there is significant evidence that we're currently in a global cooling period:
"Global warming (i.e, the warming since 1977) is over. The minute increase of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere (0.008%) was not the cause of the warming—it was a continuation of natural cycles that occurred over the past 500 years.
The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling, perhaps much deeper than the global cooling from about 1945 to 1977. Just how much cooler the global climate will be during this cool cycle is uncertain. Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely."
That's from the article found here:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=10783
The section of the article titled "PREDICTIONS BASED ON PAST CLIMATE PATTERNS" is interesting, and it puts things into perspective. The graph in that section shows huge variations in Earth's temperature from 15,000 to 10,000 years ago. The recent global warming is a tiny blip at the end of the time scale.
The point I'm making here is that there is nowhere close to a scientific consensus that global warming is anthropogenic in nature. We're being conned.
Call me cynical, but I think that whenever there is a push by governments to tax their citizenry based on "scientific evidence", it behooves us to look carefully at the source of funding for the scientific studies cited. A lot of these scientific groups get their funding from the government. As you say, Tone Deft, things that make you go hmmmmmm...
From the page at
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Kyoto_Count_Up.htm, a site which debunks junk science, the Kyoto Protocol has cost the world about $615.5 Billion so far, for a theoretical temperature decrease by 2050 of 0.0063 degrees C. This is laughable. But the joke is on us and our wallets.
Data can be manipulated to support one's point of view. As I believe Al Gore has done with his movie "An Inconvenient Truth". The movie does turn out to be inconvenient to global warming alarmists:
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm
From the article:
"Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"
My take on all this? Hold on to your wallets; we're getting screwed by our governments.
