Tag Archives: Climate Change

The Woolsey’s track record

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James Woolsey and wife, Sue, are big players in the Colorado Springs area. Susan Woolsey makes policies over at Colorado College, where she sits on the Board of Regents and James is a bigwig neocon player nationally, where his position as ex CIA head gives him some big name power and recognition.

So what exactly is the Woolsey track record like? See James Woolsey: Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind for some idea of what the patriarch is really like. Our last encounter with him was where he was trying to spread the idea in the local area that bio-fuels was an ecological dream that our government should be pushing night and day, (he has companies pushing just that, too.) He was given a forum at the campus chapel by his wife over at Colorado College to spout what the Woolsey’s would like to see become a big family money maker…. biofuels… and specifically government promotion of them.

The Woolseys are a local group of aristocracy that operates with the complicity of the local press in keeping their activities and backgrounds well hidden from the general public. You won’t see either The Independent or The Gazette giving out much info about this family, but rather they will print pieces of parallel propaganda in support of their neocon agendas. Example in point was how The Indy only printed a puffy happy piece about Bio Fuels Evolving priorities Ex-CIA head James Woolsey feels conservation helps battle terror as well as climate change when they interviewed James Woolsey for his bio fuels promotion tour.

Is The Independent scared of the guy and intimidated by him? Well, they have reason to feel that way since he is a thug who wields quite a lot of power nationally and locally. It is much easier to play along with the Woolsey family than to cross them.

Similarly, with wife Susan running the show over at Colorado College, it is much easier to play along with the idea that the local privileged college for elites is a bastion of liberalism, though it is not even close to being that. KRCC, the local radio station run by Colorado College, also helps promote that desired liberal image though its programming in actuality is quite conservative, the program ‘Democracy Now’ being the exception that proves the rule. The rest of the programming is quite white bread though.

Yes, we have close encounters of ‘the Fourth Kind’ in Colorado Springs with the Woolsey family. This is another group of bigwig aristocracy that pushes the Christian Right Wing agenda here combined with constantly pushing ‘defense contract’ militarism. They help set some of the political agendas at Colorado College, The city hall, The Independent, and The Gazette in a way that goes quite under noticed and never commented on.

We’ll try to keep an eye on them in the days ahead, since Colorado no longer needs agendas being set by the likes of the Woolseys and Coors families.

Climate Change -who benefits?

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Are “Climate Change” and “Global Warming” a rather convenient way for the large investment companies (now that they’re all jumping on the bandwagon) to step forward, in lock step with the Congress, and find the ways in which they can become the “players” in the unfolding “crisis” and have a new tax that will, of course as always, be a burden most on those who can least afford it?

Or are they really concerned about the planet? Was Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” more of an investment talk aimed at these owners of capital getting in on a carbon tax and trading scheme, rather than a real debate that gave time to the dissenting scientific view? And, is the dogma now that CO2 and greenhouse effect are really driving the race toward ownership of emerging large alternative energy companies in which the corporations will likely win? Calling CO2 a pollutant is deception. It is what trees and plants thrive on.

Ethanol has now become the new “savior” in our effort of curbing the import of foreign oil. But ethanol is net-energy. That is, it takes more energy to create it than it gives back, besides the agricultural mess it will lead us to. How is it in past earth warming cycles, man’s absence was a causation? Seemingly impossible. Is the Solar cycle part of a natural global warming process? Why aren’t we moving instead to form citizen owned solar and wind utilities that will help the vast majority to utilize these energies without the huge up front costs usually associated? Or unless implemented immediately and widely, would it be all for naught as the worlds energy needs will never be affected by alternative energies? In other words, how do you replace the 85 million barrels of oil a day the planet uses? Not to mention the tons of coal and millions of cubic feet of natural gas?

Gore’s 7 good foot soldiers steps to reduce Co2 “pollution” is almost Hitlarian. Don’t think, just do what I say …from a spineless politician who wouldn’t stand up (and told others not to) for an investigation into the 2000 stolen election.

Capitalism will overtake any real discussion of problems we face and destroy dissenters who offer up real solutions to energy use that are owned by the populace at large. And once they’ve taxed us for carbon they will figure out a way to tax the sun or wind for those who take advantage of it for their homes. Yes, reduce your use of oil, gas, coal, etc… but beware who really benefits from this mostly un-debated scare of global warming.

What do we get for behaving as they want us to? A cleaner world? But no monetary gain for us? If our government was really serious about this the tax incentives would come back as in the 70’s and much bigger this time. And in all states. But that would hurt the oil-energy companies.

Some interesting articles and comments for your consideration:

Denial
By Frank Furedi, Spiked Online

“The charge of denial has become a secular form of blasphemy … The heretic is condemned because he has dared to question an authority that must never be questioned. Here, ‘overwhelming evidence’ serves as the equivalent of revealed religious truth, and those who question ‘scientists of unquestioned reputation’ — that is, the new priestly caste — are guilty of blasphemy … ‘Denial’ has become part of a secular inquisition that stigmatizes free thinking.”

Preaching the Climate Catechism
By Lorne Gunter, National Post

“Since 2003, the upper layer of the Atlantic has lost 25% of the extra heat it had built up in the past three decades…The broad consensus among solar scientists is that the Earth’s warming is almost entirely explicable by increased solar activity that began about 100 years ago, and which will end around 2020…But these inconvenient truths would be bad for the cause…”

Lehman Brothers contemplate and study profitability of Climate Change

Austrailian carbon credit purchase. Who owns the wind farm in China? Not the citizens.

Is carbon tax a shelter for the rich?

John Howard- Oz’s political dinosaur dies due to Global Warming

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John Howard, Australia’s political dinosaur, is finally dead due to the effects of Global Warming. He lost the election for Australian Prime Minister, and the reason why is that…

like our own local idiots at The Gazette editorial pages he was a political dinosaur who pooh-poohed Global Warming as being of any real concern to him. But it killed him in the end.

In the land most effected by the Ozone Hole and Coral Reef Destruction, drought, and extinction of wildlife, John Howard insisted on mouthing off the same old prescriptions for yet more disaster. Plus, he was a political whore in bed with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfield.

In the end though, Global Warming finally caught up with the dumb bastard. See John Howard Asleep on Climate Change, where Australian Labor nails him on the issue.

Here is Howard’s mistaken belief… Climate not main challenge: PM. As we can see from the election results, this dinosaur was absolutely mistaken.

Like with the Gazette editorial staff, some political Dodo Birds will either have to evolve or just go extinct. In Oz, Howard is now dead. In Colorado Springs, the paper is just less read.

Mincing Words with Nature’s Matriarch

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I learned about Sudden Wetland Dieback yesterday. What’s that? The salt marshlands of America’s east coast are turning inexplicably to muddy wastelands and scientists have developed a euphemism for the occasion.
Not nice to fool Mother NatureThe nomenclature reminds me of another unnatural phenomena that’s been given its own death form: Coral Bleaching. That describes coral reefs which have suddenly expired white as ghosts. As if we’d need to call the piles of bones in the elephant graveyard, Elephant Bleaching.

I understand that scientist want to name what they are seeking to study, but doesn’t a name confer the unfortunate suggestion of a natural occurrence?

It also adds a step, is seems to me at least psychologically, between the effect and the cause. The poor Indonesians in 2004 didn’t suffer a Rapid Oft-Fatal High Water Relocation. It was a Tsunami. Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance wasn’t due to Cement Negative Buoyancy Cankles. It was the mob. Do we need to study the criminal element’s access to poured concrete, or do we need to go after who done it?

The immediate agent of the dieback may be dust from Africa, just as an impassive Pacific may be blamed on an intensified gulf stream (belittled with the appellation El Nino), but wherefore comes this unprecedented toxicity of the elements? We all know. It’s not nice to fool mother nature.

I’d like to know what specifically is meant by dieback? Perhaps those subversive academics are allowing after all for the inclusion of the principle of equal and opposite reaction: blow-back.

We know what’s behind wetland dieback, coral dieback and El Nino blowback, it’s man’s unnatural pollution. It’s our excess carbon emissions and then some, which are heating and killing the globe. There’s already a neat term, sufficiently unnatural sounding: Global Warming. Corporate polluter think-tanks have already re-termed the problem Climate Change to introduce an ambiguity of inherent badness. Change can be good. Only Luddites fear change. The fittest survive change.

The corporate media very cleverly reframed the recent Enviro-palooza concert event as A Climate In Crisis. Sound the alarm there’s a crisis! But what to do, what to do?! The Global Warming warning was too simple. When bath water becomes too warm, for example, we know what to do: shut off the hot water.

Do we need to rename extinction as Pervasive Survival-Instinct Reversal? We could, if we are seeking to ameliorate the intermediate effectiveness of the death blow. Or we could find out who took out the contract on our murder and prevent it.

To belabor mixed metaphors, put an ambulance at the base of the cliff to address Near-Instant Altitude Deceleration Injury, or go to the mountain and curb Dead Man’s Curve.

The news

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I got my morning dose of Yahoo already, amazing seeing as how it’s after noon already.
   Senate panel votes to reject Bush war plan
   Olmert calls for Israel president to resign
   Bush shifts to domestic issues with energy pitch
   Experts warn climate change may fan terrorism

The news links above are Congress passed a non binding resolution of non support for the New and Improved stay the course war plan.
OK but they still aren’t on to pulling out, just not the surge. I guess they think baby steps are all they can do.

The President cleverly diverts attention away from his War. The reporter for AP (special correspondent) diverts attention cleverly from the clever and cunning plan to divert our attention from the War. This guy is a spin master from the darkest pits of Hell.

The Israeli Knesset demands that the Israeli president step down.
Not on the charges from the ongoing invasion of Gaza and Lebanon, mind you, but on a personal rape charge. And if I got my Israeli parliamentary structure down correctly, the Israeli president doesn’t have as much power as the Military.

John Kerry, in a big surprise move, decided not to take up the standard he dropped big time in November ’04. I really ain’t interested in hearing his spin on why he dropped the ball then nor why we should mourn for him graciously declining to bear the standard for us in ’08.

And a coalition of British scientists paired with a coalition of British Security Experts re-iterated the apparently not well enough documented idea that massive poverty caused by global warming might lead to an increase in international violence.

Now that I ain’t gonna get snotty about. It needs to be said again and again.

Tree rings for skeptics of science

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dead treeWhenever there is talk about the age of mankind, or the solar system, or the universe, a friend of mine delights in adding, “IN THEORY.” If the calculations denote an earthly past beyond the scale of a Creationist’s 7,000 year model, my friend considers it theoretical.

Someone might be addressing dinosaurs or geology or the Big Bang, speaking in terms of MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO, and my friend will chime “in theory!”

She’ll turn to me and justify her footnote by asking “how do they know?”

In truth, I don’t know. I don’t understand carbon dating or astronomy or quantum physics. I don’t disbelieve, I just can’t explain. I give her argument the credit of the electron-vs.-electron-microscope paradox. How can we know what an electron looks like if we can only see it with an electron microscope, which we invented with the anticipation of knowing how to look at an electron? Something like that. Yes, scientists tend to get the results they anticipate.

We attended Al Gore’s AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH the other day, about Global Warming, and researchers were charting climate changes by analyzing core samples taken from polar ice. We are able to sample ice which dates back 800,000 years apparently.

“In theory” my companion added.

“Apparently” I concurred, having no idea how ice was dated/carbon-dated.

Later in the program a scientist likened the layers of ice to the rings of a tree trunk. You can see the seasons of passing years in the grain of the wood. You can see when there might have been a forest fire, or years when the weather might have been different.

Individual layers of ice in the core samples represented similar changes in the environment. The composition of the ice trapped whatever mixture of gases comprised each year’s atmosphere. You can see each year’s climate as layers of ice formed over the last.

Then I remembered visiting Muir Woods in California and marveling at a cross-section of a tree trunk upon which scholars had marked various milestones in history. Columbus, the Battle of Hastings, the year 0 A.D., et al. Some living Grand Sequoias are as old as 3,000 years.

I can understand tree rings, and I can understand ice layers. It’s science we can see with our own eyes. Now I know where I can see 800,000 years of it. If my Christian friend wants to presuppose that God created the polar ice caps with 793,000 years of climate history already embedded in the ice, fair enough. But allow scientists the latitude to seek the lessons the Earth might have to teach us from its most distant “past.” Certainly God intended us to perceive it that way.

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The crux of this issue is of course the denial of global warming. There’s a strange correlation between those who refute man’s influence on the climate, and religion, excuse me, anti-science. If they’re end-timer Christians who are really just rooting for the end of the world, let them admit it and step out of the way. If they’re average Christians with a sane sense of responsibility to their fellow beings, they are being misled by preachers who teach them to doubt scientific research.

living treeScience begat technology begat industry (begat pollution and population) which begat this mess. Human knowledge may be a Pandora’s Box, but we are inside the box ourselves, not at its lid. We have to use scientific tools to deliver us from global catastrophe. No one is saying worship it, just listen to it.

Unsustainable argument making

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I attended Colorado College’s symposium about the expected effects of climate change upon the Rocky Mountain region. There was less discussion about adapting to the certain change than there was about hoping still to prevent it.

By focusing on trying to undo global warming, the discussion had to quantify the changes and of course explain their causes. This opened up the door to arguing the causal links, leading to the idea that perhaps we need do nothing at all.

I don’t know but I think I expected to see live scientists deny global warming. What scentist is going to deny global warming? Should be a good show! What I learned was how they deny it. It’s boring but instructive.

Our panel consisted of a student researcher who presented a study of current and forecasted climate change, a representative of the ski industry to present their plans and efforts, and two professors to explain the science. The professors were a father son team from UNC and USC respectively. While they might smilingly present themselves as advocates of environmental issues, I’d call them spoilers.

Elder Roger Pielke went into the technical gobbledegook concluding… nothing. Probably the scientific community needs those guys, but don’t put him on a public panel. His part: spirited, unquestionably qualified, perhaps even well meaning, obfuscation.

His son Robert Pielke explained the need for more unbiased research. Too many scientists have spoken out in alarm about global warming, thus they are biased and their research cannot be trusted. We’ll need more unalarmed scientists to weigh in before we can conclude anything. Follow that logic? This was Pielke’s lesson: always question the motive of a researcher.

Great lesson, in reverse! Someone seeking to deny the warming, underwritten usually by big oil, coal, and general industrial interests, that person’s research might be wise to scrutinize. What pray tell might be the ulterior motives of the 70% of scientists who are currently expressing their alarm about global warming?

Junior Pielke’s approach is the same argument we hear from the unIntelligent Design proponents. Question the motives. Scientists are biased against a deity apparently and therefore evolution findings cannot be trusted. It’s good advice to question the motives. What are the creationists’ motives? To further our understanding of the physical world or to bolster increasingly fallable-looking poppycrock?

Don’t we hear that argument everywhere? Never mind Bush’s motives for slaughtering now up to 250, 000 Iraqi civilians, question the protestor’s motives, no doubt they do not support the troops!

The 250, 000 casualty figure comes from the British medical journal The Lancet, previously unquestioned when they presented their estimates of civilian casualties in the Balkans and Africa. Question their motives. The Lancet figure, estimated to be lower than the probable casualty count, came from American, English and Iraqi doctors. No doubt their ulterior motive is to save lives.