Don't you talk back to me!

[Bosox Believer]

Okay, I had an idea for a thread that you all might find fun. Obviously there is plenty of "heated debate" in this political forum. So, let's make a little game of it. Here are the rules. You may only post news stories, print/video links. You may make NO comment. Links and embedded text only. I would like to ask the mods to delete any post that includes any comment from the poster besides what they have found. I'm not sure how this is going to play out, but let's see if we can have a debate without using our own words. Hopefully there is enough material out there to make your point/counterpoint.

[Bosox Believer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/op...in&oref=slogin

[ari1013]

A couple of things:

1. I think it's a pretty neat idea to have the stories act as the arguments.

2. I think it would be better for us to take a choice cut (maybe a paragraph or so) to quote rather than using an entire article because nobody's going to sift through pages and pages of articles in a thread.

3. If it comes down to Op-Eds, like the one you posted, it's essentially going to boil down to the David Brooks, Bill Kristols, and Michelle Malkins vs. the Shrums, Krugmans, and Kos blogs. Is that really what you want from this?

[Bosox Believer]

A couple of things:

1. I think it's a pretty neat idea to have the stories act as the arguments.
2. I think it would be better for us to take a choice cut (maybe a paragraph or so) to quote rather than using an entire article because nobody's going to sift through pages and pages of articles in a thread.
3. If it comes down to Op-Eds, like the one you posted, it's essentially going to boil down to the David Brooks, Bill Kristols, and Michelle Malkins vs. the Shrums, Krugmans, and Kos blogs. Is that really what you want from this?

1. Thanks!
2. I agree completely
3. I don't want to say what can and can't be used, as long as there is SOME credibility to the source. But you are right that it has the possibility of degenerating into an O'Reilly VS Olbermann feel to it. We'll see I guess.

So, I broke my own rule already. Hopefully that will be the last time, for me at least.

[Doc Fluty]

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/...enough_to.html

Are 32,000 Scientists Enough to Question Global Warming 'Consensus?'
Marc Sheppard
The National Press Club in Washington will today release the names of as many as 32,000 American Scientists who reject not only Kyoto-style greenhouse gas limits, but the very premise of manmade global warming itself.

On Saturday, Lawrence Solomon wrote a great piece in the National Post (h/t Benny Peiser) which begged the question:

"How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming?"


How many, indeed?

Solomon, author of The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too fearful to do so, reminds us that 32,000 scientists have now signed the "Oregon petition," which states that

"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."


How might anyone of clear mind consider these words from these numbers and still accept claims of scientific consensus? Or calls for any -- let alone immediate -- action?

Solomon also points out that these dissenting scientists - over 9,000 of whom hold Ph.Ds -- now outnumber the environmentalists that attended the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio that actually kicked off the global warming craze. And, I might add, far exceed the count of UN IPCC "scientists" whose calamitous predictions lie at the very heart of climate hysteria and what Solomon calls "the Kyoto Protocol's corruption of science."

But will their sheer numbers nullify the "settled science" argument?

Not if the alarmists have any say it won't. Solomon offers a brief history of attempts to bury all such previous accords. First by mocking the limited number of signatures on earlier appeals, and then -- when the original Oregon petition boasted 17,800 signatories -- claiming duplicate or fraudulent names. And even when all names were ultimately verified as authentic (save one actually planted by agents of Greenpeace), the MSM still ignored their consequence.

Sixteen years ago, the Rio event attracted over 7,000 journalists who dutifully spread the word of man's inhumanity to his habitat to an appreciative world. Will today's official announcement of 32,000 men and women of science who, by their physical signature, reject mankind's guilt capture any media attention at all?

Or, for that matter, that of climate experts Gore, Boxer, Lieberman, Warner, Clinton, Obama, or, most despicably -- McCain?

As the science no longer appears to concern any of them -- don't hold your CO2 polluted breath.

[Bosox Believer]

A climate change petition started in 1988 by the tobacco industry's favourite scientist (Federick Seitz), has just been re-released with a reported 31,072 signatures of "scientists"

The Oregon Petition was originally started by Dr. Seitz (formerly the principal adviser to the RJ Reynolds medical research program) and by Arthur B. Robinson, a lapsed biochemist who now operates the one-man Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

by 1989, Bill Hobbs, a senior executive at RJ Reynolds, was telling people that "Dr. Seitz is quite elderly and not sufficiently rational to offer advice." (He was just 78 at the time.)

http://www.desmogblog.com/flawed-ore...on-rises-again

[PHX-SOXFAN]

article from science magazine:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/conten.../306/5702/1686

[ari1013]

I am horrified to find my name on such a list. I have spent the last 20 years arguing the opposite.”

Dr. David Sugden. Professor of Geography, University of Edinburgh

I have NO doubts ..the recent changes in global climate ARE man-induced. I insist that you immediately remove my name from this list since I did not give you permission to put it there.”

Dr. Gregory Cutter, Professor, Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Old Dominion University

I don’t believe any of my work can be used to support any of the statements listed in the article.”

Dr. Robert Whittaker, Professor of Biogeography, University of Oxford

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com...-24-hours/1117

Oops!

[yaowowrocket11]

Furthermore, those same records show that the Arctic warmed twice as fast between 1917 and 1937 as it has in the past 20 years. After 1940, the Arctic saw a big cool-down and climatologists noted sea ice expanding in the northern Atlantic. Christy argues that what he calls the Great Climate Shift occurred in the late 1970s and caused another sudden warming in the Arctic. Since the late 1970s there has not been much additional warming in the region at all. In fact, on page 23, the Arctic Council Assessment offers very similar data for Arctic temperature trends from 60 degrees north latitude—the area that includes most of Alaska and essentially all of Greenland, most of Norway and Sweden, and the bulk of Russia.

The Arctic Council report states that satellite measurements find the area over which ice melts in the summer in Greenland increased 16 percent between 1979 and 2002. Should the ice cap in Greenland completely melt away, sea levels would rise seven meters or so, inundating Florida, New York City, London, and Bangladesh. Not an immediate worry, since this process even with extreme warming would take centuries.

- http://www.reason.com/news/show/34939.html -

[Bosox Believer]

The ancient frozen dome cloaking Greenland is so vast that pilots have crashed into what they thought was a cloud bank spanning the horizon. Flying over it, you can scarcely imagine that this ice could erode fast enough to dangerously raise sea levels any time soon.

Along the flanks in spring and summer, however, the picture is very different. For a lengthening string of warm years, a lacework of blue lakes and rivulets of meltwater have been spreading ever higher on the ice cap. The melting surface darkens, absorbing up to four times as much energy from the sun as unmelted snow, which reflects sunlight. Natural drainpipes called moulins carry water from the surface into the depths, in some places reaching bedrock. The process slightly, but measurably, lubricates and accelerates the grinding passage of ice toward the sea.

Most important, many glaciologists say, is the breakup of huge semisubmerged clots of ice where some large Greenland glaciers, particularly along the west coast, squeeze through fjords as they meet the warming ocean. As these passages have cleared, this has sharply accelerated the flow of many of these creeping, corrugated, frozen rivers.

All of these changes have many glaciologists “a little nervous these days — shell-shocked,” said Ted Scambos, the lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., and a veteran of both Greenland and Antarctic studies.

Some fear that the rise in seas in a warming world could be much greater than the upper estimate of about two feet in this century made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year. (Seas rose less than a foot in the 20th century.) The panel’s assessment did not include factors known to contribute to ice flows but not understood well enough to estimate with confidence. All the panel could say was, “Larger values cannot be excluded.”

“What is at stake is the stability we have always taken for granted” both for coasts and climate itself, said Jason E. Box, an associate professor of geography at Ohio State University. Dr. Box presented fresh findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting last month showing that several Greenland glaciers accelerated sharply in direct response to warming, both in a warm spell starting in the 1920s and now.

Eric Rignot, a longtime student of ice sheets at both poles for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said he hoped the public and policymakers did not interpret uncertainty in the 21st-century forecast as reason for complacency on the need to limit risks by cutting emissions.

Dr. Rignot recently proposed that unabated warming could result in three feet of global sea rise just from water flowing off Greenland, three feet from Antarctica and 18 inches as the remaining alpine glaciers shrivel away.

This is similar to projections by the most prominent NASA climate scientist, James E. Hansen, but more than twice the three-foot rise that many glaciologists seem to agree on as an outer bound for what is possible by the end of the century.

“It is too early to reassure that all will stabilize, and similarly there is no way to predict a catastrophic collapse,” Dr. Rignot said. “But things are definitely far more serious than anyone would have thought five years ago.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/sc...ries/Greenland

[Bosox Believer]

And then there are the more tangible costs. The war has resulted in over 4,000 U.S. combat deaths, four times as many grievously wounded, and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths. Over 2 million Iraqis have fled the country and 2 million more have been displaced within the country. The price tag in dollars has also been staggering. In the last five years, the United States has spent close to $1 trillion on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. That is enough money to rebuild every school, bridge and road in America, create universal health care and fund several Manhattan Projects in alternative energy. Whatever benefits the invasion of Iraq might produce, it cannot justify these expenditures in lives and treasure.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/142642

[DenButsu]

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=jSH6ofHbeUw

(caution: adult language)

[PHX-SOXFAN]

Arctic sea ice could break apart completely at the North Pole this year, allowing ships to sail over the normally frozen top of the world.

The potential landmark thaw - the first time in human history the pole would be ice-free - is a stark sign of global warming,

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/...freethissummer

[Bosox Believer]

U.S. exports to Iran grew more than tenfold during President Bush's years in office even as he accused it of nuclear ambitions and sponsoring terrorists.

The United States sent Iran $546 million in goods from 2001 through last year, government figures show. It exported roughly $146 million worth last year, compared with $8.3 million in 2001, Bush's first year in office. Even adjusted for inflation, that is more than a tenfold increase.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/08/ira....ap/index.html

JOHN McCain, who once sang in jest about bombing Iran, has reacted to a report of rising US cigarette exports to the Islamic republic by saying it may be "a way of killing 'em".

While Senator McCain waited for a cheese steak at Pittsburgh restaurant Primanti Brothers, famous for its thick sandwiches piled high not only with meat but french fries, a reporter on Tuesday asked him to comment on the report that US exports to Iran had increased tenfold in the past seven years — with cigarettes ranking as the top export.

"Maybe that's a way of killing 'em," Senator McCain said. His wife, Cindy, sitting next to him, poked him in the back, and he added: "I meant that as a joke, as a person who hasn't had a cigarette in 28 years."

http://www.theage.com.au/world/mccai...0709-3ck2.html

[Bosox Believer]

http://www.270towin.com/simulation/