Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 12/19/08 1:08 pm:
“You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant,” Myers said. “Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big – I think we’re going to die from a lack of fresh water or we’re going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure.”



Myers is the second CNN meteorologist to challenge the global warming conventions common in the media. He also said trying to determine patterns occurring in the climate would be difficult based on such a short span.



“But this is like, you know you said – in your career – my career has been 22 years long,” Myers said. “That’s a good career in TV, but talking about climate – it’s like having a car for three days and saying, ‘This is a great car.’ Well, yeah – it was for three days, but maybe in days five, six and seven it won’t be so good. And that’s what we’re doing here.”



“We have 100 years worth of data, not millions of years that the world’s been around,” Myers continued.



Dr. Jay Lehr, an expert on environmental policy, told “Lou Dobbs Tonight” viewers you can detect subtle patterns over recorded history, but that dates back to the 13th Century.



“If we go back really, in recorded human history, in the 13th Century, we were probably 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than we are now and it was a very prosperous time for mankind,” Lehr said. “If go back to the Revolutionary War 300 years ago, it was very, very cold. We’ve been warming out of that cold spell from the Revolutionary War period and now we’re back into a cooling cycle.”



Lehr suggested the earth is presently entering a cooling cycle – a result of nature, not man.

http://businessandmedia.org/articles/2008/20081218205953.aspx

Clarification/Follow-up by labman on 12/20/08 5:33 am:
''What has Mars to do with earth?'' It is our neighbor and a source of additional data. I hardly see how we can blame George Bush for the ice caps on mars melting. Since Mars and Earth have the same sun, could it be possible the melting of the ice caps on both planets have the same cause?

Clarification/Follow-up by Mathatmacoat on 12/20/08 11:48 am:
Last time I looked that was perhaps the one thing we were not blaming George Bush for. The human race must take responsibility for its own life style and its own waste.

You seem to forget that Mars is a long way further out than Earth, okay it has less atmosphere to protect it but I doubt its weather exhibits the same characteristics. Mars is not a twin to Earth and we would do well to take the lesson from Venus which has a run away greenhouse effect.

Whether the Sun is responsible for the present state of our climate or not, we are still placed in the position of needing to limit pollution of various kinds for our own future well being. Anyone who has been to places like China knows that unregulated industry is not a good thing. Enlightened nations took steps to limit certain kinds of pollution and limiting carbon dioxide emissions from human activity is only the next step in this process.

I seriously don't think that we have either the will or the ability to seriously change weather patterns on this planet but given time we have proven capable of ruining anything. Mars stands as a sign post of what could happen to a planet we should realise our deserts are growing

Clarification/Follow-up by labman on 12/20/08 10:13 pm:
I found this link on another site, http://www.dailytech.com/A+Melting+Arctic+Happy+News+for+Mankind/article12882.htm

''

Two nuclear-powered Russian icebreakers start for the North Pole
Alarm over sea ice loss is misplaced.

Recent short-term gains in Arctic ice coverage indicate nothing about the eventual state of the Arctic. Answers to the long-term status of the region lie in the realm of a scientific branch known as paleoclimatology. What does it tell us?

The Earth is currently in the geologic epoch known as the Holocene. This began nearly 12,000 years ago when the last ice age (more precisely, the Weichsal glacial) ended. Temperatures warmed, glaciers began to retreat, and the Arctic began to melt. This began what is called an interglacial: a warmer period between glaciation.

We tend to think of the poles as immutable, but geologically speaking, permanent polar ice is a rare phenomenon, comprising less than 10% of history. Icecaps form briefly between interglacials, only to melt as the next one begins -- this time around will be no different.

So we know the Arctic will eventually be open water. The only question is how it will affect us.

The language the media uses to describe Arctic melting is usually emotionally loaded. Filled with terms such as "concern", "desperate", even "dying" and "doomed", one would think a living organism was being described. Experts are always quoted as "warning" us, rather than simply speaking -- classic propaganda techniques.

Even the scientists themselves have an emotional stake in the argument. After all, when you've spent your entire career studying Arctic ice, the possibility of it vanishing is understandably horrifying. But what about the rest of us? Will Arctic melting be good or bad?

Let's look at the scorecard.

No change in sea level.
Arctic ice, which floats rather than being anchored on bedrock, doesn't influence sea levels at all. Antarctica and Greenland do, but with one on a long-term cooling trend, and the othe

Clarification/Follow-up by Mathatmacoat on 12/21/08 1:37 am:
let's face it some people find an upside in everything but it's one that has a bite in the tail. Greenland ice is melting, good for the few thousand people of Greenland but of questionable benefit to millions of people in low lying coastal areas. Yes Russia the USA and Canada will benefit from potential access to more oil and gas but can it be extracted without destroying a fragile environment. What you are suggesting is that supertankers sail the Arctic waters, what happens when the inevitable oil spill occurs, remember the EXXON VALDEZ. We have no idea of the consequences of warming in an interglacial period or of the consequences of a return of the ice where before the human population was small it is now huge

Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 12/21/08 10:09 am:
if the argument is reduction in emissions because it harms us then let's discuss that issue on it's own merits without the canard of it effecting the climate.

btw 'the spill from the Valdez dissipated into the ocean and is of no consequence today. Every day off the coast of California oil spills into the Pacific ,bubbling up near hydrothermal vents ....a simple geological fact.

The presumption here is that C02 is a pollutant. I suggest that when there was a higher concentration of C02 in the atmosphere ;during the last greenhouse cycle ,the earth was in a lush green state..animal life was abundant It took a killer meteor to plung the earth into an ice age we are still recovering from.

There are plenty of pollutants we need to control. CO2 should be low on the list of priorities.

Clarification/Follow-up by labman on 12/21/08 7:40 pm:
Right Tom. Could we start with the huge, brown clouds of particulates down wind of China and India? What about the Aral Sea? Of course they don't fit certain agendas.

Clarification/Follow-up by Mathatmacoat on 12/21/08 9:03 pm:
Good point labman if you go to Pakistan the skies are just as polluted and smoggy as they are in India or China yet there is little heavy industry there, What of Indonesia or Brazil heavily polluted with particulates from rain forest destruction and burning off and I would like to see where animal life was abundant a few skeletons in pockets doesn't suggest abundance. Our present environmental laws in developed countries arose out of a recognition that emissions in the form of uncontrolled particulates were harmful. So far everything that the human race has devised as industrial progress has proven to be harmful and needing control in various forms, nothing we do is benign as you would like to think, and poisoning the ocean with oil to pursue that industrial progress has consequences too. The oil industry is a major polluter and a strong lobby against control of emissions, so Tom, be careful you haven't become a mouthpiece for them

Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 12/23/08 1:05 pm:
The year-end news isn't pretty. The dictatorship-dominated United Nations has its eye on our Christmas hams as a key source of allegedly man-made global warming and planetary suicide.

"We haven't come to grips with agricultural emissions," warned Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a front page article in the New York Times on December 4, "From Hoof to Plate, a New Bid to Cut Emissions."

Before he gets the UN to go after the belching and flatulence of hogs, you'd think Dr. Pachauri would make sure that global warming is actually occurring, and that if it is, that it's in fact man-made, or pig-made, and not just due to solar activity or natural cycles.

The Associated Press reports that 񓟸 is on a pace to be a slightly cooler year" than last year. On December 11, the palm trees were snow-covered in New Orleans in the earliest snowfall ever recorded in the city's history. Enjoying a rare blizzard on the Outer Banks, kids were building snowmen on the beach a week before Thanksgiving. "Alaskan glaciers grew this year instead of retreating," reported Investor's Business Daily on December 15, while "Fairbanks had its fourth coldest October in 104 years of records," and "the temperature at Denver International Airport dropped to 18-below-zero on December 14, breaking the previous record of 14-below set in 1901."

Still, environmental ministers from 187 nations gathered in Poland this month to talk about a new treaty to fight global warming in a conference that was scheduled prior to the snowball fights on Bourbon Street.

Farm flatulence and belching will be "one of the main issues" on the agenda in Poland, reported the New York Times, explaining that "the trillions of farm animals around the world generate 18 percent of the emissions that are raising global temperatures, according to United Nations estimates, more than from cars, buses and airplanes."

Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 12/23/08 1:06 pm:
Going into this year's Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season, the USDA reported that frozen ham stocks in the U.S. totaled 160.5 million pounds, only about 2.2 million pounds below the record high pre-holiday figure for that date of 162.66 million pounds.

To control our carbon footprint, says Dr. Pachauri, we should "reduce meat consumption." A good world-saving lunch would be an internationally sanctioned broccoli burger, minus the cheese, unless we can find some zero-emitting heifers or develop some kind of methane-capturing cow diapers.

In a "Raise a Stink" campaign earlier this year, farmers in New Zealand mailed reeking parcels of sheep and cow manure to members of Parliament to protest a proposed flatulence tax. The new levy is designed to empty tens of millions of dollars from the pockets of farmers, raise meat prices, meet the government's commitments under the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and pay for research into methane gas emissions from agricultural animals. The nation's postal service complained that the campaign was a threat to the physical and mental health of postal workers.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, New Zealand is required to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. "According to government figures, New Zealand's 45 million sheep and cattle burped and farted about 90 percent of the country's methane emissions," reports London's Telegraph.

Next year, Sweden is launching a green labeling program for food, so consumers can readily see that a turkey is allegedly better than a pig for keeping the ocean levels down, and that carrots are even better. "Producing a pound of beef creates 11 times as much greenhouse gas emissions as a pound of chicken and 100 times more than a pound of carrots, according to Lantmannen," a Swedish environmental group, reports the Times.

Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 12/23/08 1:08 pm:
The perfectly correct Christmas dinner? A carrot soufflé, minus the eggs, and a "sin tax" on any fuel-burning side dishes that traveled more than 100 miles.

Or maybe a big stuffed kangaroo on the Christmas table would please the warming zealots. "It's been long known that kangaroos don't produce methane," explained George Wilson of the Australian Wildlife Service recently in the New York Times. If Australia's current kangaroo population of 35 million was managed up to 175 million, and if 42 million sheep and cattle could simultaneously be removed, Wilson calculates that the country could cut 16 megatons of greenhouse gas emissions, 3 percent of nation's total.

RALPH R. REILAND is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Clarification/Follow-up by Mathatmacoat on 12/23/08 10:42 pm:
Tom the perfect answer to all this hog flatulance and CO2 emisssions from animals eat Kangaroo, they are five times more efficient in converting grass to meat and I have never heard a kangaroo fart. This means the problem of emissions from agriculture and we can move on to more important things. We can raise Kangaroo meat for the world but you will all have to start wearing Kangaroo fur clothing otherwise what will we do with the skins

The UN is full of wankers who cannot get out of their own way. If Poland has nothing more to worry about than pig farts and New Zealand nothing more to do than worry about sheep fartsthey are well off. Anyway NZ have been very innovative in devising taxes let's see what they come up with next

Clarification/Follow-up by paraclete on 12/24/08 1:48 am:
This business about emissions from animals is an urban myth. As far as the CO2 equivalent of animal emissions is concerned it is a small part of the emissions problem.
The real problem is CO2 it far outways any other source and it comes from burning coal and oil and therefore the real culpruts are the power and oil industries. Just get the oil industry to stop flaring off gas and you will take a major step, surely that energy could be diverted to electricty generation. The use of waste energy hasn't yet been fully explored or exploited and the use of animal wastes for energy production hasn't been exploited properly either.