It is funny that the US use more Gasoline (which we know and is proven to be not exactly good for the environment) than anyone else and is now involved in a war to get more gasoline, but their government and it's people are denying the whole Global Warming phenomenon. Funny that.
And there is no possibility you've been mis-lead at all is there??
What's even funnier is that the US government tells us that there IS global warming (Anrold Shwarzaetc. for example is planning on writing tougher pollution laws). GWB says we have to fight global warming, I've heard him say this a few times.
But really, I blame global warming on the fuckin' dinosaurs. They never recycled a day in their life, and look where it got them. We have to learn from their mistakes, so we don't end up like them. How do we do that? I don't know. But obviously we can't follow their CO2 emitting ways.
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Official Played Down Emissions' Links to Global Warming
A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.
In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved.
Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues. Before coming to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.
The documents were obtained by The New York Times from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers. The project is representing Rick S. Piltz, who resigned in March after a decade working in the office that coordinates government climate research and issued the documents that Mr. Cooney edited.
A White House spokeswoman, Michele St. Martin, said today that Mr. Cooney would not be made available to comment. "We don't put Phil Cooney on the record," she said. "He's not a cleared spokesman."
Other White House officials said today that the changes made by Mr. Cooney were part of the normal interagency review that takes place on all documents related to global environmental change. "All comments are reviewed, and some are accepted and some are rejected," said Robert Hopkins, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He noted that one of the reports Mr. Cooney worked on, the administration's 10-year plan for climate research, was strongly endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences.
And Myron Ebell, who has long campaigned against limits on greenhouse gases as director of climate policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian group, said such editing was necessary for "consistency" in meshing programs with policy.
But critics said that while all administrations routinely vet government reports, scientific content in such reports should be reviewed by the White House Science and Technology Office. Climate experts and representatives of environmental groups, when shown examples of the revisions, said they illustrated the significant if largely invisible influence of Mr. Cooney and other White House officials with ties to energy industries that have long fought greenhouse-gas restrictions.
In a memo sent last week to the top officials dealing with climate change at a dozen agencies, Mr. Piltz said the White House editing and other actions threatened to taint the government's $1.8 billion-a-year effort to clarify the causes and consequences of climate change.
"Each administration has a policy position on climate change," Mr. Piltz wrote. "But I have not seen a situation like the one that has developed under this administration during the past four years, in which politicization by the White House has fed back directly into the science program in such as way as to undermine the credibility and integrity of the program."
A senior Environmental Protection Agency scientist who works on climate questions said the White House environmental council, where Mr. Cooney works, had offered valuable suggestions on reports on occasion. But the scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because all agency employees are forbidden to speak with reporters without clearance, said the kinds of changes made by Mr. Cooney had damaged morale.
"I have colleagues in other agencies who express the same view, that it has somewhat of a chilling effect and has created a sense of frustration," he said.
Efforts by the Bush administration to highlight uncertainties in science pointing to human-caused warming appear to be putting the United States increasingly at odds with a growing list of world leaders and scientific bodies.
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who met with President Bush at the White House today, has been trying for several months to persuade Mr. Bush to intensify American efforts to limit greenhouse gases.
Mr. Bush has called only for voluntary measures to slow growth in emissions through 2012.
Today, saying their goal was to influence that meeting, the scientific academies of 11 countries, including those of the United States and Britain, released a joint letter saying "the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action."
Starting with the negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty in 1997, the oil group has promoted the idea that uncertainties in climate science justify delaying emissions restrictions on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases.
The top international and American panels of experts on climate have concluded that such emissions have very likely caused most of a global warming trend since 1950 and could raise temperatures at more than triple the 20th-century rate in this century if emissions are not cut.
Upon learning of the White House report revisions, representatives of some environmental groups said that the effort to amplify uncertainties in the science was clearly intended to delay consideration of limits on the gases, which remain an unavoidable byproduct of burning oil and coal. "They've got three more years and the only way to control this issue and do nothing about it is to muddy the science," said Eileen Claussen, the president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a private group that has enlisted businesses in programs cutting emissions.
The alterations are sometimes as subtle as the insertion of an adjective, but cause a clear shift in the meaning of the documents.
For example, a sentence in an October 2002 draft of a regularly published summary of government climate research, "Our Changing Planet," originally read: "Many scientific observations indicate that the Earth is undergoing a period of relatively rapid change...."
Mr. Cooney's neat, compact notes modified the sentence to read: "Many scientific observations point to the conclusion that the Earth may be undergoing a period of relatively rapid change...."
In places where uncertainties in climate research were described, Mr. Cooney added qualifiers like "significant" and "fundamental."
Another document showing the same pattern of changes is the 2003 Strategic Plan for the United States Climate Change Science Program, a thick report describing the reorganization of government climate research that was requested by Mr. Bush in his first speech on the issue, in June 2001.
That document was reviewed by an expert panel assembled in 2003 by the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists largely endorsed the administration's research plan, but they warned that the administration's procedures for vetting reports on climate could result in excessive political interference with science.
Now it appeared that some interference was happening even before the research had gotten into full swing, said Dr. William H. Schlesinger, who was on the review committee and is dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University.
After some of Mr. Cooney's changes to the drafts were described to Dr. Schlesinger by The New York Times, he said several seemed "egregious."
"They're trying to throw enough uncertainty in so that either policymakers or the public would not want to take a firm stand on it," he said.
__________________
I know there is already a global warming thread but I don't believe the title of that thread has any relevence to the issue presented here and as such I'm asking for it not to be moved, please.
edit: it was moved. if this is truly the global warming thread and the only one then i suggest the title be changed. get rid of the 'myth or reality' crap.
_________________ Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear, Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer. The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay.
US scientists pile on pressure over climate change
David Adam, science correspondent
Wednesday June 8, 2005
Guardian
US scientists have increased the pressure on George Bush and other world leaders to tackle climate change by signing a joint statement calling on G8 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The statement, from the science academies of the G8 countries, says the scientific evidence on climate change is now clear enough to compel their leaders to take action.
It says: "There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring. It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities...
"The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action. It is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions."
The statement has been issued ahead of the G8 summit in Gleneagles in July. It follows months of negotiations between the UK's Royal Society, which published it yesterday, and the other academies.
One source close to the negotiations called the support of the US National Academy of Sciences "unprecedented".
In 2001 the US academy declined to sign a similar joint statement because it was preparing its own report on the issue for the Bush administration.
In a separate 1992 report it concluded: "Despite the great uncertainties, greenhouse warming is a potential threat sufficient to justify action now," but until now it has stopped short of making specific policy recommendations.
President Bush has consistently stressed the uncertainties of climate science but the new statement makes it more difficult for him to dispute the scientific consensus.
The statement calls on G8 nations to "recognise that delayed action will increase the risk of adverse environmental effects and will likely incur a greater cost."
It was released as Tony Blair was meeting Mr Bush in Washington. Mr Blair has made action on climate change and aid to Africa his priorities for the G8 summit.
Lord May, president of the Royal Society, said current US policy on climate change was "misguided".
He said: "Getting the US on board is critical because of the sheer amount of greenhouse gas emissions they are responsible for. President Bush has an opportunity at Gleneagles to signal that his administration will no longer ignore the scientific evidence and act to cut emissions."
Vicki Arroyo, director of policy analysis at the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change, a US thinktank in Virginia, said the statement "makes it harder for the [Bush] administration to do what it generally does, which is to focus on the uncertainty."
Along with the Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences, the statement is signed by the G8 science academies of France, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada, along with those of Brazil, China and India - among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the developing world.
Lord May said: "It is clear that developed countries must lead the way in cutting emissions but developing countries must also contribute. The scientific evidence forcefully points to a need for a truly international effort. Make no mistake, we have to act now."
Levels of carbon dioxide - the most common greenhouse gas in the atmosphere produced by burning fossil fuels - have increased from 280 parts per million in 1750 to over 375ppm today. Scientists say this warmed the Earth's surface by about 0.6C during the 20th century. The statement says this warming has already led to climate changes.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that average temperatures will rise further by 2100, to between 1.4C and 5.8C above 1990 levels.
Catherine Pearce, climate campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said: "The national science academies are right to call for prompt action on climate change. But this document lacks targets or a timetable for urgent action.
"G8 countries must accept their historic responsibility in creating the problem, and show genuine leadership through annual reductions in emissions."
I've never seen a scientist deny the existence of water vapor as a greenhouse gas. What I have seen is equations where water vapor is a relative constant in the global warming equation, and carbon dioxide is a variable. All of these equations are imperfect, of course, but nobody has presented evidence that water vapor is more or less of culprit for warming now than it ever was. What I have heard (from the ice core sampling folks) is that dramatic changes in atmospheric temperature have closely mirrored swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide for millions of years. What should be studied is the difference in how water vapor traps heat, and how carbon dioxide traps heat. Not all greenhouse gases trap heat to the same degree.
This is a good post actually, quite reasonable, although in one aspect you kind of have the cart before the horse.
Warm periods and increased CO2 levels do coincide.
However, the temperature increase proceeds CO2 increases. A warming ocean (which is a gigantic carbon sink) releases CO2 into the atmosphere.
_________________ For your sake I hope heaven and hell are really there but I wouldn't hold my breath
And I'm guessing that will be about the end of it, as I'm sure they'll find something else to shift the focus too, like Howard Dean or something. Our government is getting more and more pathetic by the day.
_________________ Deep below the dunes I roved Past the rows, past the rows Beside the acacias freshly in bloom I sent men to their doom
Last edited by meatwad on Fri Jun 10, 2005 6:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
By Fiona Harvey in London
Published: June 9 2005 20:35 | Last updated: June 9 2005 20:35
Leaders of some of the world's biggest businesses on Thursday increased the pressure on the Group of Eight industrialised nations ahead of a summit on global warming, urging them to set up a system of emissions trading for greenhouse gases that would extend to 2030 and beyond.
Business representatives of companies including Toyota, BP and Ford, met Tony Blair, UK prime minister, to discuss climate change. Mr Blair has made the issue one of two priorities, along with Africa, for the G8 summit under the UK's chairmanship in Scotland in July.
Steve Lennon, chair of the environment and energy commission of the International Chamber of Commerce, which represents companies in 130 countries, said: “We see a global system of emissions trading as inevitable.”
The business leaders called for a “cap-and-trade” system or similar market-based mechanism that would set limits on how much greenhouse gas countries and companies could emit and also “define greenhouse gas emissions rights”. Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, trap heat on earth and cause climate change.
Rick Samans, managing director at the World Economic Forum, which convened the meeting, said companies were seeking certainty. All of the G8 nations except the US have ratified the Kyoto protocol, which binds developed nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels. George W. Bush, US president, has refused to set reduction targets or discuss measures to tackle climate change beyond 2012, when the the Kyoto protocol expires.
Mr Lennon said a cap-and-trade system for emissions would probably be a mixture of mandatory and voluntary schemes. The statement was signed by ABB, Alcan, BP, British Airways, BT, Cinergy, Cisco, Deloitte, Deutsche Bank, E.ON, EADS, EDF, Eskom, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, HSBC, Petrobras, UES, Rio Tinto, Siemens, Swiss Re, Toyota, Vattenfall and Volkswagen.
It's not really a record at all, but a statistical composite from station records from all over the world, most of them from towns and cities, and most from countries which do not maintain their stations or records properly.
This record is compiled by the Goddard Institute (GISS) in the US. It indicates a global warming of +0.8°C. Is it real? Or is it just a statistical product of urban warming skewing the data, and bad site management in non-OECD countries?
The pre-1940 warming is widely regarded to have been caused by the warming sun during the earlier part of the 20th century
This is the combined record from hundreds of weather stations in the 48 states of the contiguous USA., the early 1930s being the hottest years of the 20th century. This is completely at variance with the global record shown above. (Both graphs were produced by NASA-GISS)
Urbanisation has been more successfully corrected for in the US than in the rest of the world and the US also has the best maintained network of weather stations in the world. This must therefore be a better representation of the global picture too. The US record also agrees with the satellites.
_________________ For your sake I hope heaven and hell are really there but I wouldn't hold my breath
Lawmakers Want Probe in Charge White House Doctored Climate Change Reports
Two senior US lawmakers called for a congressional probe into charges the White House altered government documents to cast doubt on the generally-accepted scientific consensus about the causes and effects of global warming.
Representative Henry Waxman and Senator John Kerry asked the General Accountability Office (GAO) -- Congress' investigative arm -- to look into a recent whistleblower report that a former oil industry lobbyist altered government reports on global warming.
The allegations were reported Wednesday in the New York Times.
"We request that the Government Accountability Office investigate the extent to which White House officials and political appointees at federal agencies have interfered with federally funded science on global warming," said Kerry and Waxman.
"Unfortunately, the incidents reported by the Times are simply the latest in a pattern of interference with climate science by the Bush Administration," the Democratic lawmakers said.
The Times reported that a White House official with no scientific training edited government climate reports to play down the links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, according to internal documents obtained by the daily.
Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, allegedly subtly altered documents, adding qualifiers like "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties" to give the impression of considerable doubt about the findings.
On one document, Cooney added the work "extremely" to the sentence: "The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely difficult."
The alterations Cooney made on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003 often appeared in the final reports, said the daily.
Cooney is a lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics and lacks scientific training, the daily said.
Before working at the White House in 2001, he was a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute and led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases, according to the Times report.
Rick Piltz, who resigned in March as a senior associate in the office that coordinates government climate research, said in a memorandum sent to top US officials last week that editing of scientific reports tainted official efforts to establish the causes of climate change.
"Each administration has a policy position on climate change," Piltz wrote, according to The New York Times. "But I have not seen a situation like the one that has developed under this administration during the past four years, in which politicization by the White House has fed back directly into the science program in such a way as to undermine the credibility and integrity of the program."
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 1:03 am Posts: 24177 Location: Australia
Man in Black wrote:
This must therefore be a better representation of the global picture too.
How could US temperature data possibly be a better representation of global temperatures than global temperature data?
Oh, because it fits in with your point better.
_________________ Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear, Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer. The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay.
Taking a ride on the sheep urine express:- WINCHESTER, England | June 10, 2005 7:11:23 PM IST
A British bus company believes it may have a secret weapon to cut pollution emissions -- sheep urine in the engine.
The Stagecoach company has fitted a bus in Winchester with a tank of sheep urine. The waste is sprayed into exhaust fumes to reduce emissions of harmful nitrous oxides, The Guardian reported Friday.
It is a novel way of reducing pollution but we believe it will work, Andrew Dyer, managing director of Stagecoach South, said. There is nothing to worry about -- we won't be asking passengers to leave a sample and we won't be carrying a resident sheep at the back of the bus.
The bus carried its first passengers last month.
The urine is collected by the fertilizer industry from farmyard waste and refined into pure urea, which is then sold to be used in the new engine. Ammonia from the urea reacts with nitrous oxides in the exhaust fumes and converts them to nitrogen gas and water, which is released as steam, The Guardian said.
Beckett exposes G8 rift on global warming By Marie Woolf in London and Colin Brown in Moscow
13 June 2005
The British Government is deeply disappointed that President George Bush has not made a greater commitment to tackling climate change before the G8 summit, the Environment Secretary has disclosed.
In a rare, outspoken critique of the US position on global warming, Margaret Beckett told The Independent of the Government's frustration at the lack of "common ground" with Washington on the need for action on the environment.
The US has consistently blocked attempts by Britain to put progress on tackling climate change alongside G8's moves to scrap African debt at the Gleneagles meeting of the leading industrialised nations next month.
Mrs Beckett added that signing the Kyoto protocol was clearly "off the agenda" for President Bush, who was "coming from a different place in the dialogue" on the issue of global warming. She said the Government had made no secret that it wants the White House to be "more engaged" on climate change. "Certainly there is a degree of disappointment that there isn't more common ground than there already is," she said.
Global warming: the US contribution in figures 13 June 2005
- The United States constitutes 4 per cent of the world population
- It is responsible for a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions - an average of 40,000 pounds of carbon dioxide is released by each US citizen every year - the highest of any country in the world, and more than China, India and Japan combined
- Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually - consuming more than 850 million trees
- There are more than 200 million cars and light trucks on american roads
According to the Federal Department of Transportation, they use over 200 million gallons of petrol a day
- Motor vehicles account for 56 per cent of all air pollution in The United States
- A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2002 concluded that people living in the most heavily polluted metropolitan areas have a 12 per cent increased risk of dying of lung cancer than people in the least polluted areas
- 32 of the 50 busiest US airports currently have plans to expand operations
- Every year US industries release at least 2.4 billion pounds of chemicals into the atmosphere
- Despite having just 2 per cent of known oil reserves, the US consumes 25 per cent of the world's oil production
- 16 per cent of world oil production goes into american cars alone.
- Approximately 160 million people living in 32 US states live in regions with smog and soot levels considered dangerous to health
- The new clear air interstate rule aims to cut sulphur dioxide by 73 per cent and nitrogen oxide by 61 per cent in the next 10 years
- Around 50 million new cars roll off US assembly lines each year
There are already more than 20 million four-wheel-drive vehicles on US roads
- More than 1.5 million gallons of oil were spilled into US waters in 2000 alone
- Only 1 per cent of american travel is on public transport, an eighth of that in the UK and an eighteenth of that in Japan
- As much as 5.99 tonnes of carbon dioxide is emitted per American per year, compared with 0.31 tonnes per Indian or 0.05 tonnes per Bangladeshi.
- The US had 16 major oil spills between 1976 and 1989, whereas France suffered six and the UK five
- The average american produces 864kg of municipal waste per year, almost three times the quantity of rubbish produced annually by an Italian
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 7:19 pm Posts: 39068 Location: Chapel Hill, NC, USA Gender: Male
This thread makes the Baby Jesus cry.
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 1:03 am Posts: 24177 Location: Australia
Man in Black wrote:
Where do you live in Australia?
Melbourne.
_________________ Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear, Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer. The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay.
This must therefore be a better representation of the global picture too.
How could US temperature data possibly be a better representation of global temperatures than global temperature data?
These are data from areas in the United States, which is one of the heaviest producers of these gasses. I'm no global warming expert, but I would assume that this area would have suffered noticably.
The example isn't quite "pick and choose" since it includes data combined from hundreds of sources, not just one or two.
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