Gore: Cigarette Smoking 'significant' Contributor To Global Warming

which is?

what?

 

My favourite climate site have also catched up this news.

"Al Gore is an Embarrassment"

 

Have you guys not figured out that drudge just made that up and put it on his site? and al gore probably never said that?

 

The problem is science can not be applied to a political problem. Political science is an oxymoron. Science can help guide public policy, but society through politicians has to balance what is possible against the short/long term cost benefit. For instance we could wipe out hunger world wide, but at what cost? Can society really afford what this would require?

In the case of global warming, the long term costs of doing nothing far outweigh the short term costs of addressing this issue. In fact for most citizens increasing efficiencies to reduce their carbon footprint will help them save money in the short term as well.

The entities that are fighting against global warming the most are those who have the most to lose from society making the changes needed to address global warming. Those entities are the fossil fuel industries in particularly the coal industry.

Indeed. People need to realize that Drudge is out for Drudge and given how little Democrats have been becoming tangled up in juicy scandals; Drudge needs to invent stuff to keep the excitement level higher. If he simply focused on the real scandals of the day (Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Tom Foley, etc.) he would alienate his core readers who are Republican loyalists, quickly fade from grace and lose his influence. He is now making stuff up about the Democrats because quite frankly the Democrats are boring right now. Quite literally, we will probably see more Congressmen and Washington insiders sent to prison as the result of corruption and influence peddling than any other time in our past. These include:

1) Jack Abramoff (convicted): Republican lobbyist and former aid to Tom DeLay. Plead guilty to pled guilty to multiple charges of fraud, tax evasion, and conspiring to bribe members of Congress

2) Bob Ney (Pleading Guilty): Republican member of the House of Representatives from Ohio. Pleaded guilty to influence peddling.

3) Tom DeLay (on trial in TX): Republican House Majority Leader. He is on trial in Texas for money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

4) Mark Foley (resigned/under investigation by FBI): Republican Representative from Florida. He resigned after he was exposed in a sex scandal involving male pages under the age of consent. Currently he is under investigation by the FBI.

5) House Republican Leadership: Is now under investigation to determine who knew what when in regards to Tom Foley.

6) William Jefferson (under investigation by FBI): Democratic Representative from Louisiana. He is under investigation by the FBI for corruption and demanding cash and other favors for himself and relatives, in exchange for using his congressional clout to arrange African business deals.

7) According to the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS (and I quote), "there is so much political corruption on Capitol Hill that the FBI has had to triple the number of squads investigating lobbyists, lawmakers and influence peddlers."

No the Republican's are not alone in the corruption on Capital Hill, however, they are in a position of power and majority and are able to exploit their position much more effectively than the Democrats can as they don't wield the same power in Congress. Again if Drudge were to focus on the real stories of political intrigue he would lose his user base and they would think of him as a trader for exposing corruption within the Republican Party. Drudge is digging up stories about Al Gore simply because it plays better with his audience then do the real stories that really matter.

 

Drudge has a significantly better track record of honestly and accuracy than any of the three major television networks.

An excellent source for scientific information on the environment is Steven Milloy's Junk Science.

But, my favorite single article on this topic must still be There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998, by Professor Bob Carter, a geologist who specializes in paleoclimate research at James Cook University in Queensland.

 

steven miloy is oil company lobbist, I can't beleive you think thats a good source

 

Wow, latehorn that is extra weird.

That what I was taught in elementary school. We were taught that manmade pollution was causing global cooling and was going to cause a new ice age.

I still remember the pictures of the wooly mammoth in my schoolbook. I thought that would be extra cool!

 

Okay there are TWO opposing affects from manmade pollution:

1) The first pollution we came to understand was particulate matter such as soot from car exhaust. Particulate matter blocks the sun and the less sun that reaches the earth, the cooler things get. Examples of this would be cooling trends caused by mega volcanoes. By itself the soot from man made pollution could send us into an ice age. In addition this soot has lots of very bad health consequences for humans and the environment (acid rain, mercury pollution, etc.). It was based on our understanding of soot that scientists came to believe that we could cause a cooling of the earth. What scientists DIDN'T UNDERSTAND at the time was the effects of the second type of pollution.

2) The second pollution we came to understand many years later was greenhouse gases (e.g. carbon dioxide and methane). Greenhouse gasses have the exact opposite affect from soot in that they lock the energy of the sun in our atmosphere instead of bouncing it back into space, thus greenhouse gasses tend to warm the earth up.

People like Steven Milloy and Bob Carter try to confuse people on this issue by failing to look at the two opposing affects that are caused by the two different parts of man made pollution.

We have made great strides at removing soot from our pollution thus this masking effect to the warming affect of greenhouse gas emissions is being removed. Soot also only has a short term masking effect as it quickly settles back to the earth (e.g. over a period of years) where as greenhouse gasses continue to accumulate in our atmosphere and are not removed unless absorbed and chemically altered by plants or mechanical processes like carbonic acid rich rain falling to earth and bonding with lime. The problem is natural processes for scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air can not work as fast as the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere by man.

In regards to Steven Milloy, one must look at the agenda of the messenger. If he is an oil company lobbyist than by definition he has a conflict of interest on the science issue and the cause/effect of greenhouse gasses on global warming. In short, he is not a credible source because he him self practices pseudoscience in the very fact that he has a result that he wants to prove (that being greenhouse gasses global warming is a lie) and then looks for evidence to prove his agenda rather than following the proper scientific protocols of looking the evidence and seeing where it leads regardless of the outcome. In short people like Steven Milloy ignore or dismiss any evidence that runs counter to what they want to prove rather than looking at the evidence as a whole and trying to understand what it is really saying.

People stop and think for a minute. Good scientists do not have some over riding agenda driving their research (unlike industry lobbyists). They simply employ time tested investigative techniques called "scientific method" to research issues to better understand things. A scientist no more wants to give up modern conveniences than you or I, so trying to promote global warming if it were not true would be of no personal benefit to the thousands of scientists from around the world who are researching this issue.

The fact remains that our understanding of global warming does not come from one single field of science. It comes from many different fields of science (geology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, chemistry, biology, glaciology, paleontology etc.) with thousands of different scientists studying different things and building up a body of evidence over decades that all points to the same conclusion.

 

KLB:

If you are going to libel Steven Milloy, then I suggest that you do a couple of things first:

1. Check your facts.
2. Equally discount the players on the other side of the table who are pushing their pseudo-science global warming crap in order to further their anti-capitalist, anti-progress, luddite, socialist, anti-western, and anti-American agendas.

 

This makes you sound really, really paranoid.

 

Whatever.

Think you know all about environmentalist kooks?

Take this handy quiz about two of our favorite environmentalist kooks: Did Al Gore say it? Or was it the Unabomber?

 

Don't confuse the science of global warming with the extremists who latched onto it for their cause. There are thousands or maybe tens-of-thousands of scientists from around the world who have conducted research and collected evidence over decades. They didn't have an anti-globalization agenda. They were simply on a quest for knowledge and had a desire to understand the world around them.

Global warming wasn't some idea hatched by a "kook" and then scientists set out to "prove" this idea. Our understanding of global warming came about over decades of research and the slow painstaking process of scientists from widely diverse fields, backgrounds and beliefs collecting data and slowly starting to find commonalities in seemly different pieces of research.

Yes there are "kooks" who latch onto scientific issues to promote their extreme agendas, but there are also "kooks" who latch onto religious, political or social issues to promote their extreme agendas (look at bin Laden as an example). "Kooks" don't drive science; they simply try to subvert that which has been brought forth by science to push extreme ideas.

Addressing global warming does not require anti-capitalist, anti-progress, luddite, socialist, anti-western, or anti-American measures. In fact quite the opposite is true; global warming can not be fully addressed without capitalistic ventures pushing forward progress on new technologies and new sources of energy. Finding a solution to and addressing the problem of global warming is as an American of an idea as they come. It is about taking on a challenge and using creative thinking and economic clout to come up with solutions that move us forward. A socialistic society could not resolve this problem because only in the market place of a capitalistic society can the best technologies and solutions evolve and rise above inferior solutions.

The true anti-progress, luddite agenda is to fight against finding solutions to global warming because this is fighting for the status quo. Look at the forces that are fighting against global warming and you will see it is those who have the most to gain financially by maintaining the status quo and remaining dependant upon technologies that are over 100 years old. It is those who are truly fighting against progress and have the greatest luddite attitudes that are resisting global warming the fiercest.

 

Not only drudge reported it, but other sources claimed it as well.

btw.. They must have deleted the Al Gore article on iceagenow.com. Can't find it..

 

A very good program on Global Warming and conservative evangelical community turing "green" is Bill Moyer's program "Is God Green?":

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/green/index.html

 

I just can't force myself to watch Bill Moyers anymore. He lays the anti-everything-I-believe-in propaganda on so thick that it gets in the way of whatever topic he is supposed to be presenting on.

If the show is on corn, Bill Moyers presentation would be something like this:

"Corn is an excellent food that was a staple of food for the American Indians, BEFORE THE WHITE ANGLO SAXON PROTESTANTS CAME AND MASSACRED THEM ALL. Corn contains many nutrients that are essential to health, IF YOU CAN MANAGE TO STAY ALIVE WITHOUT THE AMERICANS BOMBING YOU. Corn oil has many uses, both in the home and in POLLUTING INDUSTRIES RUN BY GREEDY CAPITALISTS.​

After awhile, the propagandizing stops getting in the way of the message and it becomes the message.

 

Talk about demagogy. Maybe your problem with him is that he isn't willing to accept the "party line" or blindly follow others rather he is willing to ask really hard questions about his own beliefs and the issues around him.

One should also not forget that Bill Moyers himself has a conservative Christian background and was raised in the Central Baptist Church in Marshall, Texas. He isn't a liberal nut job. He is a conservative who is willing to ask really hard questions about his own beliefs and the issues around him. A really good interview about Bill Moyers is at: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15196924/

I've always found Bill Moyers to be one of the more thought provoking investigative reporters. He is one of the best interviewers in the business and he does a good job of allowing people to present their side of the issue without distorting what they say (even when he disagrees). He doesn't look at issues from blind political ideology instead he asks hard questions and seeks different people's answers to those questions. Years ago when I was a kid I remember watching the series he did with Joseph Campbell I think it was called "the Power of Myth". It was an incredibly intriguing series and even as a kid I found it very thought provoking.

In the case of his latest series, he is pretty close to the issues and he acknowledged this fact in this documentary. At the same time he went to great pains to ask people on all sides of the issues hard questions and make sure that he presented their stance on the issues accurately. On camera he would ask the interviewee to confirm that he understood them correctly and repeat what he understood them to say. It was the interviewee who confirmed on camera that their message/position was being accurately portrayed. Bill Moyer's didn't try to twist what other's said as so often happens with journalism by the reporters for CNN or FOX News.

Interestingly enough, I participated in an Internet "town meeting" yesterday with Bill Moyers for his documentary next week on network neutrality and he mentioned that because he is so close to these issues he has been having others do a lot more of the work to make sure that this series of documentaries stay objective.

In regards to the "Is God Green" installment it was less about global warming itself and more about how this issue is playing out with evangelical conservatives. It wasn't about the merits of global warming so much as looking at how very conservative evangelical Christians were embracing global warming as a very real issue. Heck in August even Pat Robertson publicly started to embrace global warming as a real issue (and if he isn't a certifiable conservative evangelical Christian, no body is), see:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14171691/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/04/national/main1864868.shtml
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20060803/23453.htm
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2272083&page=1

Pat Robertson is agreeing with a stance taken by Al Gore? Either the apocalypse is about to unfold or hell just froze over.