Global Warming is heating up again (I apologize for any pain caused by the obvious and unavoidable pun) and it raises a number of questions.
Wikipedia has a fairly decent summary of the Global Warming issue. A few salient highlights:
The scientific opinion on climate change is that the average global temperature has risen 0.6 ± 0.2 °C over the 20th century, and that it is very likely that "Most of the warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities". The increased volumes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) released by the burning of fossil fuels, land clearing and agriculture, and other human activities, are the primary sources of the human-induced component of warming.
Observational sensitivity studies and climate models referenced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predict that global temperatures may increase by between 1.4 and 5.8 °C between 1990 and 2100. The range of uncertainty is primarily the result of the difficulty of predicting the volume of future carbon dioxide emissions, but there is also some uncertainty about the climate sensitivity.
A number of points in the argument are not quite as settled as many assume, but even if you fully accept all the premises of the Global Warming advocates, there are two major parts of the debate that have been simply ignored.
Al Gore has made a movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, advancing his belief that the Earth's fate is in doubt. A rather uncritical article by Howard Finemen at Newsweek and a fawning interview by Eleanor Clift ironically titled 'At Some Point, Reality Has Its Day' offer evidence that while Al Gore may be a "true believer" (a frightening thought) the subtext is that the powers-that-be in the Democratic party see him as their best chance to block Clinton II and recapture the White House in 2008. New York magazine features a 9 page spread on Al Gore, The Comeback Kid, which I slogged through looking for nuggets of insight:
Gore explains that his “life post-politics” consists of five major strands There’s teaching: He lectures at Middle Tennessee State University and Fisk University. There’s technology: He sits on the board of Apple and serves as a “senior adviser” to Google (a hopelessly vague connection that is rumored to have netted him millions of dollars by way of Google stock). There’s Current TV, his youth-tilted, user-driven cable network. There’s Generation Investment Management, an equity fund run by London moneyman David Blood (the former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management) and former Gore aide Peter Knight, who describes its philosophy as “trying to push the capital markets towards long-term thinking and sustainability.” And then there’s the crusade against global warming, which is clearly first among equals.
I voted for Gore in 2000 and I think there is a good case to be made that Global Warming, whether or not entirely from man made causes, and our reliance on imported oil, are serious problems which we will need to deal with in the years ahead. However, there is something a little vertiginous about the entire campaign to return an enhanced awareness of Global Warming to center stage. The whole affair seems to be an orchestrated campaign to change the subject, to deflect our attention from the fact that Iraq is emerging from war into representational government, the public supports the government's efforts to take aggressive action against terrorists, and both parties share in the corruption in Washington; none of these issues are likely to be effective as bludgeons to use against Republicans in 2006 or 2008; maybe an accusation of impeding the fight against Global Warming will work.
The MSM and the Democrats need ongoing disasters if they are going to unseat the Republican majorities in the Congress and ultimately regain the White House.
Nowhere in the articles or interviews is there any sense of the urgency of the problem; where should we rank Global Warming on a list of problems including such things as Iran, Islamic fascism, China's growing military and threats to Taiwan, North Korea and their nuclear weapons, etc? Is Global Warming a greater and more urgent problem than all of those things? Even if you agree that the sea levels are rising 1mm a year and the temperature may go up 1.4 - 5.8 °C by 2100, where do you rank the urgency of this particular problem?
Furthermore, nowhere is there any mention of currently possible techniques that could change the global atmospheric CO2 to any significant degree; in fact, there is almost no discussion of recommendations for action, just some typical boiler plate (decrease gas and oil usage, duh!) If I follow the reasoning of Al Gore and his minions, we are facing a life-threatening emergency in Global Warming for which they offer no recommendations and overshadows every other problem facing us in the world today.
Finally, there are plenty of comments establishing Gore's anger, his feelings of being robbed of the presidency in 2000, of the Presidency being his birthright; additionally there are numerous opportunities for Gore to explain how Bush has made a disastrous mess out of everything he has touched (Iraq, Katrina, torture, NSA wiretaps, etc) but nothing at all about how Gore thinks we should approach other pressing issues. Aside from how disastrous it is, Gore has no thoughts about straightening out the Iraq mess, but the strangest and most disturbing omission is any mention of the other "I" word, Iran, which is doing everything it can to get our attention: [
Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boasted Wednesday that the Islamic republic had mastered the entire nuclear fuel cycle and that it would give an "historic slap" to any attacker.
"Today, Iran has mastered the entire nuclear fuel cycle, from start to finish, thanks to young Iranian scientists," the president said in a speech in the southwestern border town of Khorramshahr.
KMaru has a great deal more at his post on the implications of this news.
I know it would be a bit much to expect friendly journalists who are deeply involved in the rehab of Al Gore to ask such pointed questions, but their lack of curiosity is impressive.
Perhaps they never ask because they already know that the best way to solve the Global Warming problem is to do nothing about Iran. Then we can either watch them jack the price of oil up to the stratosphere, which will increase gas prices, cause a global depression, and decrease the use of fossil fuels; or we can have a nuclear exchange with Iran, which will jack up the price of oil, probably cause a global depression, and decrease the use of fossil fuels.
Recent Comments