We’re So Fucked.

Goddamn.

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As much as I hate giving any conservatives any kind of real ammunition, the accuracy rate of these environmental scientists have been about as high as any republican think-tank regarding the Iraq War or the US economy.

Another day another fear.

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So it’s either this or the Hadron Collider.

I’ll take the LHC, please.

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Couldn’t you just, like, you know…

Light a match?

I’ve actually been wondering about that myself. I remember visiting a landfill as part of my biology courses in college and watching them burn off the escaping methane.

I’m sure it’s completely unworkable due to the sheer scope of it, but it’d be good if we could just collect the methane or burn it off somehow.

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The methane would be dissolved by the ocean, and then be released over a very large area. Very difficult to collect and burn off.

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Well fuck me gently with a chainsaw!

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So, here’s what I’m thinking.

We get some sharks, right?

And we get some lasers, you follow?

We put the lasers… on the sharks’ heads. The lasers light the gases wherever they are, and problem solved!

Amirite?

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Andrew.

I really hope that the GOP trolls that occasionally show up don’t show your idea to McCain/Palin’s campaign. I think they’d be crazy enough to try if they win (though that seems a little less likely now). 😉

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Another nerd board I’m on has a smug conservative providing this little treatise on how Global Warming is bunk. I would like to ask your well-researched help in refuting it, if possible.

“More than 31,000 scientists, including many of those that participated in the IPCC report and won Nobel Prizes right alongside Al Gore, that agree that ‘Global Warming’ is not a manmade phenomena, and that there’s no convincing evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or any other greenhouse gas that is causing or will anytime in the foreseeable future cause any kind of catastrophic heating of the Earth’s climate. (http://www.oism.org/pproject/)

Beyond that, since the IPCC report came out several years ago, that same panel had to be reconvened to figure out what was wrong with thier dire predictions when, instead of temperatures going up, temperatures began dropping. (http://epw.senate.gov/public/)

Scientists announced that the world temperature peaked in 1998 and has been dropping since. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7329799.stm)

And, then the World Meteorological Organisation announced that we’d have Global Cooling throughout the year. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=557209&in_page_id=1770)

And, then they came out and announce that Global Warming had mysteriously gone ‘on hiatus’ until at least 2015. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/04/30/eaclimate130.xml)

3,000 robots were sent out into the oceans to measure water temperatures because the oceans are supposed to be the main indicator of global warming — mainly due to the fact that 80% to 90% of it involves warming ocean waters. There was no evidence of warming at all in the last 5 years. In fact, the robots were telling scientists that the ocean’s temperatures were dropping. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025)

We started having snow falling in places like Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Maui and India and other places that haven’t seen snow in a decades (or, in Iraq’s case, in a century) or more.

China, the Arctic, and other places throughout the Northern Hemisphere experienced an abnormally cold winter last year. Snow cover over China, North America, Siberia, and Mongolia reached a height it hadn’t seen in 40 years (http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=332289}, with China experiencing the most brutal winter its had in centuries.

Just last month, a scientist in Mexico — looking at data that scientists in Canada (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4248062.html) and Russia also observed — declared that we’d not only not experience any more Global Warming, but that we’d likely slip into another Mini Ice Age within two years (http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.milenio.com%2Fmexico%2Fmilenio%2Fnota.asp%3Fid%3D651680&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=es&tl=en), and that we should expect it to last from 60 to 80 years.

The Canadians and Russians started worrying about the ‘disturbing lack of sun spot activity’ way back in February, by the way. We haven’t had any significant sunspot activity since then, either. So, if you think it was a concern then, how much more of a concern do you think it’s becoming now?

But, hey, what do any of those guys know, right … ?”

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Actually, never mind. Somebody did it for me (I have no time for such things, only indignation about them). Apparently the very articles this guy linked to debunk most of the claims he made about them.

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This whole conservative effort to dismiss global warming seems rather short-sighted. Isn’t the parable of the knight and the monk relevant here? If global warming is a threat to drastically alter or extinguish life on this planet within the next century and we take serious steps to curb the problem, then we save humanity. If it isn’t a threat, then oh well, we helped conserve natural resources and made the air a little more breathable.

As always, this seems to be about money. The corporations who have money don’t want to squeeze their profit margins by investing in alternative fuel sources. The governments owned by these corporations refuse to take steps lest they lose their funding.

Nobody seems to realize the risk of doing nothing outweighs the rewards of doing anything.

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I’d point out one more thing, if I may:
Scientists announced that the world temperature peaked in 1998 and has been dropping since.
This may be technically true, but it’s highly misleading. Global temperature doesn’t necessarily just bump up every year–of course there are going to be variations, a miniature warming/cooling cycle. If you only look at temperatures since 1998 then yes, things are cooling down. If you look at them from a longer period you’ll see a distinct pattern of temperature increases even with fluctuations that have some years cooler than previous ones. See this blog post for a good discussion of this sort of thing: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/05/selective_data_and_global_warm.php

They also don’t mention that 1998 was an outlier because of an exceptionally strong El Nino that year–if you look at El Nino on Wikipedia, you’ll notice it says: “The El Niño of 1997-1998 was particularly strong and brought the phenomenon to worldwide attention. The event temporarily warmed air temperature by 3°F, compared to the usual increase of 0.5°F associated with El Niño events.”

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