Global Warming: The Fight's About Policy, NOT the Science

What's the saying- something like "It's hard to get someone to understand the facts when his wallet requires him not to"? The sad fact is that big money interests have taken over the Republican talking points machine. They disregard the science because it is in their best interests to do so. To pretend that pulling out sequestered CO2 in the form of fossil fuels and rereleasing it into the atmosphere is the same as cow farts is disingenuous in the extreme. Or rampant ignorance. Yes, there are natural cycles, but just like a long handle on a wrench increases the torque, the addition of millions of tons of greenhouse gases will throw these natural cycles out of kilter. It is very sad that the Republicans have staked out the anti-science position.

chickaree wrote: What's the saying- something like "It's hard to get someone to understand the facts when his wallet requires him not to"? The sad fact is that big money interests have taken over the Republican talking points machine. They disregard the science because it is in their best interests to do so. To pretend that pulling out sequestered CO2 in the form of fossil fuels and rereleasing it into the atmosphere is the same as cow farts is disingenuous in the extreme. Or rampant ignorance. Yes, there are natural cycles, but just like a long handle on a wrench increases the torque, the addition of millions of tons of greenhouse gases will throw these natural cycles out of kilter. It is very sad that the Republicans have staked out the anti-science position.

As archer would say SCOURCE Please!

BTW: EPA Declares Human Breath (CO2) a Pollutant
Written by Thomas R. Eddlem Monday, 20 April 2009 11:00
The EPA on April 17 proposed new regulations to control carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other “greenhouse gases” as “pollutants” under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act. While not mentioning what aspects of carbon-dioxide emissions will be regulated, the carbon dioxide emitted from automobiles and power plants is definitely on the regulation block. The first step toward costly and far-reaching regulations is that the EPA establish carbon dioxide as a regulatory “pollutant,” even though all plants need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and all animals exhale carbon dioxide.
In fact, about 8 percent of man-made worldwide carbon dioxide emissions are due to simple human breathing. The EPA says they do not want to regulate this activity … for now. But there's no chemical difference between CO2 emitted from a gasoline engine and that emitted from a human lung.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech-mainmenu-30/environment/1022

WE MUST KILL 8% of PEOPLE TO HELP SAVE THE EARTH....

1 year earlier:
EPA Chief Says CO2 Output Not a Factor in Approving Coal Plants
By GreenBiz Staff
Published December 21, 2008U.S. EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has issued a memorandum saying that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant that is subject to regulation when approving new power plants.

Johnson’s 19-page memo last Thursday produced a swift reaction from the Natural Resources Defense Council, which said the finding flies in the face of a November decision by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board rejecting the same line of reasoning Johnson laid out in his memo.

“It’s a marvel to behold an EPA action that so utterly disdains global warming responsibility and disdains the law at the same time,” said John Walke, director of the NRDC Clean Air program, in a statement. “EPA’s administrator is defying the agency’s own judges, the Clean Air Act, and the course of history that recognizes the urgency in tackling global warming.

Scientifically, WHAT CHANGED in a year?

Do you honestly believe that pulling out andreleasing fossilized CO2 will have no effect? We evolved on a planet where all these greenhouse gases were locked away. Think about a river with a dammed reservoir. Sure the river downstream floods and recededs as part of it's natural cycles, but what happens when you open the floodgates at the top during a flood cycle? Would you really want to be living next to it the? Is it your politics or you reason that makes you so determined to ignore the science? This is the biggest area in which I feel my party has failed. Facts have no ideology. Science has no party. To adamantly deny the obvious is inconceivable to me. Now what the left wants to do about it is what has me shaking my head. Cap and Trade? What a farce.

Correct me if I'm wrong chickaree, but haven't they started intentionally flooding the river below the Hoover Dam because they came to realize that the flooding was a necessary part of the health of the river? That preventing the floods from occurring was more damaging to the ecology of the river than the floods were? Haven't we also come to that same conclusion regarding the forests and fires? That being the case, might we infer from this that the sequestering of the CO2 from the environment is unhealthy as well for the ecology of the planet? Given that the current era represents one of the most impoverished atmospheric CO2 levels ever to occur on the planet, why wouldn't a higher, more normal level. be preferred to the impoverished one that exists?

Wow! Willful ignorance on parade.

lol :pop Ignorance on parade. I thought I saw a naked emperor.

Yep that's me, willful ignorance. If the planet can have an ice age lasting thousands of years with CO2 levels exceeding 4000 ppm (compared to less than 400 ppm today), I'm pretty certain there is something that regulates warm or cold to a greater extent than CO2 concentrations TM. One of the (many) reasons I remain unconvinced currently that, due to the closed nature of our system, releasing a fraction of the volume of the sequestered carbon back out into the atmosphere is going to cause the end of the world as we know it. The last 400,000 years are among the coldest the plant has ever experienced and one of perhaps as many as 3 times that the CO2 concentrations have been this low. Given the history of the planet over the last 500 million years or so, according to all the scientific data collected thus far, we are living in an abnormal period, not a normal one. Calling me a name won't change that fact.

On one of the series about Earth, there was a segment describing how our planet was a completely frozen ice planet for several million years. I wonder what the CO2 levels were then.

Here is a link:

http://www.say2.org/naked-science-snowball-earth/01.htm

you could be wrong PS....you have to read ALL the research before reporting your opinions as fact, not just the ones that agree with your premise.

if CO2 truly raises global temperatures, how could an ice age have occurred when a greenhouse effect much greater than today’s was in full swing?

The answer: This particular ice age didn’t begin when CO2 was at its peak -- it began 10 million years earlier, when CO2 levels were at a low.

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/earlyice.htm

<crickets chirping>