In one of the best (and concise) editorials I’ve read recently from a major daily newspaper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution yesterday ripped into President Bush and his administration regarding their lies about Global Warming:
If the scientific “debate” over global warming was reduced to a game of strip poker, the Bush administration would be wearing its boxer shorts right now. The president and his advisers have tried every gambit imaginable to trump mounting evidence that human activities are dangerously heating the planet, but they keep drawing a losing hand.
(continued below the fold)
At first, they mostly dismissed the dire warnings as environmental hysteria. When that no longer worked, they insisted global warming was a function of strictly natural processes. After hundreds of climate studies concluded otherwise, the White House resorted to bluffing; Bush has conceded that humans are partly responsible for the problem, but wants to indefinitely defer taking decisive action until additional studies of the causes and effects of global warming are complete.
Last week, the first of 21 studies commissioned by the administration was released by researchers with the federal Climate Change Science Program. Read it and weep: After studying the temperature at the Earth’s surface and its inner atmosphere, they discovered “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.” Furthermore, the study states that burning fossil fuels for energy was the major factor in the higher-than-normal temperatures that have been recorded over the past 50 years.
Imagine that. Bush commissions a study by our government scientists, and it actually determined that his administration has been dead wrong on the issue of Global Warming. In other words, Bush got undressed by his own hand picked climate scientists. I guess they didn’t get the memo. Still, the study is out there. So, how did the Bushistas respond?
The White House said the report showed that President George W Bush’s decision to spend nearly $2 billion a year on climate monitoring and research was working.
However, officials cautioned that it was only the first of 21 assessments by the Climate Change Science Programme, which was set up in 2002 to tackle “unresolved questions”. They said the administration remained committed to studying the other questions and to using voluntary rather than compulsory means to slow the growth in carbon emissions.
Oh yes, Bush’s plan to monitor the environment is working all right. That is, if you define “working” as “stalling” or “delaying” taking any action on Global Warming. Certainly it is working to the benefit his friends in Big Oil and in Saudi Arabia who are raking in monster profits these days. Imagine how much larger their profits will get while Bush’s 20 other studies wind their way to completion.
His plan ain’t working for you and me, though. It ain’t working for the folks on the Gulf Coast and in Florida preparing for another hurricane season and hoping it won’t be as damaging as the last one. And for anyone who depends on glaciers and snow melt for water reserves, it sure ain’t working. Just ask the people in Tibet and China, where drought and sandstorms will soon be a perilous reality because the glaciers that feed the great rivers of East Asia are melting away.
But then, as we learned last week at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, President Bush is a better comedian than anyone else on the planet. So laugh at his “global warming success” strip tease routine, if you will. Just remember, however, the joke’s on all of us.
Also available in Orange.
Study the issue to death, while doing nothing… A trick Bush learned from his father and Ronnie…
Nice to see that W’s teflon continues to peel even faster than the climate is heating, though.
Excellent as always, Stephen – thank you!
and keep raking in the bucks. Years ago (1980s) I had a friend who was a plant manager for a chemical company. They had a huge pile of asbestos they’d been ordered (by a court) to clean up. Every year he managed to delay it was worth millions to the corporation, and he got major bonuses.
In the meantime, it’s our home they’re ruining with their life-threatening feces.
It ain’t working for the folks on the Gulf Coast and in Florida preparing for another hurricane season
Hell, I’m not even on the Gulf Coast or in Florida, I’m 100 miles inland, and I have ridden out 3 hurricanes in the last 2 years and experienced power outages of at least a week each time. As someone who lived for decades on the coast, this is completely outside of my past experience; there is no way it is natural. We need to start fixing it asap, not when 20 more studies are finished.
Here’s a study I’d suggest: have Bush put on those boxer shorts & take a healthful camping trip up to our region for about a week. (After all, what’s one more vacation?) He can remain camped out as our daytime temperatures bounce back & forth between 70 and 38 F — it won’t take long.
Apparently, it’s not ‘warming’ we’re looking at, exactly — but the type of wildly fluctuating weather we’ve experienced this year.
Personally, I know no one who hasn’t conducted their own informal study of these changes — at no cost to you.
It’s here & now, folks — we’re seeing it every day.
At the very least they could increase mileage standards. All they need is for one of the studies to be ambiguous and they’ll seize on that for the next 2 1/2 years. Hes a do nothing president unless the plan is so flawed and stupid that he sees himself in it and acts. Like invading Iraq or extending tax cuts you know shit that makes absolutely no sense. Criminal bastard.
The sad fact in current debate about global warming is in the universal reluctance to even discuss the major contributor to the problem: THE GROWTH OF AVIATION IN THE WORLD. Washington has decreed that any news reporter that even hints at linking Jet engines to global warming will be trucked off to a Texas hunting trip with the VP. This is the biggest, most dire problem that the human race has ever faced. If we don’t immediately curtail commercial aviation, the human race will be DESTROYED. Just visulize this: for a 24 hour period, take a count of all the commercial jet planes (airlines) which have been in the air throughout the world. (We can assume that the count is in the tens of thousands.) Now assume that each aircraft has two large fan jet engines, and then pick a nominal fuel consumption rate of gallons per hour being burned, and double it (for two engines). Now multiply the pounds of jet fuel per hour by the number of planes in flight for the 24 hour period. This exercise will give you some idea of the mega-tons of pollution (CO2, H2O, NO2, SO2,CO) constantly filling the upper atmosphere around the earth. Check the many reference sources on the net; one is “Toronto’s Air Apparent” and their report titled “Flying is dying”. Another is Northwest Environment Watch which has a report estimating the CO2 emmissions in pounds per passenger. Check it out at http://www.nothwestwatch.org. Let’s get real folks!!