How Conservatives Destroyed the Environment

[Naked Gents Rut]

Manhattan, Venice, Shanghai, Calcutta and numerous other cities will be under water.

Venice is the only one to miss on that list.

[Darius871]

don't you live in Manhattan?

[Victor Galis]

Venice was doing just fine when temperatures in the northern hemisphere led to conditions where Scandinavians would colonise Greenland.

I'm not sure those temperatures were higher than what we have today though.

So build a big wall. Lots of coastal cities and regions are below sea level. Aren't you guys in favor of stimulative public works projects? Build the Manhattan dike. Make New Amsterdam more like Old Amsterdam. It makes more sense to fix a problem when it arises than it does to imagine problems that don't exist and pushing through insanely expensive programs to fix what ain't even broken.

Does insurance make sense? Preventive medicine?

The only question is how expensive is prevention compared to fixing after the fact. This is a question that can't even be asked when one side is still in denial.

[Naked Gents Rut]

don't you live in Manhattan?

Yes. I speak from experience.

[Felch]

Does insurance make sense? Preventive medicine?

The only question is how expensive is prevention compared to fixing after the fact. This is a question that can't even be asked when one side is still in denial.

Fine. Quantify it already. I've got no problem with sound and rational policy. But spare us the theatrics.

[Victor Galis]

Manhattan, Venice, Shanghai, Calcutta and numerous other cities will be under water.

Venice is the only one to miss on that list.

To be fair only lower Manhattan would flood. I imagine the popularity of building a dike to protect Wall Street would be rather low at the moment.

[The Mad Monk]

Former astronaut speaks out on global warming
By Associated Press
Sunday, February 15, 2009 - Added 1d 4h ago

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SANTA FE, N.M. - Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn’t believe that humans are causing global warming.

"I don’t think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect," said Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York.

Schmitt contends that scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.

"They’ve seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming," Schmitt said.

Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration.

Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making."

Williams said Heartland is skeptical about the crisis that people are proclaiming in global warming.

"Not that the planet hasn’t warmed. We know it has or we’d all still be in the Ice Age," he said. "But it has not reached a crisis proportion and, even among us skeptics, there’s disagreement about how much man has been responsible for that warming."

Schmitt said historical documents indicate average temperatures have risen by 1 degree per century since around 1400 A.D., and the rise in carbon dioxide is because of the temperature rise.

Schmitt also said geological evidence indicates changes in sea level have been going on for thousands of years. He said smaller changes are related to changes in the elevation of land masses — for example, the Great Lakes are rising because the earth’s crust is rebounding from being depressed by glaciers.

Schmitt, who grew up in Silver City and now lives in Albuquerque, has a science degree from the California Institute of Technology. He also studied geology at the University of Oslo in Norway and took a doctorate in geology from Harvard University in 1964.

In 1972, he was one of the last men to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 17 mission.

Schmitt said he’s heartened that the upcoming conference is made up of scientists who haven’t been manipulated by politics.

Of the global warming debate, he said: "It’s one of the few times you’ve seen a sizable portion of scientists who ought to be objective take a political position and it’s coloring their objectivity."

___

Information from: The Santa Fe New Mexican, http://www.sfnewmexican.com
© Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/national/general/view/2009_02_15_Former_astronaut_speaks_out_on_global_warming/srvc=home&position=recent

[Dis]

at this point I don't know what to do. I heard google searches cause global warming too. And it's just distressing. What am I supposed to do? live in a cave? But even my methane emissions are contributing to global warming.

Seems like the only way for me to cut global warming is to kill myself. But instinct prevents me from doing that.

I simply refuse to live in a cave. I support carbon restrictions, but they'd have to be pretty severe to fix what we've already done.

And lastly, I'm an optimist. I like to think once the oil runs out, things will eventually get back to normal (may take thousands of years, but it will).

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece

[Imran Siddiqui]

I heard google searches cause global warming too.

Well, **** that then... let the world die

[Agathon]

SANTA FE, N.M. - Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn’t believe that humans are causing global warming.

That would be former Republican Senator Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, who is a notorious far right conservative. There's a good book called The Men Who Fell to Earth, which will tell you a lot of what you might want to know about him.

I'd be wary of saying that astronauts are the font of all wisdom. Jim Irwin went looking for Noah's Ark, and Ed Mitchell believes in UFOs and New Age mysticism. Schmitt is sane compared to those two, but he's still a bit of a political operator.