"Too hot to Handle"

I watched this awsume show last week end. They do large scale experiment to test enviromental theories in combating global warming.

In theory they can totaly reverve global warming caused by excess CO2 in a matter of a few years.
This can either be done with the pumps tested in this show or my just dumping man-made fertalizers into strategic places in the ocean at the right time of year.

The only down side is... your messing with the ocean and who knows what you could screw up thats even worse than global warming...

Anyone else watch the show?

Brian.

In theory is right!

All we need is the government trying to run the climate like they run, Fannie May and Freddy Mac, government schools, social security, wars... The only thing they excel at is wasting our money!

Deron.

Umm..

Despite Sarah Palin's unschooled, uneducated, unsophisticated opinions, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were, until last week, PRIVATE entities; there is no such thing as a "government school", unless by that you mean "not home schooled"; social security works just fine, thank you, despite the Republican fear mongering; and finally, you certainly can't judge the US's ability and moral authority to wage wars by the last eight years. We have a monkey in the White House; this is not the norm.

The mess we are in in the United States is quite obviously completely owned by the Republican party and its efforts to "drown government in the bathtub". This is the conservative philosophy, and we are watching its final and complete failure play out before us. The current finanicial crisis in the U.S. is 100% because of 28 years of deregulation.

It's not that government itself is hopelessly incompetent; it's that Republican governance is hopelessly incompetent. When a central article of your philosophy is "government is bad", that leaves you in a pretty awkward place trying to actually RUN one. As David Brooks said in the New York Times today:

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn't just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

It is important to understand what is going on here. It is important to understand that everything we're witnessing right now is the direct result of the final FAILURE of the entire conservative philosophy.

The completely-insane-from-the-beginning conservative doctrine of "government can't do anything right, let's kill it" is RESPONSIBLE for the current problems. And here conservatives are still talking about the liberal press and government-is-evil as though Jimmy Carter is still president.

In the U.S. we are locked in a death struggle to see if the stupid have finally outbred the intelligent. We will see in November. After seeing how easily Americans can be distracted by guerilla theatre (the Palin debacle) I have no assurances.

Dangit, I come here to get AWAY from politics! ;) Back to voltage!

As a geologist and eath scientist, I'm still not 100% convinced that human activity is the sole cause of global warming, but I'm pretty sure Sundog has the right take on the political situation we're in at the moment.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were, until last week, PRIVATE entities; there is no such thing as a "government school", unless by that you mean "not home schooled"; social security works just fine, thank you, despite the Republican fear mongering; and finally, you certainly can't judge the US's ability and moral authority to wage wars by the last eight years. We have a monkey in the White House; this is not the norm.

Fannie and Freedie were never private, the are Government Sponsored Enterprises http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_sponsored_enterprise.

Government is the funding source for public education, and those schools are beholden to the Dept. of Education. That fits my definition of being a government school.

Social security will work just fine until it doesn't, which is not that far away. Surely you are aware of the coming funding crisis in Social security and Medicare as the Baby boomers retire?

Neither Republicans nor Democrats have moral authority in my book. Bush may be the worst example, but Democrats aren't that great either.

The completely-insane-from-the-beginning conservative doctrine of "government can't do anything right, let's kill it" is RESPONSIBLE for the current problems.

Sorry, but government GREW under the Bush administration. Republicans talk about shrinking government, but don't actually do it.

It's easy, as I heard said in an earlier report I heard a month or so ago. It's known how much oil is being burned by humans and it's known the amount of carbon that goes into the atmosphere from burning that oil, and the increase in CO2 levels match the amount burned by humans pretty closely. Therefore human activity is shown to increase CO2 levels.

I agree that the CO2 increase is primarily caused by human activity, especially burning fossil fuels. I would agree also that CO2 is strongly correlated with global average temperature. It's hard to argue against that after having looked at the graph of CO2 vs. temperature like the giant graph Al Gore stood in front of in "An Inconvenient Truth". However, correlations are not causality. Could it be that rising temperatures cause an increase in CO2 levels?

Although not their primary cause, atmospheric carbon dioxide also plays an important role in the ice ages. Antartic ice core data show that CO2 concentration is low in the cold glacial times (~190 ppm), and high in the warm interglacials. (~280 ppm); atmospheric CO2 follows temperature changes in Antartica with a lag of some hundreds of years.

Data correlation and model simulations indicate that solar variability and volcanic activity are likely to be leading reasons for climate variations during hte past millennium, before the start of the industrial era.

Any guess where I got the above quotes? They are both from the IPCC Working group 1 report (2007), pages 449 & 450. This shows that the correlation is the reverse of what is commonly thought: increasing temperature is the likely cause of increasing CO2. If you look closely at "Gore's graph", you will notice CO2 levels lagging temperature as noted above. The 2nd quote also shows that past climate variation has never been shown to be caused by CO2 level increases "until the start of the industrial era", and I might add, until we attempted to model climate based on our limited understanding of climate.

Humans have certaily polluted our planet, and it must stop if we are to survive and thrive. There are lots of good reasons to reduce and eliminate our use of fossil fuels without invoking global warming. Reasons like:
- Long term sustainability (Peak Oil)
- Reducing pollution
- Energy independence.

Because Global Warming is the 800 lb gorilla (threatens our survival), well meaning people have latched on to the idea. What happens if we do something stupid like mucking up the oceans, or putting permanent aerosols into the atmosphere because of this theory, only to have the temperature go down due to natural causes? Like most people on this forum, I care about the environment, but it would be better if we did the right things for the right reasons. I would like to see more critical thinking about this issue.

Sundog

"The Federal National Mortgage Association, nicknamed Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation, nicknamed Freddie Mac, have operated since 1968 as government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). This means that, although the two companies are privately owned and operated by shareholders, they are protected financially by the support of the Federal Government. These government protections include access to a line of credit through the U.S. Treasury, exemption from state and local income taxes and exemption from SEC oversight."

Not so private when we get to bail them out and congress has control over them.

Not only that there has been a lot of kickbacks and influence pedaling going on with these government sponsored enterprises, take a look the information is not that hard to find.

Don't get me started on Government run schools, where they excel at wasting our money and increasing drop out rates! Yeah, sure, lets send our kids to a Government run school where the drop out rate is as high as 1 in 3.

You can not blame the people "We" elect. It's the people of this country that are so self centered that they are willing to elect someone who can get them what they want, not someone that is going to do the right thing for this country as a whole. "Screw everyone else, as long as congressman Joe Blow brings home my: checks, jobs, subsidies, SSI, unemployment, welfare... I will be happy".

Deron.

You can not blame the people "We" elect.

That's true. One reason I won't vote.

George Carlin had a skit about that as well. ;)