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I’m not sure why people are having such problems dealing with factual reality.
Whether it be the gender-queer crowd and their patented ability not to understand that sex and gender are not the same thing or here today with this story about the head of the EPA not accepting the fact that CO2 is a significant green house gas and pumping more of it into the atmosphere threatens human existence as we know it.
“The new head of the Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday he is not convinced that carbon dioxide from human activity is the main driver of climate change and said he wants Congress to weigh in on whether CO2 is a harmful pollutant that should be regulated.
Pruitt, 48, is a climate change denier who sued the agency he now leads more than a dozen times as Oklahoma’s attorney general. He said he was not convinced that carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal is the main cause of climate change, a conclusion widely embraced by scientists. “
What the ever living frak is this malarkey? Predictably, scientists are call Pruitt’s bullshit for what it is.
“Scientists immediately criticized Pruitt’s statement, saying it ignores a large body of evidence collected over decades that shows fossil fuel burning as the main factor in climate change.
“We can’t afford to reject this clear and compelling scientific evidence when we make public policy. Embracing ignorance is not an option,” Ben Santer, climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in a statement.
The Supreme Court unleashed a fury of regulation and litigation when it ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases are an air pollutant that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Two years later, the EPA declared carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be pollutants.
Pruitt said the Supreme Court’s decision should not have been viewed as permission for the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.
“Decisions were made at the executive branch level that didn’t respect the rule of law,” Pruitt said in his Houston speech.
Pruitt has previously said the EPA should not regulate CO2 without a law passed by Congress authorizing it to do so. The Republican-controlled Congress could potentially issue a strong signal to the EPA that carbon dioxide should not be regulated by the agency, a move that would undermine many Obama-era rules aimed at curbing emissions.”
When Florida is mostly underwater, then – maybe – these people will understand what AGW is.
Some of us have the strange need to grease the skids toward our doom by climate. Bill Nye describes his experiences with these fools.
Oh hey, extra bonus – how to convince a republican about AGW.
We are on course to have a ice-free arctic during the summer months. This is yet another indicator of traumatic warming of our world due in part to our activities and policies. The climate is changing rapidly and a new dynamic equilibrium is being established.
“Waves rearing as high as the second-floor windows of a building have been detected in the Beaufort Sea for the first time.
Arctic waves are normally kept in check by sea ice, which has traditionally covered large areas of the Arctic Ocean even in the summer. But warmer temperatures as a result of climate change are melting away more and more of that ice.
A wave gauge deployed in the Beaufort Sea in the western Arctic in 2012 has already measured some of the consequences, recording wave heights of almost five metres during a September storm.”
Daaaamn, waves in the Arctic Ocean – here is the bit on the positive feedback loop being established.
“Those waves, in turn, may gain enough power to smash away more sea ice, generating a “feedback mechanism which drives the Arctic system toward an ice-free summer,” they wrote in their paper.
In his blog post on the website of the American Geophysical Union, Thomson added, “Bigger, more powerful waves could also accelerate erosion of the Arctic Ocean coasts, which are already breaking down rapidly from the effects of climate change and melting of permafrost.”
The stories about the changing climate are often mixed in with stories about companies contemplating the new shipping routes that will become available and the resources that can be exploited once the ice is gone.”
The gradual nature of AGW is the perfect villain in this situation precisely because of our human tendencies toward short-term thinking.
Short term thinking will be the end of us.
This is what we get for not changing the system that is killing us – a half-assed, piecemeal romp toward oblivion.
“Richard Smith, in a tour de force paper published in the Real-World Economics Review, “Green capitalism: the god that failed,” summed up the dilemma:
“[T]he problem is not just special interests, lobbyists and corruption. … [Under] capitalism, it is, perversely, in the general interest, in everyone’s immediate interests to do all we can to maximize growth right now, therefore, unavoidably, to maximize fossil fuel consumption right now — because practically every job in the country is, in one way or another, dependent upon fossil fuel consumption. … There is no way to cut CO2 emissions by anything like 80 percent without imposing drastic cuts across the board in industrial production. But since we live under capitalism, not socialism, no one is promising new jobs to all those … whose jobs would be at risk if fossil fuel use were really seriously curtailed. … Given capitalism, they have little choice but to focus on the short-term, to prioritize saving their jobs in the here and now to feed their kids today — and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.” [page 121, March 2011]
“Green” enterprises will not be granted an exemption. They, too, will be pushed by market forces the same as any other enterprise. Dr. Smith writes:
“Biofuels, windpower and organic crops — all might be environmentally rational here or there, but not necessarily in every case or forever. But once investments are sunk, green industries have no choice but to seek to maximize profits and grow forever regardless of social need and scientific rationality, just like any other for-profit business.” [page 142]
All the more is that so for the capitalist system as a whole. Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, in their book What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, write:
“ ‘Green capitalism,’ even if products are produced using the utmost environmental care and designed for easy reuse, offers no way out of a system that must expand exponentially and thus continue to ratchet up its use of natural resources, its chemical pollution, its contaminated sewage sludge, its garbage, and its many other toxic substances. Some of these ‘fixes’ will probably slow down the rate of environmental destruction, but the magnitude of the needed changes dwarfs these approaches.” [page 120]”
Signed, Sealed and Delivered. Climate denialists, the exit is over there on the right. Ta-ta.
Isn’t being on a run away train fun?
I’m amused. The denizens of Bullshite Mountain just *will not* give in to reason. We are messing with the earth’s climate and the best the right wingnutz can do is blame the government for attempting to infringe on their right to destroy biosphere. I’m thinking that when New York is underwater, and Florida an undersea park, then… then we might start getting stuff done when it comes to maintaining our environment. Jon Stewart attempts and fails to remain apolitical when the crazy overwhelms him and forces his hand. One cannot just *not* comment when the weapons grade stupidity is being fired full auto on the air waves.
Not to sure how long the ytube vid will last, so here is the video on Raw Story with the vid hosted elsewhere.
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