Weather Channel founder calls global warming a scam. Read more here:
http://www.startribune.com/462/story/1544776.html

JoeAnne's concern about global warming included some Spam. The short pointless annoying message she includes is from one of those Florida based on-line pharmacies.

That raises the question of whether the only purpose of the comments was to sneak one by the editors. Her comments on global warming conveyed little understanding of the issue. She attempted to warm the hearts of global warming extremists by reciting their mantra, before directing them to a website that offers a product to people addicted to Oxycontin.

Was this a legitimate post, or clever marketing?

All right, let's continue. But first a shout out to Mayor Young -- you don't know it, but you sat just to my right at the first half of tonight's EPHS football game. I considered saying hi but figured you just wanted to enjoy watching the Eagles rack up yet another kick-a win. Woo hoo! (I was the one with the squirmy 4 year-old girl belting out Little Mermaid and Garth Brooks songs.)

So let's look at your third question: costs.

First, before I say *anything* else, I want to address the fear that obviously underlies your question. Clearly, asking the question at all implies that you are very (rightly) concerned about being fiscally responsible and not impinging on individual liberties. In the back of your mind I imagine are images of tree-hugger environmentalist-types, demanding that the federal government be used to ram costly solutions down our throats, like it or not, personal freedom be damned.

Well, as much as I love the outdoors, I am no tree-hugger. I have friends and relatives who ARE (one who even got Pres. Clinton to create a national monument: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade-Siskiyou_National_Monument) and I love 'em to death, but I've come to grips with the fact that I am not really of that pattern. Climate change to me is not an environmental issue. It is national and global security issue first, a moral issue second, and a business issue third. Also, I have a libertarian streak a mile-wide. So rest assured, I, too, am tremendously concerned with costs and would want any infringement on personal liberties to be measured with extreme care.

So...cost. The honest answer is that I don't know and that is because I don't have a full solution mapped out. No individual could, really. But here are some important thoughts:

- First, I reject ethanol or similar bio-fuel type solutions. I really don't think they play into the solution at all. There is no need to worry about using crops that could otherwise feed people or livestock from my corner.

- Second, the solutions need to go after the biggest carbon emitters. Forcing people to use more economical light bulbs may conserve electricity, but that is only an issue if the production of the electricity causes carbon emissions. I have only praise for those who voluntarily choose to reduce, reuse, and recycle...but that is not going to get us to where we need to be. We need to be positioned so we have cheap, and extraordinarily abundant electricity for all -- with no carbon emissions.

- Third, I believe that nuclear is the only current technology that offers a solution for that need. That is not to say we should not pursue wind, geotherm, solar, etc. But nuclear can get us to where we need to be NOW.

- Fourth, the cost of building, securing, overseeing and maintaining nuclear facilities will be great, no doubt. But as I noted above, these should not be government projects. These should be primarily private enterprises with government participating to secure and oversee. The latter should not be underestimated. If we as a nation are truly going to become strategically dependent on nuclear, then we need to secure our nuclear facilities with the military, and we need to have STRICT and TRANSPARENT oversight to force the private power companies to adhere to design and maintenance rules and remediations. Other than that cost, however, let private investors build and profit from the facilities. The most important thing government can do here is get out of the way.

- Fifth, by choosing to go nuclear, we as a people will owe a debt to the people of Nevada who will be asked to bear the burden of underground storage of the waste. We must spend whatever it takes to make Yucca Mountain a safe storage solution and we may be morally on the hook to relocate people living nearby if they feel uncomfortable living in proximity to the site. We can afford to treat these people right and we must never adopt the attitude that Nevada is just a wasteland, anyway. Having lived there for three years myself I can assure you, it is not.

- Sixth, I think it is probably just a reality that regular fuel-based cars and trucks will be the norm for at least another 10-15 years. The government cannot reasonably ask individuals to ditch the investment they have made in their current cars. So, as electric and hydrogen based cars and trucks slowly become the norm (mine will be the Tesla, thank you: http://www.teslamotors.com/) and the free market cost of gasoline will help you to voluntarily "choose" to go electric or hydrogen, the government needs to sponsor a project to deal with the carbon that current cars and trucks emit.

What I have in mind here are activities to sequester this carbon dioxide. One of the most interesting proposals I have seen comes from Gregory Benford, professor of physics at UC Irvine and author of some of the best sf you will ever get your hands on (http://www.gregorybenford.com/). He writes about his idea in an Amazon Short here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000CBT7PQ/qid=1132469075/...). The idea, in a nutshell, is to bury farm waste (corn stalks, etc.) in the deep ocean where the sequestered carbon will be retained for about a thousand years. He estimates that burying just the US farm waste could capture 33% of all carbon emitted today, not even factoring in a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions if we go nuclear. The two together might solve the problem through the remainder of the century.

Of course, the government would have to pay to transport and bury the farm waste (who else would?). But I can easily envision opening a carbon sequestration market: let the government set the demand side of the equation (how much carbon to sequester), and let private companies compete to devise ways to meet the demand (and burying farm waste is only one of many ways to do this). The government would certainly have to pay the suppliers (with taxpayer money), but fostering competition and innovation would ensure that the government does not itself get into the carbon sequestration business and would get the best, most cost-effective solutions. The money to pay (and, again, to OVERSEE) these vendors, I believe, could come directly from spending cuts to the military budget. This IS a security expense and it is really more suited to the security environment of the 21st century.

(Personally, if I were to make a go at this, I would envision creating great dirigibles to haul the farm waste. This would reduce the carbon emissions due to transportation and would make pick up and delivery much simpler. You could even color the upper surface of the dirigibles to reflect sunlight, incrementally reducing the Earth's albedo and helping that much more. But now I am drifting of into sci-fi again, aren't I?)

So...cost wise, I can't give you exact costs. This isn't a formalized plan that is ready for that yet. But in general, I think a solution can be tailored so that much of the expense is born by private investors who will ultimately reap a profit, and the rest, while definitely a tax-payer bill, would not be as costly as we might think, and could come from cutting existing costs elsewhere in the budget.

And as far as costs to personal freedom -- let's agree to keep that as low as possible.

(P.S. I want to add one thing here: one reason that the tree-hugger socialist environmentalist image haunts our collective imagination is because there is a terrible lack of imagination in our science fiction, especially the SciFi portrayed in films (because I know no one will read real sf). The best scifi we have on TV today is probably BattleStar Galactica, and while it is admittedly a brilliant show that illuminates much about human character, it speaks nothing to the pressing science problems of our day: climate change, energy, science education, proliferation of WMDs and religious-based terrorism, pandemics, genetics research, (real) space exploration, and the interplay of science and politics, for a few. An idea I have long wanted to pursue is to produce a show similar in format to PBS Mystery! that would allow today's best sf writers to unleash scripts that DO delve into these issues. The power of real sf is the power to expand how we see our real, present world. If anybody wants to go in with me, let me know!)

Tommy, I'll need more time to understand the econonmics of nuclear. My impression is that it does turn a healthy profit for companies like Southern Cal Edison...but I need to research that further. Also, I would envision the creation of a consortium of power companies coming together, under federal mandate, to create a standard powerplant design that could be suited to each site. Having a production-line nuclear design would reduce costs all around, making the business case all the stronger.

That said, I would emphasize that I am indeed in favor of pursuing ALL forms of renewable energy that do not contribute greenhouse emissions.

I have driven many times through that California wind farm that you see in all the commercials and that is a thrilling sight, more of which I would love to see. HSBC uses geothermal energy to heat and cool its newer buildings. An Edison project (http://www.edison.com/pressroom/pr.asp?id=5885) that looks extremely promising is the development of a Stirling Engine capable of powering over a quarter-million homes. (Apparently the project looks good to some folks other than just me, too: http://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/2008/04/100-million-into-stirling-en...). (Never heard of a Stirling Engine? See my remarks above about the dearth of imagination from our storytellers.)

These and others like them must absolutely be encouraged and, where it makes sense, subsidized. These REALLY are keys to our national security, because not only do they move us towards the energy independence we so desperately need from a security standpoint, but they are also the technologies we can safely EXPORT to developing nations. Nuclear may be an option for our own use, but I can't conceive helping other nations to develop it. We need these alternatives to offer to other countries as a safe way to help them provide clean power for their peoples. By sharing these technologies, we not only protect the planet and help avert disaster, but think of the diplomacy they represent!

In the end, though, the thing I would want to stress is this: under no circumstances may we morally entertain half measures. I believe that non-nuclear solutions are just that. They simply will not provide the power that you know we as a country will consume. Half measures not only fail to address the climate crisis, but they risk lulling us into complacency, thinking that we have addressed it.

The climate crisis must be solved overwhelmingly. We do it, and we do it BIG. In my present opinion, nuclear is the only way to ensure this victory.

Ok, Peter, on to your 4th and 5th questions.

They are actually related, so I will respond to them together. Your question #4 asks for a cost-to-degree formula, and your question #5 asks whether trying to target a cooler global climate is really such a good idea.

Since, as I've indicated above, I can't give you a cost but only a strategy for keeping costs low and in the private sector as much as possible, I will not be able to give you a cost-to-degree formula, either. But it gets worse. It's not just the cost side of the equation that I don't have a concrete answer for. Peter, what we are talking about here is no less than terra-forming Earth -- and we do it without the absolute certainty you crave as to what effects we will bring about.

I freely admit it: this is terrifying stuff. If you don't already feel the terror in your gut at the thought of what I'm talking about doing, then look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:As08-16-2593.jpg. That's it, folks. We got no where else to go. If we screw her up, the show is over. And, yup, we're talking about tinkering around with the ATMOSPHERE without positively knowing what will happen.

But ladies and gentlemen, the news is that that experiment has been underway for over a century and a half. We're already terra-forming Earth, and we did so with an ignorance that makes our present uncertainty pale by comparison. What we are talking about doing is the UN-doing of the unwitting experiment we've been conducting for so long now.

You know, there are two approaches to this. What I've proposed above is a passive approach: NOT putting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. There are also active approaches: taking active measures to cool the Earth directly. Active measures would include things like deliberately increasing the Earth's albedo by, say, dispersing huge clouds of sulfur ash to reflect the incoming light from the sun. Think I'm joking? Think again: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/12343892/can_dr_evil_save_the_wor.... Scared now?

At our present stage in the crisis, I believe the measured and reasonable thing to do is to stop putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, immediately. The active approaches simply cannot be risk-justified (thankfully). But that is for now...do nothing for too long, and they may be our only shot. So how can I "be sure" that taking measures to cool the global climate will be a good thing? Again, there is no way to "be sure." But staying our present course is far more likely to lead to catastrophe, and by taking the measures I've recommended above, we can at least throttle our impact should the planetary system throw us a curveball. (We haven't even talked about curveballs, but they may be in our future. Example: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/MediaAlerts/2008/2008052826907...)

BTW, Peter, if we are ever farming Greenland, we will be doing it only after a catastrophe of unimaginable horror will have occured. The ice on Greenland is just that: ON Greenland. When Arctic ice melts, it does not raise sea-level since it was already IN the ocean. But if the Greenland ice fully melts, then you really will see sea-levels rise in the way Gore depicts, with all the accompanying human death and suffering.

And that may not be all.

Ice, of course, is fresh water. If you were to have a rapid melting of Greenland ice into the Atlantic, you would thus wind up with a region that would be locally less salty. But fresh water and salt water have different densities, so having a local region that is less salty would very likely affect the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream acts as a barrier keeping arctic waters from northern Europe. Shut down the Gulf Stream, let those waters in, and despite the fact that the global climate would be warmer, northern Europe would be plunged into a true ice age. This is precisely the scenario Kim Stanley Robinson describes in his Forty Days trilogy (http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/07/stanley_robinson_q...). Is this sure to happen? No. Is this a possible scenario. You bet.

So please: watch what you wish for.

What if it turns out that the whole thing is a crock?

In the buildup to the war in Iraq, the argument was that our intelligence supported the belief that Saddam had developed weapons of mass destruction, especially biological weapons, and that he thereby posed a direct threat to us as he might share them with al Qaeda or similar terrorist organizations. Personally, I was very torn. The "evidence" that Colin Powell presented to the UN clearly was not sufficient to establish the presence of WMDs "beyond a reasonable doubt," but combined with Saddam's history of defiance toward the UN plus the unspeakable destructive power that WMDs represent, I reluctantly concluded that there was a "preponderance of evidence" that justified the invasion.

You see, I hope, where this is going...

We humans are fallible. Even when we try our best, using our best tools and processes, we make mistakes. Could the science of climate change be wrong? Sure. But our best is just that, our best. It is what we HAVE to go on. The whole premise of the war in Iraq was based on a mistake. That does not mean that we should not have done what we did. We did what we did based on our best knowledge at the time. We must do the same now for climate change. Let's just hope -- as I firmly believe -- that our scientific community will have done us better than our intelligence community.

Tyranny of the Urgent

Today's Oct 16 issue of the Wall Street Journal has an article entitled "Costs of Curbing Global-Warming Emissions Are a Tough Sell in U.S., Europe Amid Economic Disruption and Financial Uncertainty." A blogger copied it here:
http://cquestor.blogspot.com/2008/10/climate-effort-could-be-stalled-by....

The "urgent" is often at odds with those things we otherwise would say are our highest priorities. The "urgent," in this case, is our economy -- and in this case, the "urgent" is not only pressing but also quite properly of high priority. Climate change, I would argue, trumps even the economy in terms of priority, though (which is NOT to say that solutions to one must negatively affect the other -- it is not a zero-sum game). The clear danger is that climate change does not carry with it the psychological sense of urgency that the economy does.

My only point here is that navigating priorities in a circumstance where a high-priority item is also urgent is going to be a VERY delicate balancing act. We should all stand ready to help our leadership with this in whatever ways we can.

Much to respond to, so little time.

The first point of disagreement is whether global warming is happening at all. Is the planet heating up? Does the earth have a fever? So far your answer is: Some people think it is.

Great. The obvious response of course is: Many people do not. 31,000 scientists including 9,000 with PhD’s have said that AGW is a false religion. I’m told that the list of skeptics even includes two notable Twin Cities meteorologists.

Hmmm . . . are they all crackpots? Are they all just being paid to say that by big oil? We'll explore that more at that another time . . . .

So -- Are we in a crisis? Is the earth burning up? Do we need big government socialists to save us from the impending doom?

Let's start with the IPCC -- the U.N panel that is primarily responsible for promoting the current global warming hysteria. They say that the earth has warmed up about 1C over the past century. An average of all 38 standards from the IPCC shows that it is expected to rise about 0.2C in the next decade.

But the data coming back is actually showing that things are BETTER than expected. Hooray! The models are wrong! According to at least three of the four global metrics -- GISS, HadCRUT, UAH, and RSS -- global temperatures have pretty much been cooler than expected. Temps are actually cooling slightly (between 0.01 and 0.1C per decade).

Even more important, the temperatures of the world’s oceans have been dropping for the past four years where we have measurements. And no one seems to know why. We know that temperatures in our relatively thin atmosphere can change quickly, but no one knows why the oceans are cooling.

We hear that the Arctic sea ice is disappearing. It’s true - it is. The Northwest Passage is now open for the first time since the year 2000. But most serious scientists attribute this to a wind pattern known as "arctic oscillation" -- a wind pattern that does not allow build-up of old ice. And we almost never hear about the other side of the earth -- did you know that the ice in the Antarctic is actually growing?

The IPCC has already had one of the big theories they were promoting blow up in their face. Remember the infamous "hockey stick" model? It turns out that it was an enormous hoax.

We are told that because of AGW, the sea levels will rise. According to Al Gore, they will rise 20 feet or more. Wooo -- scary! Yet according to the IPCC, they see a rise of less than 2 feet over the next 100 years -- and they keep having to revise their estimates DOWNWARD. We have had satellites measuring sea levels since 1992. They have indeed shown a slight increase of about 1 inch per year. But in the last two years, the sea levels rises have actually leveled off and even dropped slightly. This is great news! Why aren’t we being told about this wonderful new development?

And what is this we hear from your friends at NASA? Are they telling us that average global temperatures are cooling? Rejoice! The earth has broken its fever. Welcome to the new ice age. Take that money you were planning to spend on carbon credits and go buy yourself a parka -- you'll need it!

Even the Farmer’s Almanac, that venerable annual compilation of astronomical calculations, says that we will be having a cooler than normal Winter this year.

So -- if I can prove to you that global warming is indeed NOT happening -- or at least is nowhere near the catastrophic dimension that Gore and others are screaming about -- then can you and all the other socialists leave the rest of us alone? Can you stop trying to ruin American industry and kill American jobs? Can you stop taking tax money to subsidizes expensive energy like wind and solar and ethanol? Can you stop blocking attempts to drill for oil domestically? Can you let us finally please take off that silly state moratorium on cheap clean nuclear power (Minnesota is the only state in the nation to have a complete ban on even CONSIDERING nuclear)?

Can we get Al "live as I say, not as I do" Gore to take some of the enormous wealth he has amassed --from his film and his speaking engagements and all those bogus carbon credit scams -- to pay off some of your and my family’s Winter heating bills? Can we stop banning light bulbs? Can we get that peace prize back?

I’ll have to get to the question of AGW -- the idea that MANKIND and not the sun is the PRIMARY cause of global warming -- at a later time.

The central theme of the Copenhagen Consensus -- and the part that you are apparently ignoring is the idea of scarcity as an economic concept.

Let's put this in perspective. The theoretical framework the CC gave themselves was a budget of $18.75 billion per year (http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Admin/Public/DWSDownload.aspx?File=%2...). The 2009 US defense budget alone is $515.5 billion, not including an additional $70 billion to support Global War on Terror activities (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/pdf/budget/defense.pdf).That is, the CC gave themselves about 3% of the real-world US defense budget. Come on: scarcity of resources is not a real-world issue here.

What's more, the CC's theoretical priority was to determine how best to spend their theoretical budget to "advanc(e) global welfare, and particularly the welfare of...developing countries." This is a noble goal and I have no issue with it. It is not, however, the priority guidance of the US government.

Yes, in the judgement of the CC there are investments that have a higher cost/benefit payout and that's where they spend their $18.75 billion. But as the authors of the challenge paper assert, if you fail to invest on the global warming challenge, it will "seriously compromise efforts to ameliorate other challenges." They spend their money first on the low-hanging fruit. No problem, but unless someone else tackles the big problem, in the end the value of that "fruit" gets seriously compromised -- because the people who would eat it are dead.

I'm not saying we as a country should ignore the goal of "global welfare" -- our national security is, to some significant degree, directly related to it. But we have a particular interest in addressing climate change precisely because it is one of the legitimate roles of government to intervene for the common good when other entities are not incented to do it. It's icing on the cake that doing so not only solves the problem of exporting billions to hostile countries, but even yields a hard-cash profit to private investors.

All that said, the CC solutions *are* brilliant. Any charity worth its salt should be challenged by them, and in fact I will use this list for guidance on my own charitable givings.

P.S. The hit count on this thread just topped 42k. Pretty soon it will dethrone factchecker.

NASA: Methane On Rise After Decade of Stability
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=35802

Summary:

The amount of methane in Earth's atmosphere shot up in 2007, bringing to an end approximately a decade in which atmospheric levels of the potent greenhouse gas were essentially stable...

"This increase in methane is worrisome because the recent stability of methane levels was helping to compensate for the unexpectedly fast growth of carbon dioxide emissions," said climate modeler Drew Shindell at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "If methane continues to increase rapidly, we'll lose that offsetting effect."...

Given that methane is about 25 times stronger as a greenhouse gas per metric ton of emissions than carbon dioxide, the situation will require careful monitoring in the near future to better understand methane's impact on future climate change.

The article provides two speculative causes but indicates that further study is needed to determine exactly why this is happening.

For this post, I would like only those who already do agree that carbon dioxide emissions are a factor in global warming to read on. If you don't agree with this, then all that follows will be moot.

First, take a look at the EPA's personal emissions calculator:

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/wycd/calculator/ind_calculator.html

When I run the numbers for my 4-member family, I come out to about 39-40 thousand pounds of emissions per year. (A factor that helps my numbers that probably is not available to many people is that my job can be performed remotely and my employer is amicable to letting me work from home quite a bit. That cuts out a 24-mile roundtrip commute for me 15-20 times per month, leaving the bulk of our car emissions to hauling the kids around to their various activities.)

My numbers look about like this:

• Car emissions: 26% of total emissions
• Natural Gas burn emissions: 29% of total emissions
• Electricity emissions: 39% of total emissions

I'd also point out that the reasonable efforts we take to recycle yield no more than a 4% reduction in emissions. We've already done the easy stuff in our home. Any further reduction in emissions is going to be hard.

Now, the Union of Concerned Scientists writes that

Several recent analyses have concluded that, to avoid dangerous climate change, the United States and other industrialized nations will need to reduce emissions at least 80 percent by mid-century, compared with 2000 levels.

It's unfair, of course, to expect that this means an 80% reduction to each individual, but try working that math on your personal emissions results. You'd have to do something about the cars (and even if you got yourself a Tesla or a Clarity or even a Prius with a plug-in modification, some of the burden will simply shift from your auto emissions to your electricity emissions), you'd probably have to find an alternative to natural gas for heating your home, and...what the heck are you going to do about the emissions caused by generating the electricity you consume? Consume less electricity? Seriously, how much less can you possibly consume, especially if you are plugging in your car or hydrogen fuel compressor each night?

The point I'm coming back to is that we as a country will need to find a solution to deliver at least as much electricity as is currently demanded if not more, and in a way that does not generate greenhouse gasses. And I snipped off part of the Union of Concerned Scientists sentence. They add to the end of the sentence above

—and that national and international policies must be in place within the next 5 to 10 years to achieve this ambitious outcome.

I'm going to keep coming back to this: nuclear is our only available technology that will solve for the given problem. It is a far-less-than-ideal solution, but the conversation now must turn to how to make nuclear power and store nuclear waste as safely as possible. Any waivering or hoping for pie-in-the-sky solutions is just ignoring the problem constraints and wasting precious time. I'm going to start posting thoughts about things we can do.

Some links:

• Union of Concerned Scientists whitepaper on Nuclear Power in a Warming World; includes a concise Executive Summary with important recommendations on nuclear waste storage, banning nuclear waste reprocessing, and nuclear plant design
  http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear-power-in-a-...
• NASA/JPL/CalTech's updated Global Climate Change website
  http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/
• DOE to seek second permantent nuclear waste storage site and/or expansion of Yucca Mountain
  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27582900/

" It may be time to question politicians who want to put us on a path to economic ruin."

That time came and went; it was the election on November 4th. And voters natinwide overwhelmingly rejected Republican economic failures and elected Barak Obama.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed last Friday at 8,497 - a 338 point loss from the day before. The 52 week high was last December 11th - 13,850. So, what were the Reaganomics Disciples - Art Laffer, Ben Stein, et al - saying on the talking heads circuits prior to the meltdown? Link here, to watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

Our economy is in the toilet - and Reaganomics put it there. "Trickle-down" doesn't work; it never has and it never will. The economic mess President Obama will have to clean up is just like the economic mess President Clinton had to clean up when he took office, only worse. Much worse. Republicanism has destroyed the economy, and the recession will not be pretty. Place the blame squarely where it belongs - Republicans that refused to face reality.

Peter, your post is just silly. Here is a well-stated response to Christopher Booker's piece in the Telegraph: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/mountains-and-mole.... (I won't point out that Booker is also the guy who thinks asbestos is chemically identical to talcum powder, but that's so. He's obviously an intellectual giant.) I suppose you can be excused for worrying about this stuff...you may have gotten it from such a noble source as -- hmmm -- the minority side of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Wow. How could a guy like Inhofe possibly be in the minority? Peter, I think we found your playbook.

It's ironic that NASA's "error" was discovered the same week that the NBC Today show is running a series of global scare reports. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2008/11/17/scare-mongering...

We should expect that as Barack Obama gets closer to move-in day at the White House, that Global Warming Hysteria will begin to die down. Just as homelessness and the aids epidemic disappeared from nightly news reports, once Bill Clinton was elected President.

There is definitely something awry in the media, when the original reports make big news, but the subsequent discovery of erroneous data does not. It really isn't "silly" or something to "chuckle" about. It is good news, unless you're so caught up in the politics of the issue - that you take this personally, as a defeat for a cause in which you've placed so much faith. (Do you get upset when people refer to "An Inconvenient Truth" as a dramamentuary?)

Politics aside, you should be happy to know that the life expectancy for polar bears just went up!

What's silly, Jagu, is to think that an error on one data point is significant. If you think it is, you just don't get it.

Liberals Take Private Jets to Inauguration of Global Warming President
By Bob Ellis on January 20th, 2009

Don’t you love these liberals and their stark hypocrisy?

They whine and moan about people’s SUVs and electrical power plants causing global warming…while flying their private jets to attend the inauguration of the new High Priest of Global Warming (though Al Gore may still wrestle President Obama for that title).

From the Wall Street Journal:

According to an article in Bloomberg, as many as 600 private jets were expected to touch down in D.C. for the inauguration. The runway at Washington Dulles was closed Saturday to allow as many as 100 small planes to park. And the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority said it expected a total of 500 small jets to land from Jan. 16 through Jan 21.

Good thing anthropogenic global warming is a total farce, or we might be much closer to doom after today.

Of course, sacrifices are really for the little people. After all, the elites need all the modern trappings in order to be able to effectively tell us what’s good for us. If they were not aided by these technological marvels that are too good for the rest of us, we the unwashed masses might become more lost and further harm our precious Earth Goddess.

How comforting to know that the liberal elites will bear the burden of the tremendous guilt which must come with flying in these private jets. They save us from the burden of such guilt, even as they attempt to save us from ourselves.

http://www.dakotavoice.com/2009/01/liberals-take-private-jets-to-inaugur...

http://www.youtube.com/user/wonderingmind42

Marketplace: Nuclear power a less toxic subject
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/03/27/am_nuclear_was...

Synopsis: A recent Gallup poll finds nearly 60 percent of Americans support nuclear power. It now produces about 20 percent of the country's energy....Developing more nuclear power could be a challenge without a long-term plan to store nuclear waste. Especially now that President Obama has scaled back funding a nuclear waste dump in Nevada. (Why do you suppose he did that? See my Oct. 27th post above with the link to Sen Harry Reid's website: http://reid.senate.gov/issues/yucca.cfm)

MSNBC: MN Senate gives initial OK to new nuke plants
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29901542

Well, clearly my ability to follow the news lags by at least a few days...

The day BEFORE I posted the note above about what the House had done a week prior, the Senate on 4/2 overwhelmingly (42-24) passed an amendment to S.F. 550 (an omnibus energy bill) that would lift the ban on new MN nuclear power plants. 20 of 21 Republicans and 22 of 46 Democrats voted in favor of the amendment.

From the article: Sen. Amy Koch, R-Buffalo, who said lifting the moratorium was one of her main goals for the legislative session, has high hopes that the House and Senate will come to an agreement and send the legislation to Gov. Tim Pawlenty. "I think the people of Minnesota have been speaking," Koch said. "It wasn't just a little win, it was 42 to 24."

Additional Source: http://www.senate.leg.state.mn.us/briefly/floor_display.php?filename_typ...

So, I'm nobody when it comes to understanding how the politics of this must play out, but here are a couple of thoughts -- if anyone reading understands this better, please correct me:

1. Republicans almost universally support nuclear power; Democrats tend to be split just shy of 50-50.

2. In the House, there are 47 Republicans and 87 Democrats. If the measure to lift the ban gets past the Group of Twelve Who Would Protect Us From Ourselves, then if the stats above hold, there would be about, say, 45 Republicans and 42 Democrats who would favor lifting the ban. That is 65% of the House (close to that Gallup poll again), so one would think the measure would succeed.

3. We already now know the sentiment of the Senate.

4. So, I would estimate that the chances of seeing joint legislation going to the Governor are pretty good.

5. All that said, lifting the ban would be just the BEGINNING. The real work still remains: we must know that whatever means for storing the waste must truly be acceptable, and we must have solid confidence in the regulations that would govern any new plants, before any new plant should be authorized.

On the waste question, since the President has all but killed Yucca Mountain, we are basically committed to onsite storage technologies. I'm going to start plunking around to get a better understanding of what's out there. Not strictly relevant to that issue, but here is a cool video of the 1984 British train crash test of a train carrying a nuclear waste flask: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHtRZ_k0s7M

I'd say Obama is about 10,000 years too late to save Lake Agassiz.

You think the Red River Valley has a water problem now? Take a look back to when the area was covered by frozen water!
http://mrbdc.mnsu.edu/mnbasin/fact_sheets/valley_formation.html

What caused Agassiz to melt? Was it an incease in solar output, or greenhouse gases?

Agassiz itself was actually just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended) compared to the glaciers that covered North America 20,0000 years ago. What happened to all that ice, was it harvested to make igloos?

William Wood, is anyone working on a thermostat for the sun?