Hi, Vic; thanks for the pleasant comeback. Taking your points, if one can call them that, in order:
"what you brand as hypocrisy of people like Gore." Uh, what would you call it? Maybe you have a better description.
"neo-conmen of your own extreme right wing of politics." Wow; you must be gifted with extrasensory perception, knowing how I vote. FYI, I have always voted for the person - both in local, state and federal elections - whom I believed at the time to offer the best policies, irrespective of party. E.g: Carter (first election I was eligible to vote)
Democrat; Mondale
(Dem.); Bush 1
(Republican), Dukakis
(Dem.), Clinton
(Dem.), Bush 2
(Rep.)
"if opinion polls show it is popular." Opinion polls right now show that most people in the USA, having been given only one side of the story, are concerned, or very concerned about climate change.
The media - both press and TV - here is overwhelmingly left-wing and also overwhelmingly push what Rick called "the sky is falling" point of view, usually without any mention of the scores of scientists worldwide (including in OZ), including eminent climatologists and meteorologists, who say that global warming either:
a) may be happening but is simply part of a normal cycle that has been going on since the planet was formed, is caused by variations in solar output, volcanic eruptions and other natural phenomena, and mankind has no more influence on it than he has on earthquakes; or
b) it is not happening at all (unless you call less than half a degree F in 50 years signs of doom).
Gore's
An Inconvenient Truth movie has been condemned by the same scientists as bogus, exaggerated and misleading. A movie puncturing Gore's fakery ("Convenient Lies") was screened in Britain last year, but the "sky is falling" movement, which has now become BIG BUSINESS, has so far prevented its showing here, and I guess down there too. Some schools and colleges here are
requiring students to watch screenings of the movie, and in come cases will be given a failing grade unless they write the "correct" answers in tests.
As just one of scores of fallacies: Gore repeats the lie about CO2 levels causing warming; however, the graphs he shows in the movie are doctored to prove a pre-arranged conclusion. What they don't show is:
a) CO2 level increases
follow, rather than preceed, warming (climate warming increases vegetation decay processes, the products of which are CO2 and methane, itself a much more potent greenhouse gas);
b) the greatest increase in CO2 levels was during the 30 years from 1945 to 1975, during which global temperatures
decreased;
c) although glaciers are retreating in some places, they are expanding in others,
including your next-door neighbors in New Zealand, and in many places in the Arctic and Greenland where they are retreating, they are also growing more thick;
d) glaciers have been expanding and retreating since the dawn of time. Much of N. America is sculptured by the expansion and retreat of glaciers, including the Great Lakes and even Central Park in New York City, where today you can touch boulders that were pushed ahead of them by glaciers from thousands of miles up north, then left there like prehistoric monoliths.
e) far from Gore's film's scary scenes of millions of square miles of land disappearing as the seas rise by 20 feet, most responsible scientists state that the maximum that could ever happen is a rise of maybe 12
inches , and even that is unlikely. Take a glass of water, fill it to 1/2 inch from the top, and then float some ice cubes in it until the water reaches the brim. When the ice melts, how high has the water risen? Not at all, of course.
And many of the "global warming" scientists (and other, non-scientist alarmists) were predicting
global cooling, even the earth entering another ice age, just 30 years ago.
For a good exposure of this nonsense, read Michael Crichton's book
State of Fear."
Bush has been excoriated for not signing the Kyoto Treaty. However, that treaty requires only developed countries like the USA (and OZ) to cut back on carbon emission and fossil fuel use. "Developing" (i.e. backward) countries like China and India are excluded. However, look at satellite pictures of the earth and you will see a brownish-yellow smudge, starting in India and gaining strength over China. That is caused by the millions of coal-burning fires in homes and power stations. Those two countries, excluded from Kyoto, are building, or planning to build, 2,200 new coal-fired power stations by the end of the century (that is, two per month); at the same China's automoble and truck pollution is expected to increase by a factor of 15. Do you see them being condemned in the UN? No, of course not; that is reserved for the USA and other western countries, despite the fact that China's automobile pollution increase alone will negate all the reductions by all the western nations combined, and is projected by the International Energy Agency to become the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases by the end of this year. Two weeks ago China's economic planning agency released a 62-page report rejecting calls to slow this growth.
If you don't like "political rhetoric and ideology," why do you read it? As soon as you saw the subject matter, why torture yourself? Why not just click off? That's right, I said
click off.
