"The FDA is a bought- or captured-agency -- I think that's accepted now."
"...the FDA is entirely pro-industry...."
"FDA is totally captured by the industry it's supposed to regulate."He also noted that since 2000 drug companies have paid $5B in criminal fines.
"I am frankly tired of hearing the same stories from the administration's national security team,'' [Hillary] Clinton told the AP. "The president changed his economic team, he changed his White House team - I think it's time for him to change his security and defense team."Let's get rid of the old fogey.
In the future, however, [the "just the facts" scientific backgrounder] just isn't going to be good enough. Over the next decade or more, explaining the possible strategies for coping with intense hurricanes even in the face of uncertainty about the ways and extent to which hurricanes might be changing will pose a major challenge for news organizations. Reporters must strive to show the public not only the science in all of its complexity, but also to open a window on why addressing the problem matters and the choices the nation faces over how to do that. This will require balancing the desire to appear objective against the need for precautionary and forward-looking coverage -- coverage that helps set the agenda for how we think about the possible effects of global warming. It will also require getting beyond the tyranny of relying on major new studies, personality conflicts, or overt political conflict as the primary means of defining what counts as newsworthy.In fact, a "just the facts" backgrounder is precisely good enough--unless you have an ulterior purpose--and getting in to the unscientific territory of the precautionary principle adds nothing to the basic situation. To be clear: it is still a legitimate scientific question about whether global warming is increasing hurricane intensity, and legitimate, well-meaning scientists differ on the question and have not yet reached a consensus. I can live with that. Unless you think media organizations should manufacture reasons out of whole clothe, that's how they should cover the issue--the precautionary principle is unscientific.
We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels," Robertson said on his "700 Club" broadcast. "It is getting hotter, and the icecaps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air."It's the height of summer--of course it's hot. Where was he last year, or three years ago, or when the IPCC TAR came out? What will he say when the IPCC 4AR comes out? Is he willing to go to the mat? What is he willing to sacrifice for the sake of cooler temperatures? His air-conditioning? His fancy car? Is he willing to call out his Republican colleagues when they fail to bring important climate bills to the floor? Is he willing to call out Joe Barton, Roy Blount, and James Inhofe for their unscientific remarks? What's Robertson willing to spend on this problem? Then we'll see if he's serious....
Isn't this a great looking mountain? It's Three-Fingered Jack, in central Oregon, with Mt. Jefferson in the background. 7841 ft. I bet that's a really great hike, especially near the top there.
"Minds in Distress" is a comprehensive examination of America's disordered psychology. Loewe, a therapist with nearly two decades' practice, bears witness to an alarming increase in mental-emotional disorders resulting from the clash between human genetics and a culture hell-bent on outdoing everyone at any cost. The result is shattered marriages, lost jobs, bankruptcy, anxiety, addiction, rudeness, road rage, skullduggery, and violence.
"Over fifty percent of the American adult population has a diagnosable psychiatric disorder," says Loewe, who suggests these aren't so much illnesses as natural reactions to a culture gone berserk: "Life conditions are changing at a rate which I believe defies the capacity of the human mind to adapt in a timely fashion."
"...increases in carbon emissions from higher air conditioning needs more than offset decreases in carbon emissions from reduced heating needs."If I had to guess, I would have guessed that way (I think). It seems to me more people live closer to the equator than farther away from it.
Since 1990, Multnomah County gasoline sales have increased by less than 1 percent, despite a huge increase in the number of vehicles registered in the county. The OSD used these fuel sales as a proxy for vehicle miles traveled and concluded that CO2 emissions from automobiles in MC have not increased much over this time period.... Also, the Oregon Department of Transportation estimates that total travel on state-owned highways within MC during the 1990-2004 period increased from 2.70 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) annually, to 2.99 million VMT, an 11 percent increase.I looked in to this a little early last month, and was told by the City of Portland's Office of Sustainable Development that the next update to this report would be "summer 2007 at the earliest."
Here's the thing about Floyd: he doesn't look guilty. Look at him in this picture, taken at today's press conference in Madrid. He looks confident. He's wearing the backwards cap just like always and he's smiling confidently, not sheepishly. He looks sure of himself. That says a lot, I think.ExxonMobil $10.36BWhat can you say? When your expenses stay about the same and the substance you're hawking goes up drastically in price, profits will rise. Unless you lower the price of your product. And who in this greed-forsaken world ever expects that to happen?
BP $7.27B
Royal Dutch Shell $6.3B
ConocoPhillips $5.19B
Chevron $4.35B
At least he wore the backwards cap. Floyd always wears the backwards cap and at least he's being consistent. He also says he's not guilty: “I would like to leave absolutely clear that I am not in any doping process,” Landis said in a news conference in Madrid today.What more can he say, really? What would YOU say if you weren't guilty and a test somehow said you were?
Landis said today that he, like many athletes, has naturally high levels of testerone. He also insisted that he has never been involved in doping and has high regard for cycling because it is a “clean” sport.
“I’m proud of the fact that I won the Tour because I was the strongest guy there,” Landis said.
Speaking from Europe on Thursday in a teleconference with reporters, Landis said a “disastrous feeling” swept over him when he heard about his positive test. He said he had never used performance-enhancing drugs and was mystified by the abnormality of his testosterone level.
One thing Floyd can do, it seems to me, is to have the same T(estosterone)/E(pitestosterone) test performed on him right now, and publicize the results. If it gives the same ratio, it's at least some evidence in his favor that he has a naturally high T/E ratio. (Why would he still be doping after the race?)
After hearing the news, the German television network ZDF said it might stop broadcasting the Tour de France because it had signed on to show a sporting event, not “the performances of the pharmaceutical industry.”
One recent Web column even put words in my mouth. I have never said that “the unexpected colder climate in Antarctica may possibly be signaling a lessening of the current global warming cycle.” I have never thought such a thing either.As Doran details on his personal Web page, this quote comes from an article by Cliff Harris of Coeur d'Alene Press, "Weather Gems: The current cycle of global warming may have peaked!"
In brief, unless a law is a grant of positive favoritism to a minority class, we apply the same constitutional analysis under the state constitution’s privileges and immunities clause that is applied under the federal constitution’s equal protection clause. DOMA does not grant a privilege or immunity to a favored minority class, and we accordingly apply the federal analysis. The plaintiffs have not established that they are members of a suspect class or that they have a fundamental right to marriage that includes the right to marry a person of the same sex. Therefore, we apply the highly deferential rational basis standard of review to the legislature’s decision that only opposite-sex couples are entitled to civil marriage in this state. Under this standard, DOMA is constitutional because the legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents. Allowing same-sex couples to marry does not, in the legislature’s view, further these purposes. Accordingly, there is no violation of the privileges and immunities clause.Yes, God knows, the human race would miserably fail to procreate itself if a tiny minority of individuals were allowed to love members of the same gender, the continued existence of the human race being in such precarious position and all. And logically speaking the the marital existence of all childless or post-menapausal couples should not be granted either. What a joke.
In Saturday’sTulsa World, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, reiterated his stated belief that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” by comparing it to the lies told by the Nazis during the Holocaust.Reminder: Inhofe is afraid to be interviewed by climate specialist Andrew Revkin of the New York Times and prefers to spit out his vile accusations via overly friendly media such as the Fox Network and home town newspapers.
In an interview, he heaped criticism on what he saw as the strategy used by those on the other side of the debate and offered a historical comparison. "It kind of reminds . . . I could use the Third Reich, the big lie," Inhofe said.
They're not the only ones: By the Lebanese official count, Israel’s attacks have killed more than 380 Lebanese.A family such as this should have the right, in a just world, to bring criminal charges against the Israeli state, via the U.N., and to extract both financial compensation from the state of Israel and criminal charges against the soldiers, commanders, and politicians who ordered, planned, and executed these deadly attacks.
I hasten to add that I am myself an opponent of American culture and polity in many of their current manifestations -- everything from Nascar to US Department of Agriculture subsidies, and plenty in between -- and yet I do not regard any victory of Islamic Jihad, whether in Iraq or Jordon or the subway tunnels of London or the skyscrapers of Manhattan, to be necessarily a good thing for the world.
AGU press release: "During the last 150 years, many mountain ranges in Europe have lost a significant proportion of glacial extent, with strong acceleration occurring in the past two decades. To quantify past, as well as potentia,l evolution of the area and volume of glaciers within the European Alps in the context of impending climate change, Zemp et al. characterized the system using on-site measurements, remote sensing techniques, and numerical modeling. They found that between 1850 and 1970, Alpine glaciers lost 35 percent of their total surface area; by 2000, almost 50 percent had disappeared. Their estimates also place current glacial volume at only one third of the 1850 value. Using models based on the rate of glacier loss, and predicted temperatures and precipitation levels over the next century, the authors determine that a 3 degree Celsius [5 degree Fahrenheit] warming of summer air would reduce the currently existing Alpine glacier cover by 80 percent. However, if temperatures were to rise by 5 degrees Celsius [9 degrees Fahrenheit], the Alps would be completely free of perennial surface ice by 2100.
Mark Graber, Balkinization:
Seems to me that the perfect compromise that might resolve the stem cell controversy is for the scientific community to agree to do research only on embryos that could possibly mature into terrorists. After all, our president who so emphasizes morality believes there is nothing immoral about torturing persons who are suspected of being terrorists, even in the absence of any legal procedure that even confirms the suspicions are reasonable (much less a legal procedure which convicts them of any crime). Our president who so emphasizes morality also finds nothing immoral about killing innocent civilians and children in military missions that also kill a certain number of terrorists. If we can torture and kill people suspected of terrorism or people who live near people suspected of terrorism, then surely we ought to be allowed to experiment on embryos that we suspect might have become terrorists.
Scott Kvernum of Williston, N.D., was in the stands at Denton Field as his son’s team played recently against Miles City.“We’re a home-run-hitting team with metal bats, but with the wood bats we don’t have nearly the same pop,” he said. “It takes a big, strong man to poke one out with a wood bat. That’s why I’d like to see us playing here with metal bats.”
His son, Devin, is a catcher. How would he feel if his son were a pitcher? “With metal bats?” he said. “Oh God, I’d be leery.”
Why is Scott Kvernum so incapable of identifying with the pitchers on his (and other's) team, regardless of whether his son is a pitcher or not? Is he just stupid? Can he not make the abstract association between the life of his son and the life of pitchers? Why can't he figure out that if his son were in danger as a pitcher, then all pitchers are in danger?
Scott Kvernum's stupidity, his lack of an ability to reason, seems responsible for the vast majority of human idiocy, it seems to me. Here human stupidity is summed up perfectly. We are at base just idiotic, selfish, self-interested, narcisistic neanthedals. Go ahead, try to prove me wrong. Just try it.
With this effort, the City is helping create demand for thousands of gallons of renewable transportation fuels, in order to spur market development of large-scale Oregon based biofuel production facilities to meet that demand.Is this a good idea? There have been a lot of newspaper articles here in Portland that have not really arrived at a conclusion, and the consensus seems to be that the city is taking this action before all the facts are in. I don't really know. Here's a UC Berkeley press release from January that concludes:
Producing ethanol from corn uses much less petroleum than producing gasoline. However, the UC Berkeley researchers point out that there is still great uncertainty about greenhouse gas emissions and that other environmental effects like soil erosion are not yet quantified.
"Despite the uncertainty, it appears that ethanol made from corn is a little better - maybe 10 or 15 percent - than gasoline in terms of greenhouse gas production."
The people who are saying ethanol is bad are just plain wrong. But it isn't a huge victory - you wouldn't go out and rebuild our economy around corn-based ethanol.
"The transition would be worth it, the authors point out, if the ethanol is produced not from corn but from woody, fibrous plants: cellulose."
There isn't much corn grown in Oregon (I think), so I imagine most of the ethanol produced in OR will come from (as the city's press release says) "oilseed crops like canola and mustard seed, that can be grown as rotational crops by Oregon farmers."
Heck, I don't even know if my car, a 2000 Ford Saturn SL1, will run on 10% ethanol. I suppose it will, or they wouldn't be passing this ordinance. Can any car that runs on 100% gasoline run on a 90-10 gasoline/ethanol mixture.
Unfortunately, only 22 of the 78 stem cell lines approved by President Bush remain, and many of those lines have been contaminated and rendered useless. But more than 400,000 frozen embryos exist in the United States and, through further research, may lead to cures for some of life's most malicious maladies -- Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancers and more.What could be more pro-life than that? Surely an "ethic of life" includes caring for the living.
Smith's reasoning? Parkinson's diseases runs in his wife's family. As an Oregon resident in favor of stem cell research I suppose I should be thankful for whatever it is that makes Smith in favor, but his reasoning somehow irks me. It shouldn't have to be that a Senator's wife is in medical danger before he comes down in favor of research that might someday save her (and many other's) life. (You can count Nancy Reagan in these ranks too.) The job of a representative is to understand his constituents needs and desires regardless of whether he has a personal stake in the matter. Even if his wife were not in danger of developing Parkinson's disease, thousands of his constituents would be and their desire to live is no less important than is his wife's. While I'm glad Smith is in favor of stem cell research, I'd somehow be more approving if it was based on the abstract reasoning that stem cells have the potential to help thousands of his constituents instead of the more selfish thinking it may someday save his wife.
...Y2K is real. Y2K is going to rock our world.People will consequently suffer. I don’t know how much. Some people may lose their lives - but more likely at the hands of a disabled medical establishment than because of civil disorder, loss of power, starvation, bad water, or other projected horrors (though these, too, are possible). Some will suffer the loss of fortunes, some of any income whatsoever, and many of something in between. Quite a few will find themselves suddenly without an occupation, and few ideas about how to make themselves useful to other people (without occupations themselves). Many will suffer a loss of comfort and modern convenience, and if that goes on any longer than a week, it may escalate into serious problems of public sanitation and infectious disease.
I have to admit that since learning about Kunstler's Y2K beliefs last week he's come down several pegs in my book. I mean, fool me once.... But fool me twice--I don't think so. The man seems to have a proclivity for doom, and seems determined to make money off of it one way or the other.
I think the world is probably due for some Peak Oil shortcomings--in 10 or 25 years--and that oil is only going to be more expensive in the near- and long-term future. But technology does adapt, as it did with Y2K. People adapt. Programmers recognize their code's shortcomings and fix it.
(And yes, it was possible to view the Y2K issue as a computing problem that programmers needed to fix, but which did not imply the end of the world. I wrote such a perspective in a now-defunct magazine in 1997: "The Year 2000: Software Hits the Wall," Internet World, January 1997, p. 68.)
Mostly I don't know whether Peak Oil will "rock our world." But Kunstler did (and does) claim to know, and after one massively blown prediction his stock falls considerably in my eyes. I won't view what he writes in the same way ever again.
"I don't think scientists involved with embryonic stem-cell research would care if they are excommunicated or not."
-- Cesare Galli of the Laboratory of Reproductive Technologies in Cremona, Italy (the first scientist to clone a horse), on the Vatican's vow to excommunicate stem cell researchers
The Task Force is intended to identify key short-term and long-term vulnerabilities and develop recommendations for addressing these. The Task Force is expected to produce a set of options and recommendations to City Council about how Portland can best prepare for constraints on the supply and affordability of oil. The recommendations will also address how to educate the public about this issue.I bet not many cities have one of those. So don't come crying to us when the oil runs out and you are unprepared and we here have it all figured out. We will just ask why you were twiddling your thumbs all this time, while going about our merry way.
If Al Gore were to be convinced that global warming WAS a natural phenomena, would he be so worked up about it? I don't think so, yet the consequences would be the same.Roberts replies:
If global warming is anthropogenic, we need to both stop exacerbating it and start adapting to the effects that are already inevitable. If it is natural, then we only need to adapt, since apparently nothing we do can affect the natural course of climate changes. OK?That's exactly wrong. Atmospheric physics does not change if the last 30 years of warming have been natural. The potential for carbon dioxide to heat the atmosphere is still the same, and we're still pumping it into the sky. Climate models still have the same validity they do today if the last 30 years of warming were natural. We'd still need to be just as concerned about the potential for ~3°C warming by 2100 due to the greenhouse gases we're putting into the atmosphere. In fact, if the last 100 years of warming were natural, we're even in worse shape, because we're pumping heat-generating gases into the atmosphere on top of a natural bubble.
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.
Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
That self-deception started early.
...We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too, of our government's lies.
How many times have we heard President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?
One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
...We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.
We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
Max Boot thinks we need more troops to achieve victory in Iraq ("Winning would do more than withdrawing," July 2). I have a suggestion: He could quit his job at the Council on Foreign Relations and do some fighting himself.The same goes for Andrew Sullivan, too.
Boot graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. He got a master's degree from Yale University in 1992, then worked for the Christian Science Monitor for two years. He then spent eight years at the Wall Street Journal and since 2002 he has toiled at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also has lectured at the Army and Navy War Colleges.
So here we have a classic desktop warrior. He has made a career talking about war, and now he wants to send even more troops to fight and die--while he keeps talking safely at home.
-- Per Fagerent, Southeast Portland
The Oregonian, July 6, 2006
Global is good.From the number of trackbacks on his site, it looks like a lot of people think he's on to something.Warm is good.
Even greenhouses are good places.How can "global warming" be bad?
I'm not being facetious. If the problem were called "Atmosphere cancer" or "Pollution death" the entire conversation would be framed in a different way.
The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.If you want more of this kind of thing, read Paul Davies' thoughts from awhile back, "The fight against global warming is lost" (click here and scroll down). Davies advocates that we adapt to global warming, but the problem with that is it sounds doable if you think that global temperatures rise ~2-4°C, but who says it stops there? I guess by that time we're supposed to have hydrogen cars and all, but the reality is that after petroleum production begins to decline we'll probably be using more coal than ever before. Even the IEA projects that--click here and scroll down and click on the first illustration link. And that only makes GW worse. So adaptation is a never-ending game where the temperature gets higher and higher and the problems get worse and worse....
The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.If you want more of this kind of thing, read Paul Davies' thoughts from awhile back, "The fight against global warming is lost" (click here and scroll down). Davies advocates that we adapt to global warming, but the problem with that is it sounds doable if you think that global temperatures rise ~2-4°C, but who says it stops there? I guess by that time we're supposed to have hydrogen cars and all, but the reality is that after petroleum production begins to decline we'll probably be using more coal than ever before. Even the IEA projects that--click here and scroll down and click on the first illustration link. And that only makes GW worse. So adaptation is a never-ending game where the temperature gets higher and higher and the problems get worse and worse....
...Thus the entire U.S. corn crop would supply only 3.7 percent of our auto and truck transport demands. Using the entire 300 million acres of U.S. cropland for corn-based ethanol production would meet about 15 percent of the demand.For good measure, they add a moral component to their argument:
Finally, considering projected population growth in the United States and the world, the humanitarian policy would be to maintain cropland for growing food -- not fuel. Every day more than 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes -- one child every five seconds. The situation will only get worse. It would be morally wrong to divert cropland needed for human food supply to powering automobiles. It would also deplete soil fertility and the long-term capability to maintain food production. We would destroy the farmland that our grandchildren and their grandchildren will need to live.These arguments from general energy principles would seem to dominate over enthusiasm for ethanol, as was highlighted in today's Boston Globe. Although this article primarily discussed cellulosic ethanol, not corn ethanol.
Pierrehumbert RT 2005: Climate change: A catastrophe in slow-motion. Chicago Journal of International Law, (in press) pdfIt's worth checking out. I hadn't heard of this guy Pierrehumbert, but he writes a lot of interesting things. Here puts the future in stark perspective:
...The situation is about to become much worse. In China, India, and the US combined, there are currently 850 new coal-fired power plants on the drawing board, and these will annually add some 681 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. By way of comparison, the signatories of the Kyoto Protocol (an agreement that the US declined to sign) will reduce their annual carbon emissions by only 131 million tons if they meet their targets. The 850 planned coal-fired plants almost irrevocably foreclose future opportunities to reduce carbon emissions.
People who were given a simple visual task while mildly intoxicated were twice as likely to have missed seeing a person in a gorilla suit than were people who were not under the influence.
Rolling Stone: And that has to be done within ten years?Where does this 10-year figure come from? Throwing in a cool term like "tipping point" doesn't give it any more heft. Maybe it comes from James Hansen. In his recent book review in the NY Review of Books, he writes:
Gore: No, we don't have to do all of it in ten years -- that would be impossible. What the scientists are saying when they give this dark warning is that we may have as little as ten years before we cross a tipping point, beyond which there's an irretrievable process of degradation.
...we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.This in turn comes from a statement he makes earlier:
Any responsible assessment of environmental impact must conclude that further global warming exceeding two degrees Fahrenheit will be dangerous. Yet because of the global warming already bound to take place as a result of the continuing long-term effects of greenhouse gases and the energy systems now in use, the two-degree Fahrenheit limit will be exceeded unless a change in direction can begin during the current decade. Unless this fact is widely communicated, and decision-makers are responsive, it will soon be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences. We have reached a critical tipping point.I've never seen this 10-year anywhere in the scientific literature, or this two degree figure. Carbon emissions are a continuum that rise by 1-2% a year. Nothing spectacular is going to happen to them 10 years from now--most likely they'll just be rising 1-2%/yr as they are now. Ice melts in a continuum. It melts basically the same at +1.5°C as it melts at +3.0°C. Species shift in a continuum. Sea level rises in a smooth and continuous fashion.
THOSE WHO CARE about the Constitution and the fate of American democracy should go easy on the champagne.Yes, it was immensely reassuring that the Supreme Court, voting 5 to 3, held that President Bush lacked the authority to create military trial commissions by executive fiat, bypassing both Congress and international law. By extension, the court challenged Bush's entire theory of extra-constitutional wartime powers as commander-in-chief.
...But this slender victory for constitutional democracy is nothing like the high court's 1974 ruling, 9 to 0, compelling Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes. It is crystal clear from the dissent that a hard-core bloc of four justices will defer to Bush, whatever the cost to the Constitution.
...The rule of law now hangs by a thread. It depends on the health of an increasingly frail 86-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens, and the willingness of the Court's inconstant swing vote, Anthony Kennedy, to side with the Constitution.
...With increasingly partisan courts, there is no one to complain to.
...If American democracy is to survive, Congress, as well as the courts, needs to rein in this president. But Congress has typically put partisanship ahead of constitutional democracy. This week, Republicans were far more eager to defend the flag than the Constitution.
...The Bush era has been a slow-rolling coup d'etat. People are afraid to say so, lest they look like extremists. But the real extremists are in the White House. If our democracy slips away, it will be because its defenders were irresolute and in denial of what is plainly occurring. And if our democracy ultimately survives, it will have been a very close call.
Rolling Stone: OK, say you're the guy making that call. What do you ask us to do -- trade in our cars and buy a hybrid?Telling people they have to change "every aspect" of the current situation isn't giving them an answer. In fact, it seems to me that Gore doesn't have an answer, either here or in his movie. OK, maybe nobody does. But when you are trying to get people to simply accept the reality of global warming, giving them some concrete ideas of what they might do is a good start, instead of saying we have to tear down the entire system and rebuild it. Conserve. Buy a hybrid if you can. Buy green power. Get people thinking in the right direction. I think Gore wiffed this one.
Gore: Here's the essence of our problem: Right now, the political environment in the country does not support the range of solutions that have to be introduced. The maximum you can imagine coming out of the current political environment still falls woefully short of the minimum that will really solve the crisis. But that's just another way of saying we have to expand the limits of the possible. And that's the main reason that I made this movie -- because the path to a solution lies through changing the minds of the American people. Not just on the facts -- they're almost there on the facts -- but in the sense of urgency that's appropriate and necessary. Once that happens, then things that seem impossible now politically are going to be imperative. I believe there is a hunger in the country to be part of a larger vision that changes the way we relate to the environment and the economy. Right now we are borrowing huge amounts of money from China to buy huge amounts of oil from the most unstable region of the world, and to bring it here and burn it in ways that destroy the habitability of the planet. That is nuts! We have to change every aspect of that.
Increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide that accompany global climate change may be less of a boon to crop agriculture than previously thought, according to a new analysis. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, for instance, has concluded that the fertilizing effect of higher carbon dioxide levels could offset crop losses brought about by higher temperatures and lower soil moisture in a warmer global climate. But the IPCC's data come from old experiments on crops grown in greenhouses and shelters that don't properly capture real field conditions, say Stephen Long and colleagues. Their analysis of open-field experiments concludes that higher carbon dioxide levels will only enhance crop yields half as much as the older greenhouse experiments suggested. Carbon dioxide increases may not stimulate the growth of crops like corn and sorghum in the tropics at all, they note. The findings “may move impacts on agriculture higher up on the list of pressing concerns about climate change,” David Schimel writes in a related Perspective.
"It's not a burning issue," a wry Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) told The Hill newspaper's Jonathan Allen off the Senate floor....An hour later, Hatch fell a vote short of his goal. But there was no time to wallow: Oregon's Smith was already on the floor, hailing Oregon State University's college baseball World Series victory.
"Mr. President," Smith announced with an enthusiasm that eluded him during the flag-burning debate, "I stand before you a Beaver believer."
There are no global warming doubters on the 20-member panel and Abbott [dean of Oregon State University's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences] says the debate about climate change is or should be over.
Mark Abbott: "The science is mostly resolved now. I mean, we know that the climate is changing. We don't know all of the future directions and there are things that are going to be good. The number of frost-free days is going to affect the kinds of crops or wine grapes you can grow. That could be a good thing and there are going to be a lot of things that aren't going to be good."
Goddard's Hansen says that by raising this possibility Lindzen has done a lot of good for the climate discussioneven as he thinks Lindzen is wrong.
"I have said consistently that global warming is a serious problem. There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused," Bush told reporters.
"We ought to get beyond that debate and start implementing the technologies necessary to enable us to achieve a couple of big objectives: One, be good stewards of the environment; two, become less dependent on foreign sources of oil, for economic reasons as for national security reasons," he said.
ABC News thinks Bush's statement indicates he's still focusing on the doubt:
The President — as far as the extensive and repeated researches of this and many other professional journalists, as well as all scientists credible on this subject, can find — is wrong on one crucial and no doubt explosive issue. When he said — as he also did a few weeks ago — that "There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused" … well, there really is no such debate.It seems to me it depends on how you interpret Bush's statement. Of course, maybe that's just the way he prefers it.
