6/26 Rant

Sorry to all you 5 or 6 people that actually frequent my blog. I've been at my cabin and I've just been all around lazy lately. I thought I'd post some pics from my cabin:

















Apparently these were the only two that I actually saved on my phone. I must have been too [distracted] ;) the rest of the time to remember to hit the SAVE button, but I really like these two. I could look at that sunset for the rest of my life...

Anyways, moving on to pointless politics.

Today, after the whole controversy about the New York Times once again publicly disclosing the terrorist surveillance policies of the Bush Admin, I decided to go over to the conservative blog captainsquartersblog.com to see what the right wingers over there were saying about it.

Recap: the New York Times today put out an article that described the Bush policy of tracking "terrorist" financial records and transactions. I didn't read the story because I don't subscribe to the paper, but apparently Congress was briefed about the program and there are 'auditors' that oversee it to check for any abuses.

I posted a comment on the page, expecting some angry feedback. What actually happened was that I was lambasted all day long for being an idiot, a kool-aid drinker, a conspiracy theorist, an extremist and a paranoid absolutist. Wow... tough crowd. All I really said was that I thought it wasn't right for one department to have limitless power in terms of gathering, tracking and handling any kind of personal information. And then some stuff about Ann Coulter being nuts. Pretty reasonable stuff I thought. They all thought I was retarded, but like me, they have the right to their own opinion.

Global Warming: I'm passionate about this topic because it means so much (if true) to our very existence, and the existence of our planet's current ecology. I've checked out both sides of the argument, which both have compelling arguments to make. But with a little more research into the claims of people who say global warming is a crock, it's easy to see that these people are desperately grasping for any kind of fact that can back up their argument. They use 'facts' that should more appropriately be called weasels, because they only tell you part of the truth.

There isn't one credible scientist (not on Exxon Mobiles payroll) out there that will dispute the fact that global warming is real and that it is caused by human activities.

Now the Supreme Court is going to hear a case brought up by many eastern states who are claiming that the government should have been regulating carbon emissions for a long time now to combat warming.

Three main conservative claims on global warming:
1. The Earth currently does seem to be in a warming period, though how warm and for how long no one knows. In particular, no one knows whether this is unusual or merely something that happens periodically for natural reasons.

No one knows huh? How about 11 international science acadamies which recently joined together to declare that, "It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities … . This warming has already led to changes in the Earth's climate."
http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf

How about the Weather Channel which has recently come out boldly claiming that human-caused global warming is real?

2. The ice in greenland is actually getting thicker in the middle.

Absolutely right. Perfect weasel. The ice over Greenland seems to have gotten thicker by half a meter in the last 10 years. But wait neo-cons!... there's one more thing you should know. The same scientist who produced this study actually concluded that this was evidence of global warming. It's very simple to understand if you ever studied weather in junior high. When the air and sea become warmer, water evaporates much more easily. When water evaporates, it condences into clouds... clouds rain or snow on the mainland. The warmer it is, the more water evaporates, the more snow on the mainland of Greenland. Simple, simple, simple.

3. The Earth has only warmed by one degree in 100 years!

This is an over-generalization. The average temp all across the globe has increased by one degree, which may not seem like much, but can have a huge impact on the environment as many prominent scientists have told us. The temps at the poles have actually increased by an average of 12 degrees fahrenheit. This is where the impact from global warming seems to be centered. Recent scientific studies have shown that due to melting ice caps, Polar Bears are drowning. They're now resorting to cannibalism to survive because they can't reach their prey anymore.

Gotta go... summer is a hectic time. I'll have a big huge post tommorow on global warming that no one will read. It just makes me feel better to get it all out.


One of the world's most respected climatologists, NASA's James Hansen, even used a dice metaphor to make it clear.
If you paint one side of the die red, you'll roll red about one in six times. Paint four red, and you'll roll red on average four in six times.
Manmade greenhouse gas emissions, Hansen explained, were loading the dice so that we'd have such extreme weather far more frequently. And, exactly as predicted, we and the world have — well above what the frequency of any natural weather cycles can explain.