On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 16:25:46 GMT, the opaque Gunner
spake:

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:38:48 GMT, "Poker Joker"
wrote:

"Gunner" wrote in message
. ..

Id much rather wrap a bicycle chain around your neck and pull till all
the **** stops coming the stump terminating at your 3rd cervical
vertebrea. How about doing your part in stopping the uncontrolled
release of CO2?

Gunner

Is that a wimper I hear? I knew you were too immature to understand
anything.

Never been around wolves much, have you?

It's much easier to plonk the trolls, Gunner.

And for the Chicken Littles:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Dec22.html
(text follows)
--snip--

Global Warming? Hot Air.

By George F. Will
Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page A23

In today's segmented America, Michael Crichton's new novel, "State of
Fear," might seem to be reading just for red states. Granted, a
character resembling Martin Sheen -- Crichton's character is a
prototypical Hollywood liberal who plays the president in a television
series -- meets an appropriately grisly fate. But blue states, too --
no, especially -- need Crichton's fable about the ecology of public
opinion.

"State of Fear," with a first printing of 1.5 million copies,
resembles Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" -- about 6 million copies sold
since 1957 -- as a political broadside woven into an entertaining
story. But whereas Rand had only an idea -- a good one (capitalism is
splendid), but only one -- Crichton has information. "State of Fear"
is the world's first page turner that people will want to read in one
gulp (a long gulp: 600 pages, counting appendices) even though it has
lots of real scientific graphs, and footnotes citing journals such as
Progress in Physical Geography and Transactions -- American
Geophysical Union.

Crichton's subject is today's fear that global warming will cause
catastrophic climate change, a belief now so conventional that it
seems to require no supporting data. Crichton's subject is also how
conventional wisdom is manufactured in a credulous and media-drenched
society.

Various factions have interests -- monetary, political, even emotional
-- in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require more
government subservience to environmentalists and more government
supervision of our lives.

Crichton's villains are environmental hysterics who are innocent of
information but overflowing with certitudes and moral vanity. His
heroes resemble Navy SEALs tenured at MIT, foiling the villains with
guns and graphs.

The villains are frustrated because the data do not prove that global
warming is causing rising sea levels and other catastrophes. So they
concoct high-tech schemes to manufacture catastrophes they can ascribe
to global warming -- flash floods in the American West, the calving of
an Antarctic iceberg 100 miles across, and a tsunami that would roar
at 500 mph across the Pacific and smash California's coast on the last
day of a Los Angeles conference on abrupt climate change.

The theory of global warming -- Crichton says warming has amounted to
just half a degree Celsius in 100 years -- is that "greenhouse gases,"
particularly carbon dioxide, trap heat on Earth, causing . . . well,
no one knows what, or when. Crichton's heroic skeptics delight in
noting such things as the decline of global temperatures from 1940 to
1970. And that since 1970, glaciers in Iceland have been advancing.
And that Antarctica is getting colder and its ice is getting thicker.

Last week Fiona Harvey, the Financial Times' environmental
correspondent, fresh from yet another international confabulation on
climate change, wrote that while Earth's cloud cover "is thought" to
have increased recently, no one knows whether this is good or bad. Is
the heat-trapping by the clouds' water vapor greater or less than the
sun's heat reflected back off the clouds into space?

Climate-change forecasts, Harvey writes, are like financial forecasts
but involve a vastly more complex array of variables. The climate
forecasts, based on computer models analyzing the past, tell us that
we do not know how much warming is occurring, whether it is a
transitory episode or how much warming is dangerous -- or perhaps
beneficial.

One of the good guys in "State of Fear" cites Montaigne's axiom:
"Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known." Which is
why 30 years ago the fashionable panic was about global cooling. The
New York Times (Aug. 14, 1975) reported "many signs" that "Earth may
be heading for another ice age." Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976)
warned about "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." "Continued
rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) could herald "a
full-blown 10,000-year ice age" (Science, March 1, 1975). The
Christian Science Monitor reported (Aug. 27, 1974) that Nebraska's
armadillos were retreating south from the cooling.

Last week The Post reported that global warming has caused a decline
in Alaska's porcupine caribou herd and has lured the golden orange
prothonotary warbler back from southern wintering grounds to Richmond
a day earlier for nearly two decades. Or since global cooling stopped.
Maybe.

Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law
of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but
no sooner than five years away -- soon enough to terrify, but far
enough off that people will forget if you are wrong. Because Crichton
remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions of his readers
will be wholesomely skeptical of today's.


--snip--


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