John Stossel blog (Adventure 3 not coming to me yet) Jul 19, 2007 6:02AM PST

By the parenthetic part of this blog's title I'm just saying I can't remember what happened when, here's yet another holdover post. Here's an excerpt from John Stossel's Myths Lies and Downright Stupidity: Why Everything You Know is Wrong Note: The following are John Stossel's words, not mine. Some passages may be shortened to prevent what may already be somewhat blatant plaigarism. To any of Stossel's legal eagles that may read: I am only benefitting you in free commercial fashion. From Chapter 9, The Power of Belief "Like most people, I was brought up to respect science and scholarship. My father was an engineer, my brother was a scientist. I assumed everyone wanted to see evidence before they believed. I was wrong. I have learned that many people simply belief what their religion teaches, what their political party believes, what their friends say, or what makes them feel good. Myth: Global Warming will cause huge disruption in climate, more storms, and the coast will flood! America must sign the Kyoto treaty! Truth: This myth must be broken in four pieces Myth #1: The earth is warming! Truth: The earth is warming. It's true. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says the global average surface temperature increased about .6 degrees Celsius over the twentieth century. Myth #2: The earth is warming because of us! Truth: Maybe If our fossil fuel is responsible for global warming, something doesn't add up. Half the global warming of the past century happened in 1900 to 1945. If man's responsible, why wasn't there much more warming in the second half of the century? We burned much more fuel during that time The planet is just in a gradual warming trend, coming out of what scientists call the "Little Ice Age" which ended in the 1800s. Our climate has always undergone changes, and it's presumptuous to think humans' impact matters so much in comparison to the frightening geologic history of the earth. A graph of temperatures over the last 4,000 years shows today's warming isn't such a big deal Note: genres cannot duplicate the chart but the source is NOAA Paleoclimatology Program and World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, Boulder Myth #3: There will be storms, flooded coasts, and huge disruptions in climate! Truth: Probably not Note: this section is more lengthy and therefore the following are genres words, but in the form of paraphrasing what Stossel writes He mentions that schoolchildren he's talked to are certain America is "dying" and lawyers from the Natural Resources Defense console (he makes a point of saying "another environmental group with more lawyers than scientists") agrees. Scientists however, he says find this panic laughable. Dr. John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville says: "I remember as a college student being told that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy. Such doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines but have proven completely false. Similar pronouncements today about catastrophes due to human induced climate change sound too familiar and too exaggerated to me as someone who actually produces and analyzes climate information." Dr. Patrick Michaels, author of the Association of American Geograper's 2003 Climate Paper of the Year, points out that melting Arctice ice won't raise sea levels any more than the ice in your drink makes your glass overflow. "The Arctic ice cap is just floating ice.. if it melted.. it's not a land mass adding to water" MSNBC and BBC ran stories on the coming calamity of Greenland's melting glaciers which alarmists said would raise global sea levels. But only Greenland's southern glaciers are melting, not the northern ones. In October 2005, Norweigan, Russian, and American scientists reported that Greenland's ice was thickening not melting. Most scary claims based on heat waves and droughts are based on computer models that purport to predict future climates but are lousy because water vapor and cloud effects cause changes computers fail to predict. The 1970s computer models told us to prepare for global cooling. Scientists say these models should be viewed with utmost skepticism. So why aren't they? Stossel wonders. And as a matter of fact, Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas says added CO2 in the atmosphere could benefit the world cause more CO2 helps plants grow. Warmer winters= longer harvest season for farmers and may even end Saharan drought. So why don't we hear about the good side of global warming? According to Dr. Baliunas "It's the money! 25 billion dollars in government funding has been spent since 1990 to research global warming. If scientists and researchers were to release reports that global warming had little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn't be as much money to study it!" Myth #4: Signing the Kyoto Treat would stop the warming. Truth: Hardly. In 1997, the UN met in Kyoto, Japan, and asked the developed nations of the world to cut CO2 emission to below 1990 levels. And even advocates of Kyoto admit that if all the nations signed the treaty and obeyed it, global temps. would increase. The difference by 2050 would be less than a tenth of a degree! Even if Kyoto had an impact, would all signers honor what they signed? China is predicted to out-emit us in 5 to 10 years. India will soon follow. What incentive do they have to stop burning fossil fuels? The fundamentalist Greens (I'm guessing hardcore environmentalists-Ed.) imply if we just conserved energy , and switched from fossil fuels to solar power (they rarely mention nuclear power- the most practical alternative), we would live in a non-global warmig fairyland of hapness. But their proposals are impractical since building solar panels burns energy, as does trucking and installing them- then taking them down to repair them. (That last paragraph and one's following to remind you is Stossel's words as very lightly paraphrased by myself. Direct your hatred to anything more opinionated accordingly) To think that solar energy could stop the temperature increase is absurd. EPCOT, a theme park with a solar energy ride, counsumes about 395,000 kilowatt-hours a day. The Department of Energy says you'd need around a thousand acres of solar panels to generate that much electricity. EPCOT itself sits on just three hundred acres, so you'd have to triple the size of the park just to operate it! Windmills aren't so great either. They are giant bird-killing Cuisinarts (I just left that in cause it was funny-Ed.) and we'd have to build lots of them to produce sigificant energy. In 2000, a group called Cape Wind wished to erect 130 windmills in Nantucket Sound, off the coast of Massachusets. I think the drawing makes them look interesting but-horrors!- they would be visible from the Kennedy family vacation compound in Hyannis Port. Robert Kennedy Jr., high-poobah of the environmental zealotry movement, is leading a campaign to ban the windmills from Nantucket Sound. The group he leads, the Waterkeeper Alliance, says it supports wind farms- but Kennedy fights the one near his home. What a hypocrite (Genres did not feel the need to edit because genres really hates some of the Kennedy's. Mostly Ted who should probably be in jail for murder after waiting hours to call 911 about a woman that died in his car. In other words, you can feel free to direct hate towards genres for this part because genres hates you and your stupid Kennedys- Bob Dole Ed.) 90% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels. Kyoto would decimate about every third world countries economy, and deliver a catastrophic blow to our own. So what shuld we do about the threat of global warming? First, calm down. Second, if the world is warming it is more reasonable to adjust to it than try and stop it: if sea levels rise, we can build dykes and move back from the coasts. It worked for Holland. Farmers can plant different plants and move north. Far better to keep studying global warming, let the science develop, and adjust to it if it happens, rather than wreck life as we know it by trying to stop it. Sorry to go on so long, I got carried away because the global warming myth-makers are so sanctimonious and insistent. On to simpler myths. Stossel's words end. Genres begin. There was a much more heavy handed comment on why I posted this here before but 1) way too much fucking text and 2) it brought up the polotics side of this which while it will inevitably still be debated that way somewhat in the comments, I didn't like it the second time I looked. I don't disagree with what I posted but I think it's best to keep it simple.