RFK Jr

[rubberneck]

Is there no limit to the depths that some on the left will sink to to score a couple of cheap political points. RFK Jr. blames Miss Gov. Barbour for the damage caused by Katrina becuase he urged Bush to nix the Kyoto treaty. Hurricanes have been around longer than humans so how can global warming be the cause?

As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2.

In March of 2001, just two days after EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman’s strong statement affirming Bush’s CO2 promise former RNC Chief Barbour responded with an urgent memo to the White House.

Barbour, who had served as RNC Chair and Bush campaign strategist, was now representing the president’s major donors from the fossil fuel industry who had enlisted him to map a Bush energy policy that would

be friendly to their interests. His credentials ensured the new administration’s attention.

The document, titled “Bush-Cheney Energy Policy & CO2,” was addressed to Vice President Cheney, whose energy task force was then gearing up, and to several high-ranking officials with strong connections to energy and automotive concerns keenly interested in the carbon dioxide issue, including Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, White House chief of staff Andy Card and legislative liaison Nick Calio. Barbour pointedly omitted the names of Whitman and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, both of whom were on record supporting CO2 caps. Barbour’s memo chided these administration insiders for trying to address global warming which Barbour dismissed as a radical fringe issue.

“A moment of truth is arriving,” Barbour wrote, “in the form of a decision whether this Administration’s policy will be to regulate and/or tax CO2 as a pollutant. The question is whether environmental policy still prevails over energy policy with Bush-Cheney, as it did with Clinton-Gore.” He derided the idea of regulating CO2 as “eco-extremism,” and chided them for allowing environmental concerns to “trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years.”

The memo had impact. “It was terse and highly effective, written for people without much time by a person who controls the purse strings for the Republican Party,” said John Walke, a high-ranking air quality official in the Clinton administration.

On March 13, Bush reversed his previous position, announcing he would not back a CO2 restriction using the language and rationale provided by Barbour. Echoing Barbour’s memo, Bush said he opposed mandatory CO2 caps, due to “the incomplete state of scientific knowledge” about global climate change.

Well, the science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming.

Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and--now--Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

In 1998, Republican icon Pat Robertson warned that hurricanes were likely to hit communities that offended God. Perhaps it was Barbour’s memo that caused Katrina, at the last moment, to spare New Orleans and save its worst flailings for the Mississippi coast.

[Kyobanim]

Not that I agree with him or anything but one of the ingredients for a hurricane to form and strengthen is hot water. The water in the gulf is warmer than usual this year.

Could be that this is an unusually warm year for water or there's something to the global warming theories. I tend to believe the global warming theory. But the Kyoto treaty wouldn't have had any effect on the outcome of the current situation. That's long term. Kinda like closing the gate after the horse got out.

[rubberneck]

I would agree with you but for the fact that there have been a number of category 5 hurricans over the past 100 years in the Gulf. Luckily most of them have weakened before landfall or hit other countries. Why is it that global warming is the culprit here but not in the other cases?

http://www.e11th-hour.org/resources/timelines/v.hurricanes.us.html

[Airbornelawyer]

Not that I agree with him or anything but one of the ingredients for a hurricane to form and strengthen is hot water. The water in the gulf is warmer than usual this year.

Could be that this is an unusually warm year for water or there's something to the global warming theories. I tend to believe the global warming theory. But the Kyoto treaty wouldn't have had any effect on the outcome of the current situation. That's long term. Kinda like closing the gate after the horse got out.
The warming of ocean waters is a cyclical trend. They were warmer in the 50s and 60s, leading to more and worse hurricanes. They cooled in the 70s and 80s, leading to a decrease in hurricane frequency and intensity. They were warmer starting in the mid-1990s to today, resulting in more frequent and intense hurricanes. The pattern is inconsistent with a theory of progressive warming, and certainly with any theory that roots such warming in human activity.

I notice that many of the same people on the global warming bandwagon today were on the new Ice Age bandwagon in the 1970s, when there was a cooling trend in places.

As for RFK, Jr., he is well-known as a polemicist and a hack.

[jbour13]

Kyo I agree that the Treaty resolves nothing.

But look at the Earth's natural cycles and global warming, if it were an ice-age somehow we'd still be at fault. It happened 100,000 years ago and were just on the flip side of it. We've just made the flip side worse and forced it to go to the extreme.

Articles such as this one show how short sited and how quickly we forget past occurences.

Global warming is a very valid threat, but bear in mind the Earth itself runs in cycles ranging from hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years.

We again are caught in the constant shift that this big blue ball goes through.

Does global warming attribute? Most certainly. Can we reverse the effects of what damage has been done, not quick enough to counter another 50 to 100+ years of turbulent weather. That is only if we should act now and stem the usage of fossil fuels. Not gonna happen.

Natural occuring things like volcanic eruptions, gas pocket releases, dust storms, even excessive evaporation of water contribute to warming.

To be fair in this post, we reap what we sow. We as humans have contributed more pollutants, particles, and aerosols to the atmosphere in the last 100 years than the Earth released in equal amounts over a few thousand.

My recommendations on this is use this thread on impact to economy to gauge an appropriate response to this crisis. It's definately more far reaching than most are comfortable to admit. a-3-7 posted the article from Stratfor and that should serve as sufficient warning to everyone to stock up on necesscities and prepare for some austere times.

I'm goin' shopping after work to restock a few items. :D

Edited to add: Seems AL beat me too the same point. :)

[Airbornelawyer]

The "barn door/horse" analogy is also extremely inapt not only because it assumes what is not proven, that human activity causes global warming, but also because it implies that humans can reverse this process.

I can't think of a better analogy off the top of my head, but what comes to mind is turning off your shower during a rainstorm (let's assume it's an outdoor shower). It is a monumental conceit of Man that he dominates his environment.

BTW, regarding the effect of fossil fuel consumption on the environment, recall that before widespread use of coal and oil, the primary fuel source was wood. Also recall that before the internal combustion engine, the primary means of travel, besides by foot, was by large animal (mainly horses). The grazing area required for herd animals and the need for wood for fuel and building materials led to widespread deforestation. Technological advancement, propelled by the very forces deemed the bad guys by environmental activists, saved the environment in many places by halting and reversing deforestation, among other calamities. The eastern seaboard of the United States now has more forests than it did a century ago. Meanwhile, in less-developed parts of the world, the destruction of the environment continues. In the savannas on the periphery of the Sahara, the desert creeps further south. One of the main culprits here is in fact human activity, as plant life is destroyed for fuel.

[Sweetbriar]

One thing I've noticed about hurricanes and other natural disasters, even in the last 50 years, is that there are far more people in the cities and coastal areas to be displaced. Therefore, even if a hurricane is the same size that occurs in that location every 75 years, it gets much bigger billing - with updates every 15 minutes on cable TV! The gaps in weather history are big enough to sail a Katrina thru annually. I agree it is hubris on our part to think we are anywhere near to deliberately affecting the weather, for good or bad.

[jbour13]

Katrina and Disgusting Exploitation
By James K. Glassman

A profound tragedy is unfolding in New Orleans, the most beautiful city in America, with the richest cultural history and the most wonderful style of living. I lived in New Orleans for seven years. I was married there. My children were born there. I have many friends there.

My daughter, her husband and their little baby managed to get out of the city ahead of the flood on Sunday, driving 14 hours into Texas with the few belongings they could stuff into their car. They have no idea what has become of their house and their possessions, not to mention their friends, their pets, their jobs, their way of life.

Tragedies happen, and my daughter and her family are happy just to be alive. Their losses and those of hundreds of thousands of other innocents deserve mourning, prayer and respect.

That is why the response of environmental extremists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now.

Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces.

Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.

But that doesn't stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: "Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now -- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children."

Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany's environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): "By neglecting environmental protection, America's president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflect on his country and the world's economy."

The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. "When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the international community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection."

He goes on, "There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide." In other words, thanks to Katrina, we'll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)

Ross Gelbspan, in a particularly egregious, almost giddy piece in the Boston Globe that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, wrote that the hurricane was "nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service Katrina, [but] its real name was global warming." He also finds global warming responsible for droughts in the Midwest, strong winds in Scandinavia and heavy rain in Dubai. The reason for all this devastation, of course, is that the Bush Administration is controlled by coal and oil interests.

And the Independent, a widely read British newspaper, reported today that "Sir David King, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina." King contended that "the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming."

The Kyoto advocates point to warmer ocean temperatures, but they ought to read their own favorite newspaper, The New York Times, which reported yesterday:

"Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught 'is very much natural,' said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.'"

An article on TCS quoted Gray last year as saying that, while some groups and individuals say that hurricane activity lately "may be in some way related to the effects of increased man-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide,…there is no reasonable scientific way that such an interpretation…can be made."

Indeed, there is no evidence that hurricanes are intensifying anyway. For the North Atlantic as a whole, according to the United Nations Environment Programme of the World Meteorological Organization: "Reliable data…since the 1940s indicate that the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed, and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased."

Yes, decreased.

Not only has the intensity of hurricanes fallen, but, as George H. Taylor, the state climatologist of Oregon has pointed out, so has the frequency of hailstorms in the U.S. (see Changnon and Changnon) and cyclones throughout the world (Gulev, et al.).

But environmental extremists do not want to be bothered with the facts. Nor do they wish to mourn the destruction and death wreaked on a glorious city. To their everlasting shame, they would rather distort and exploit.

Link with additional hyperlinks embedded at:

http://www.techcentralstation.com/083105JKG.html

[VelociMorte]

"We as humans have contributed more pollutants, particles, and aerosols to the atmosphere in the last 100 years than the Earth released in equal amounts over a few thousand."


I'll have to call you on this one. A single volcanic eruption can eject more particulate matter and "greenhouse" gasses than mankind has produced throughout our entire history. Forest fires and range fires, until recent history, burned uncontrolled for millions of years before mankind decided to manage them. The Earth's climate has always fluctuated. Antarctica used to be a tropical forest. The Gobi used to be a forest. Now one is desert and the other a frozen wasteland. These changes occurred well before the Industrial Revolution. To blame mankind for "Global Warming" is about the same as blaming ants for continental drift.