主播大秀

Until people of your mindset come up with a plan which doesn't trade a looming global ecological catastrophe for an immediate global economic one, nothing of substance will happen. The USA will never buy a plan like Kyoto which is not only unfair but ineffective and would destroy America's economy and the rest of the world's with it. This is not just the position of President Bush as many Europeans would like to believe it is, the US Senate voted back when Kyoto was being discussed in a Sense of the Senate vote 95-0 against Kyoto. Now, stop playing politics, send all the politicians home, and assemble the worlds best scientists and economists to work out an emergency strategy or all you will get is more and more complaining as the polar ice caps and glaciers continue to melt and the world's temperature continues to rise. Endless America bashing is a useless and pointless sport even if it makes Europeans feel good. All it does is make American's angrier and more recalcitrant. And by the way Europe, get your own house in order first, you're missing your Kyoto targets by a mile. Why? For the very same reasons the Americans wouldn't sign up to it. Hypocrites.

What the world has needed for a long time is a replacement for burning fossil fuel to generate most of its power. It also needs to control its population and stop burning down its tropical rainforests. As more and more people populate the earth and they expect to share in the fruits of technology, they will each generate carbon dioxide meaning that under the theory of many ecologists we in the more industrialized nations which are not growing our populations will have to each generate less and less. This is not a tenable solution to global warming because even if it were tried, it is not sustainable. What's more, the nation which generates the most per capita CO2, the US also generates among the highest per capita GDP which drives the rest of the world's economies and the most per capita food surplus which keeps vast populations from starving. Were the US to substantially cut its CO2 emissions, it would in order to accomplish this have to reduce its GDP, its consumption of goods exported from other nations, and its agricultural output as well, all with dire consequences. The governator of California can announce all the pie in the sky emission reduction targets he wants but when the price for meeting them starts to hit Californians in their pocketbooks, they will shift into reverse and gun the economic engine as hard as they can. I lived in California myself for five years and I have no doubt of it. Besides, sacrificing California's economy cannot save the world. Neither can CO2 credits where industrialized nations buy exemption from reductions of their own output by shifting it to the non industrialized nations for money. The technological revolution will not happen by itself. If the best technology Europe can produce are spacecrafts which crash into Mars and superjumbo passenger planes which can't be built, then they were very foolish to antoganize a nation which has demonstrated time and again that when it sets a technological goal, it has a fighting chance of achieving it. What do you do for an encore Europe, wait and hope that a change in adminsitration in the US will save the world? Don't count on it.

Ed Inglehart #4
Junkie behavior?
If you want to live in the 18th century, fine. Shut the main disconnects of gas and electricity to your house, sell your car, and live in an unlit cave heated only by burning logs. If enough people think like you do, then none of us will have a problem and people like me can go on their merry way living in the 21st century. BTW, the average lifespan was around 30 year old. Is your time up yet?

I really detest these trite simpleminded analogies and metaphors. Energy is not a drug, it is the main means by which we all enrich and prolong our physical lives. It gives us freedom to make choices unopen to people who lived and live without it. Some people don't like the idea that large numbers of people have many choices in life and elect to do things with them that they wouldn't do themselves. They feel those choices should be reserved for a select elite. The only way our technological society is going away is if we become extinct. Luddites can rant and rave all they want, there is no going back to the 18th century. Are you adicted too? You'll find out next time you have an otherwise life threatening infection and your doctor gives you a shot of penicillin or tells you that you need an operation to stay alive.

Chris Freeman #12
When you can't argue against the bitter truth with facts, it is always useful to resort to calling its anouncer arrogant. It's one step above the silence of acquiescence, even if it's only a very small step. Speaking of arrogant, I can hardly think of any place on earth more arrogant despite its sordid history than Europe. How about a small reminder or two. A little over three years ago, British aerospace engineers were bragging that their Beagle II would get to Mars at one eighth the cost NASA expended. Wherever the Beagle has landed, it hasn't bothered to phone home to its master. On the other hand, shortly after the dog that won't hunt disappeared into the forest, two probes, Pride and Opportunity drove onto the Martian surface and well beyond anyone's expectations, they are still sending back photos today. The recent "Postcards from Mars" was mailed with a US stamp on it. Six and a half years ago, smug European economists said that Europe would not be affected by the looming economic recession in the US. By historic standards, that was a brief and shallow recession. Europe still hadn't recovered from it years after it was a faded memory in the US. Europe has been full of bad advice for America. Good thing for us it can't vote in US elections. America is not about to give up its sovereignty. Auf Wiedersehen Angela Merckel, your visit last week was so brief.

Ed Iglehart #7,15

I've never heard of Ivan Illich but I am familiar with Ivan Awfulitch :>)

Ed Iglehart 15
"If I can spell your name right, perhaps you can return the favour."

In your postings, you have not resorted to the trivial, you have restricted yourself to the irrelevant. Sorry, I forget for a moment that this is a British blog, I inadvertently used the American spelling.

Ed Iglehart #19

I had a dream too, I dreamt that European environmentalists began to act rationally by actually deciding it would be better to cooperate with Americans in developing new practical energy technologies (besides the nonsense of fusion) than continuing to bash them over Kyoto. But then I woke up, read your words, and I got back to realy.

Oil companies have nothing to worry about. We Americans will take the money we saved on home heating fuel this winter and buy monster SUVs with it. I've already got an order in for one with a custom made fifteen liter engine that can tow a house.

Ed Iglehart #21

The cause of global warming according to environmentalists is human activitity. Therefore according to your logic, in order to solve the problem, we have to stop that activity and getting rid of humans is as good a place as any to start. Your ideas in posting #4 would be a step in that direction.

How typical. Environmentalists/Scientists.

Cobbly/Worlds, some environmentalists are scientists, and some scientists are environmentalists. Some scientists have no professional expertise in areas related to the environment and only a passing interest in it. What difference do these semantics make?

GW is not attributable entirely to humans/GW is attibutable partly or mostly to humans.

Ed Iglehart, what does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China?

Sometime when I listen to 主播大秀 or discuss anything on their HYS or Blog sites, I feel like I live on another planet, not merely another continent. For example, there was an entire half hour critique of the 10 years of Tony Blair's administration with 4 British journalists and not once did any of them mention the economic success of Britain in sharp contrast to every other major economy in Europe, they were so eager to bash him. That's another issue but it is typical of how it seems to me that whenever anything of substance gets discussed, the 800 pound gorilla in the center of the room gets ignored like it was invisible. And in this case, that 800 pound gorialla is the fact that assuming it isn't already too late, the combination of how many we are, what we do that we will not and cannot give up, and that we will not and cannot compromise ourselves indefinitely for an endlessly increasing number of others is making human life on earth less and less viable unless we do something very different soon. We either have to find a better way to do it and control the number of people around or none of us will be around much longer. I've already lived much of my life and have no children or grandchildren to feel guilty over having cheated out of the lifetime of experience at living I've had so I have far less emotionally at stake than many others do. If people actually want to do something about it rather than just sit around talking and complaining then they will all have to work together or it won't happen. And people who are constantly being accused for the entire problem because the won't voluntarily agree to cut their own throats for the greater good are not about to sit around and listen to what anyone else has to say. America will find ways to cope with global warming. Will Europe?

BTW, we are technically in a 2 million year temporary warming period during an ice age which has lasted 28 million years. One concern of some scientists is that global warming could rapidly precipitate a return to more typical ice age conditions all over the world. One low probability model proposes a scenario which has it that the gulf stream could become so weak that northern Europe including the British Isles could find itself burried under a glacier...and it could happen in as short a time frame as ten years. I'd consider buying land in the Sahara, it could one day become among the few habitable places on earth for humans remaining.

I thought I made it clear in my first posting what needed to be done. Alternative energy sources on a massive not a marginal scale (meaning both diversion of major research and production), effective population control and reduction, and and end to burning down the rain forests. This should receive immediate attention from the best scientists and economists the world has. It should not be just their number one priority, it should be their only priority and they should not quit until they agree to a viable and fair plan. If this is driven by politicians, nothing will get done. Conservation has only a minor role to play. Without these other actions, conservation will be a futile effort. And when I say fair, I mean completely fair, everyone in the world will have to suffer pain and sacrifice if we are going to get through this alive. Is it already too late? Nobody knows but if it isn't, it seems from what scientists are saying it won't be a whole lot longer until it is.

Ed Iglehart #32
So far not one thing you said made any sense to me. Energy is a tool, we are not addicted to energy any more than we are addicted to saws, drills, hammers, or shoes for that matter. It is the way we control our environment. The more we expend, the more things we control and the greater our control over them. It is fitting that the nation which is by far the largest producer of wealth in the world should expend by far the most energy.

I don't know what it means when you say you can't eat GDP. GDP is a measure of economic wealth produced. In our high GDP society, it means you can eat anything you want, any time, anywhere in complete comfort no matter what the weather is outside. Go to a place where GDP is low and compare and you will see what the difference in GDP means.

America produces four and a third times as much GDP as the second largest economy China, with less than a quarter of the number of people but only 1 1/2 times the CO2 output. The average American is between 10 and 20 times as effecient as the average Chinese at producing wealth as measured by unit of GDP output per unit of CO2 generated, but the stupidity of Kyoto is that it would have imposed restrictions on America immediately while China would skate by for many years as it brings on one new fossil fuel fired power plant a week. China is one of America's largest trade competitors and has a huge trade surplus of well over 100 billion dollars a year with the US. It is the European mentality to punish success and reward failure. That is why most of their economies are failing. The US Senate's unanimous 95-0 vote against Kyoto was America's representatives' way of telling Europe's environmentalists to go to hell and there isn't a damned thing they can do about it except scream. We no longer even hear them, they've been completely tuned out. And that is the crux of the problem.

Today, the EU will come out with another of its worthless megadocuments which will be widely hailed, few people will read much of it, and which will in the end amount to nothing. Europeans have demonstrated time and again when it comes to plans, they are all talk and no action...unless it's about killing each other in which case they have demonstrated themselves most efficient in the not so distant past. The biggest farce is Carbon tax credits. They buy their way out of CO2 emissions reductions shifting the burden to poor countries which can't possibly meet their goals, and then they let them off the hook because to do otherwise would be to punish people who barely survive as it is. Europe is great at letting people off the hook, anyone remember the Growth and Stability Pact in the Maastrict treaty, who insisted upon it, what the fines were supposed to be, who violated it consistantly, and who didn't pay even one Euro for it? America doesn't call France and Germany the Axis of Weasel for nothing. And when it comes to hoopla over what big plans Europe is going to impliment, they have a good track record of boast and bluster there too. Anyone rememeber what Tony Blair said about making Europe the best place in the world to do business when Britain assumed the presidency of the EU? Now it's clearly the worst. Meanwhile 主播大秀 bashed the US for the umpteen thousandth time for not signing up to Kyoto again today. If you live in America and didn't tune in 主播大秀, you probably weren't aware of it. Most of America tunes Europe out.

Ed Iglehart #34
Everyone in the world wants a car, not a bicycle. An automobile brings freedom. You can go where you want, when you want, you don't have to wait for buses or trains, you don't have to walk back and forth to bus stops, depots, and trains stations sometimes in snow, bitter cold, pouring rain, dark night, you just walk out to to the street or your driveway, get in and go. Everyone wants to live in a comfortable home. They don't like freezing in the winter or baking in the summer. In may parts of the United States, due to distances which must be traveled and the harshness of climate, cars, heating systems, and air conditioning are a matter of survival, both personal financal survival and physical survival. If I didn't have a car, I couldn't shop or go to a job and there is no conceivable system of public transportaton which would be an adequate substitute considering the rural area where I live. People also enjoy using their cars for recreation whether it's visiting friends or sightseeing, they like enriching their lives with them. People like and need to fly on airplanes, some for their jobs because they have to, some for recreation because they want to. Many if not most people like to eat meat at least several times a week. It takes much more energy to produce meat than grains. It takes a lot of energy to move food from the vast plains and from California in America to where a lot of people live on the east coast and in the south. All of the people in the world want these things and much more such as appliances. They see them on TV, in the stores, in the homes of their friends and neighbors too and they want them. China will become the world's largest market for automobiles. Over a billion people will want them who don't now have access to them. Who are you to tell them they can't have them or that Americans should travel the vast distances they need to cover, restricted to small underpowered econobox cars which are fine in little Europe? Who is anyone to deny other people what they themselves enjoy. The only answer is to have fewer people and to find ways to give them what they want and need with technologies which don't destroy the environment. That is exactly what is not happening now and no amount of conservation can compensate for it. That is a losing strategy and if it isn't abandoned as a primary instrument to try to reverse global warming, the effort will fail.

Doesn't anyone else see the irony and hypocricy of Europe as it makes bold promises to reduce carbon emissions in one breath and then worries about delivery of oil and gas from Russia in the next? Who do they think they're kidding?

Ed Iglehart #39
So not only are you a Luddite, but you reveal yourself to be a tyrnnical one as well making pronouncements about who can and can't have cars and what kind of cars. I am hardly surprised, you kind usually are. With enough people like you advocating "envirnnmental responsibility" it's small wonder most of the people in the world don't pay any attention to it, or just pay lip service if they say they are concerned. It's a one hundred percent certain prescription for no effective action.

john cooknell #41
If the average ocean temperature is dropping, I don't think anyone knows why just yet. Perhaps it's a result of the meltoff of polar and glacial ice at a rapid rate. Whatever it is, there is also the possiblity of sudden global cooling, so much so that a very sudden return to ice age conditions could occur. This was once feared more likely than global warming.

CobblyWorlds #40
About 35 years ago long before scientists worried about greenhouse gases, there was a theory that global warming would occur in the northern hemisphere as the result of the drying up of the Aral Sea which was once the fourth largest body of inland fresh water in the world. It has dried up because hydroelectrica dams built by Stalin with the help of American engineers in the 1930s blocked the feeder rivers which maintained it. The vast Aral Sea cooled air through evaporation as it passed over it. Nobody today remembers this theory and the few climate experts I've spoken to about it have dismissed it out of hand. Any thoughts about it or knowledge of it?

If the darker oceans and CO2 buildup aren't enough to worry about, the melting of permafrost over large areas of Siberia is releasing enormous amounts of methane trapped under the ice. Methane is far more effective at trapping heat than even CO2 is.

Ed Iglehart #44
Angry, why should I be angry? I accept the world for what it is, I don't expect to change it, I merely try to survive in it the best I can. If my typing gets sloppy, it's just that I neglected to go back and correct the misspellings and typographical errors, they're always there.

If I'm anything, it's disappointed that the people who say they care the most are so utterly ineffective, not because of their motivation but because of their inexperience in actually ever doing anything or understanding what it means to get a large number of people of diverse interests to work together. (That's one of the things I do for a living.) For me personally, so far global warming has been a blessing. I don't like the extreme cold or hot weather. And in the last few years where I live, the summers have been relatively mild, while this year, the winter has been remarkably warm. If it could stay this way, I probably wouldn't give a damn what happens to the rest of the world, that's their problem, not mine.

john cooknell #46
The surface temperature of the earth is the result of the balance of solar radiation absorbed, heat radiated into space, and internal heat reaching the surface. The earth's solid crust of course is only about 70 miles thick in most places, the overwhelming bulk of the earth's mass, over 99% being so hot it is plastic or molten. In some ways human beings have no control over large changes in these balances, a sudden shift for any reason would alter the surface conditions so radically one way or the other, that the survival human life would become impossible. Human beings can usually influence their climate only marginally. Therefore the GHG emissions can have only a subtle but real effect at most. This is what is of concern of course, upsetting this delicate balance which in geological time frames of eons is never really constant for very long.

This is the first I've heard of cooling of the world's oceans. Mostly we hear that the melting polar ice caps are causing the earth to get darker and absorb more solar radiation. Scientists do have the means to effect rapid global cooling lasting only for a short term of a few years. When Krakatoa exploded, it wasn't long before the entire world was plunged into what was described as a mini ice age. This was ascribed to ash sent into the stratosphere blocking sunlight from reaching the surface. The problem with using say a nuclear device to trigger a volcano is that the effect is not particularly predictable or controllable and the underlying problem would not be addressed by it, but it might buy more time if things get really desperate.