I’ve been following the topic of global warming for about a decade now and it amazes me how it almost seems to have evolved into a religion. I respect all value systems and religions and stuff but honestly, some aspects of commercialized global warming are downright alarming. Some websites like http://www.driveneutral.org/ will even trade you some credits for driving that SUV or any vehicle you have. Some plant trees to offset your emissions, home, car, or business. It’s a huge industry not unlike those mega-churches.
The idea that one could measure emissions in one location, like here in Texas, and then offset it by growing a seedling in some far-fetched country such as Surinam is almost surreal and makes absolutely zero mathematical sense. I wish I could remember the story but one writer compared that kind of thing to the practice of paying money to get absolved of some sin – it makes everyone feel so much better, but it didn’t do a damn thing. It was a Medieval thing, I suspect.
Even the rock band ColdPlay is making the same pilgrimage. I can’t make any sense of this: if one was going to reduce global warming, shouldn’t one stop using so much fuel and plant a tree?
It is becoming obvious to me that all these offset credits are a scam, worse than a chain letter as to the accounting. Huge consulting and trading firms now make tremendous profits, not to mention that many of the PHD types make well over a hundred thousand a year just to sell their product. Huge blogs such as the Grist are even in on the game.
I’m not going to call them on the carpet or say bad things about them, but honestly folks, all that commercialization and cheerleading is a little over the top.
10 comments:
Ah Sam, you hit it right on the head, money, etc. All this carbon credit crap is nothing more than a scam with Algore as the head scammer. How in hell they expect anyone to believe them to be credible is beyond me when they run all over the country in their private jets and live in their big ass-ed air conditioned houses with giant swimming pools. Virtually every one of the loudest proponents are in reality, way over the top users of the very energy they want the rest of us to stop using. I guess they are afraid we will use it all up and they will have none.
This planet has been warming up and cooling down for millions of years, and if we don't blow it all too hell, it will probably continue to do it's thing without our intervention every time a cloud appears in the sky!! They should try working on regulating all that sunspot activity that causes a lot of, most of, our weather! Moonbats! Sunbats! Other assorted Bats, arise and congregate with signs and T-shirts and stop those accursed SUNSPOTS!
As you know the planet has been warming up about a degree a century since 10,000 years when the Laurentian Ice Age occured. It's been fairly steady, although Farmer's Almanac notes mini-Ice Ages in the 1700's and later in the 1800's - when the water wells in the Boston area were still frozen rock solid in June!
But I think it's serious because for some combination of reasons, the northern latitudes and Arctic are warming at a rate 5-10 times faster than that ole one degree a century. You can now grow tomatoes in Greenland without a darn greenhouse. The glaciers are about gone, and the permafrost has turned into sinking mud. Regardless of what you think about Global Warming, that's some serious stuff, and nobody knows how much or how fast the oceans will rise from all that meltwater.
Sure, there is a little hubris in saying that mankind caused it all to happen - although I'm sure we had a hand in it somehow. Recently the director of NASA had to back-peddle and say he was wrong to say the climate warming was not an issue. He's right: it IS an issue.
What bothers me is that all the folks have pie-in-the-sky schemes to reduce CO2 but in spite of all the hand waving, CO2 from man-made sources is zooming up faster than the population growth rate. The ultimate scam and hucksterism is the "offset" program, where you can buy and sell CO2 for maybe $5-10 a ton. That's a Ponzi scheme where there is ZERO reduction anywhere.
-Sam
Hey Sam, I saw/read somewhere that all those of the bovine persuasion are causing more of the CO2 problems than mankind with all their farting!! I think we need to sit down with them and have some serious discussions about their responsibilities in this!
I guess you and I are going to have to find a different place to live once the water starts rising. I think I'll build me nice big ole boat so I can just "go with the flow" ! See Ya! You coming up this way this summer anytime!!
I am not sure of the writer, but Glenn Beck has likened carbon credits to paying for dispensation for sins in the dark ages. Rush Limbaugh has called "Global Warming" the new religion of the liberal left.
Some of the "esteemed" evangelists of this cause are Laurie David & Cheryl Crowe whom have taken the message on the road. They have done this is an environmentally friendly way, four tour buses and a half dozen semis driving across the country to preach on how we should only use one sheet of toilet paper per restroom visit?!?
This truly is a religion. If anyone questions their dogma (facts) they are denounced as being in denial. If it were science, it would be open to scrutiny, discussion and so forth.
I recall vegan spokesperson for PETA (by the way I am part of another PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals) on the Glenn Beck show talking about how farming animals produces more greenhouse gas than all the vehicles is use on the planet. He also denounced all the "Global Warming" nuts out there as being insincere if they were not living a vegan lifestyle.
I did find a website with a carbon calculator. It stated that the average American has a carbon footprint of 18 (Tons of CO2/yr). When I calculated my carbon footprint it came in at 57. Oh well, I guess I am three times the average American;-)
I read the entire transcript of the interview with the Director of NASA. It sounds like he was trying to say that it is doubtful that we will be able to affect negligible change on the environment.
Bottom line, the "Inconvenient Truth" is that most people are looking for something greater than themselves to believe in and think they have found it in this faux religion filled with hypocracy.
MLeahy
BTW Sam, it does not have to make sense. This is a religion, a religion for the Godless. Not science......
MLeahy
Read a State of Fear by Michael Creighton. Best read ever for making sense out of the global warming panic attack.
Hey Mike! Another good read is: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism by Christopher Horner. This book shows how the left use fear mongering to advance their political agenda.
MLeahy
Mike you were on a roll!
But I hear ya and I wish people were more careful about what is science and what is hokum. You know what hokum is right, and old Yankee term for hooie and Mickey Mouse? Major diss.
1. Something apparently impressive or legitimate but actually untrue or insincere; nonsense.
2. A stock technique for eliciting a desired response from an audience.
Ahem, a cut&paste job from the Free Onlne Dictionary! Fitting, no?
But I hate to disappoint you guys, the science is there. It ain't there as good as the experts like the IPCC says, 95% but we're learning lots. It is serious and present and real but that's just IMHO, in my humble opinion. Maybe 63.5%.
It's just that the dang weather keeps changing all the time!
/sammie
I love how the "Experts" tell us what will, in no uncertain terms happen in one hundred years if we do not change our evil ways, and then get the forcast wrong three days out. Gotta love em!
Is there real science that proves that if all vehicles worldwide were taken off the road we would be OK? If so, so what it will never happen. If not, what is all the hype about on what I drive?
All of the solutions I hear do not appear to be practical. Hybrid cars carry a ton of toxic batteries to dispose of. CFL light bulbs contain mercury which will now be introduced into every home. Yet all these enviro-nuts oppose nuclear energy which is clean. A years worth of nuclear waste from a plant would fit under a desk, how about a coal plant? To all the libs out there and it all of you that oppose nuclear energy, your favorite country, France is 100% nuclear. How about that!
From now on when I hear an enviro-nut make demands of what we should do, I want it followed by a practical, real world solution or wait until there is one.
As to a one degree increase per century over the past ten thousand years, there is no way to accurately substantiate that. Up until the 1800's a galileo thermometer was used to tell temperature, not the most accurate and who calibrated them, by what method? Before that whom kept records? Paleo climatologists can't give exact temperature differentials by century before that, only estimates.
If you look at a bar chart of temperature change over the past ten thousand years in one hundred year increments, it will not have the resolution to show the type of changes we are talking about over the past fifty years. Again, guess work. Who is to say that it did not happen before?
I am just not convinced that we (Humans) are totally responsible for the changes we are seeing, or that we can actually do anything about it.
MLeahy
I hear ya Brother Mike.
What I do know is that the northern latitudes are warming at a much faster rate than a degree per century. Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Siberia and all those northern areas are melting, even as other parts of the world might be cooling.
What does that mean? Well it isn't good it you're worried about sea level increases and unknown stuff that is not 100 years away, but maybe only five. Who knows, we might be spectators to a humongous climate flip where the Arctic would get into the 70's in the summer and you could drive a cruise ship all over the area, no icebergs.
There was recently a story about the Canadian seal hunters and about 200 boats went up north of Labrador to hunt the Harp Seal. Gross, I know, but the story was they all got stuck in the sea ice. Wow, sea ice, it must be cold up there!
But the story doesn't say that the ice broke away from giant ice floes and was blown into their favorite hunting areas - which never happened before and is completely due to melting ice pack. In a normal year, the pancake ice would be frozen solid and not break loose.
Is it Global Warming? I'm too smart to say that. I call it arctic melting. /sammie
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