By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com
November 28, 2007
Scientist Elisabeth Holland learned that she had won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize while walking through O’Hare Airport in
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “was the subtext on CNN,” said
What IPCC, a huge consortium of scientists, had done didn’t really sink in until
“Us receiving the Nobel Prize are the facts speaking for themselves,” she concluded.
The information
That was one reason why Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter showed up at the atmospheric research center Monday to honor scientists from the state who worked on the IPCC.
The panel’s work could combine with the Nobel’s prestige to at long last spur the
So
Fellow IPCC member Tingjun Zhang did the same thing.
“We try to deliver what we find,” said Zhang of the
“I bring my daughter today to see how serious this is. So we can protect ourselves, protect our children, protect our grandchildren.”
Zhang’s 12-year-old daughter, Anna, said she never hears about global warming at school.
“It bothers me when people say it isn’t true,” said Anna Holland, who has had to persuade far too many classmates about a scientific fact. “If we don’t start to do something about it, by the time it gets to our grandchildren it will be out of our hands.”
And yet the naysayers continue to bray - George Will in Newsweek opining on the harsh economic consequences of trying to control the man-made pollution that contributes to global warming, a columnist in the Denver Post saying schools shouldn’t teach “Gore’s fiction.”
Incredibly,
With the Nobel, folks like
How to move forward.
“The majority of people realize we should take some action,” Zhang said. “Global warming is in the process. It’s not a cry-wolf issue. Scientists have to go and reach the community with the message and keep pressure from voters on senators and governors.”
And certainly presidents.
As newly minted Nobel laureate Elisabeth Holland correctly noted: “Every other country seems to get the issue of global warming in a way people in this country don’t.”
Copyright 2007 by Jim Spencer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
6 users commented in " Nobel Prize Makes Global Warming a Hot Policy Topic "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackAmen, brother.
Jim! RE: Revisionists are close by!
Up in little ole Bozeman, MT is a “front group”
for a Washington, DC conservative think tank,
The National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI), with folks like Dick Cheney
and former FEC Chairwoman Joan Aikens on their
Board/Trustees group. Exxon-Mobil gives big
bucks to write a distorted view of Global Warming as though it’s not happening, etc.
Now this front group in Bozeman is called The Foundation for Research in Environment & Entreprenuerialism (F.R.E.E.) with Ken Starr and Ed Meese III on their board. So, it seems
that right here in the Rocky Mtn Region we have
these guys & Aikens all fronting for the big oil and gas exploration revisionists who won’t admit to what’s happening in Global Warming.
$12 Million was spent by Exxon-Mobil to provide such groups with funding over the past few years. in addition, a couple of Montana State U. economics who are “Milton Friedman Privatization Boys” are also involved with F.R.E.E., in Bozeman.
This whole bunch invites U.S. Supreme Court Justices to come out to Salt Lake City to speak
at conferences where the Justices are “stroked”. The Justices are also wined and
dined near Bozeman, Montana at Gallatin Gateway’s resort and at the Big Sky Ski Resort.
Joe Coors was also on the board of the NLCIP, the parent lobbying group, when he was alive. And Anschutz Foundation also helps fund this same group and bunch of distorters of what scientists have uncovered! ~ Thanks Jim!
To assuage these neanderthals, the IPCC report was actually toned down; consequently, these folks may go slack-jawed in a year or so when they realize their govt. was lying to them - in the opposite direction they thought! And they will howl, they will blame the scientists, they will set their jaws and demand somebody be punished.
The dumbed-down point in the IPCC report is just this: the world is suffering from overpopulation of humans. Whether we focus on the pollution from cars or from chopping down the rainforests or damming the rivers, we have met the enemy and he is us. But to start a worldwide campaign to foster birth control and family planning would alienate the Catholics, the business interests that desire more and more “growth” to provide them with cheap labor, and let’s not even talk about the Muslim reaction. Hell, this society can hardly swallow the idea of letting a 16-year-old use the pill. The pathetic part is that if such a program were universally embraced, it would be so easy. Most women really don’t want to have all those children; right now, they have no Choice. We could stop this in a generation. Every continent could evaluate its resources, project an optimal population based on that evaluation, and kick off educating and providing birth control to its peoples to try to reach their stability point.
The alternative is to wait until things are so bad that people will finally endorse the idea of radical change but by then the forces of nature will have taken over and swamped our ability to respond: widespread death of millions from drowning, starvation, overheating leads to contamination of the environment from unburied corpses, disease sweeps in to join the fray, the structures of governance collapse and people commence killing each other to survive. That is a form of population reduction, too, but I thought we were supposed to be the intelligent species….
Jim,
Read Inconvenient Kyoto Truths by
George Will. It’s rational and
explains some inconvenient truths
about the temperature of the Earth
relative to world politics. It was
in Feruary’s Newsweek. It’s should
be required reading for everyone.
For instance (if it even matters) China
is building a coal fired power plant
big enough to power SanDiego ever week
and will do so for the next 20 years.
So what’s the logic of hamstringing only
the United States with greenhouse gas
limitations? Well, that same reason
Liberals cry about constantly, blaming
Conservative foreign policiies…They
HATE US. Kyoto is just another way to
“get at” the United States. Read Will’s
piece though it’s ingenious in it’s logic.
Dennis, the apologist for the right, cites rightie George Will as an scientific expert on global warming? I love the right wing rhetoric. . “why should we be the only ones to sacrifice (i.e. profit) when other major polluting countries (e.g., only China) won’t jump throught the same hoops?” The answer is - “because we let them.” What does China need from us more than anything? Trade. China, if you don’t get on board the world’s future and it’s health, you don’t get our devalued dollars. It’s that simple. But then, that would be taking $ out of the pockets of the Republican rich, and well, denial is a better reaction than doing the “right” ting. Like the Repubs passing on the $trillions of debt from this failed foriegn and economic policies, the Repubs don’t mind passing on the consequences of global warming. When the world’s scientists can convince the capitalists deniers that global warming will reduce their profit margin or wreck havoc on their free market, only then will they get on board. We know where the buck stops.
If we wait for China to cut back, then we are tacitly yielding a world leadership position to the Chinese. China is going to collapse under its own toxic weight. They have almost no clean drinking water left, and their people are dying of cancer and industrial diseases at an alarming rate. Believe it or not, they are mindlessly imitating the U.S. Except they did it without a historic experience with the dangerous products of manufacturing, without the power of workers’ unions, without an infrastructure of enforcement and without an educated populace. They have a lot of laws restricting pollution, but they don’t enforce them. They’re too busy monitoring their citizens’ use of the internet, because they think that’s the real danger! The good thing about this is that when we (and the rest of the mature countries) come up with solution(s) to the problems of global warming, China will follow there, too. They do not have much if any of a creative element in their society, they just mimic (and steal, tsk, tsk). We, on the other hand, believe in R&D and riding the change. That is the America I love, not this pinch-faced whining greedy corporate machine that buys face-time on the media to try to postpone the future with their lies. The true America does a swan dive into the future.
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