Old material now, from 07 or 08, stashed away in an old email file, but completely relevant to my comments on GW/CC denialists/skeptics fantasies and fairytales concerning the phenomena ...
The only argument/point I agree with is "We can't do anything about climate change" which is at the {*very bottom of this post}. The reason I agree with it is time frame related, in that we could have taken remedial action and acheived tangible results if we'd done something 20 years ago, but now that methane clathrates from under sea floors and tundra permafrosts are thawing ( since 2007) it's too late to avert runaway global warming.
* Site's system says too many links, so will place in a 2nd post.
ExxonMobil’s Tobacco-like Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science
A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists offers the most comprehensive documentation to date of how ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry's disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/sc ... s-hot.html
NASA climate scientist claims he's been silenced
NASA's top climate scientist said the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture in December calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases, The New York Times said.
In an interview with the newspaper, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that officials at the space agency's headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard website and requests for interviews from journalists.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=84236
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ominous Arctic Melt Worries Experts
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/12/5795/
An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.1212 09
Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.
NASA’s “Tipping Points” panel and slide show materials:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/tipping_points.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Heat is On
http://www.heatisonline.org/main.cfm
Clash of the Titans
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ross Gelbspan's reveals how politicians, big oil and coal, the media, and even activists have fueled the climate crisis -- and how we might still avert disaster.
This excerpt traces what Gelbspan describes as a corrupt relationship between the Bush administration and the fossil-fuel industry
Under the administration of George W. Bush, the White House has become the East Coast branch office of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal, and climate change has become the preeminent case study of the contamination of our political system by money
ExxonMobil and the Bush administration have also united in sowing climate change disinformation and deception among U.S. citizens. By 2001, ExxonMobil had replaced the coal industry as the major funder of prominent "greenhouse skeptics," a handful of "experts" who spout bogus science, raising doubts about climate change to preempt the public's demand for action. By 2003, ExxonMobil was giving more than $1 million a year to an array of right-wing organizations opposing action on climate change -- including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, the George C. Marshall Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research.
The striking success of the fossil-fuel lobby's disinformation strategy is reflected in two Newsweek polls. The first, in 1991 -- prior to the industry's global-warming misinformation campaign -- found that 35 percent of Americans saw global warming as a serious problem. By 1996, that share shrank to 22 percent -- despite the advent of far more conclusive science, documenting human-caused global warming.
The usefulness of bogus science was not lost on the Luntz Group, a private consulting firm advising Bush on climate policy presentation. "Americans ... believe all environmental rules and regulations should be based on sound science and common sense," said a Luntz memo. "Similarly our confidence in the ability of science and technology to solve our nation's ills is second to none. Both perceptions will work in your favor if properly cultivated."
Sure enough, a new effort by the "skeptics" surfaced in spring 2003. A study by lead authors Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and published in an obscure journal, Climate Research, concluded that the 20th century is neither the warmest century, nor the century with the most extreme weather, of the past 1,000 years. Both researchers had previously contended that the recent warming was due, almost entirely, to solar variations -- a finding long since disproved by peer-reviewed scientific studies.
As it turns out, the report by Baliunas and Soon was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute. It was also coauthored by Craig Idso and Sherwood Idso, whose Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide has been funded by the coal industry and ExxonMobil.
Stepping back, it becomes clear that the climate crisis represents a titanic clash of interests. It pits the survival, as we know it, of the biggest commercial enterprise in history -- big coal and oil -- against the survival of the planet and its people. It also pits the fossil fuel industry-dominated Bush administration against the rest of the world.
http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2004/ ... n-boiling/
Tony Jones speaks with Ross Gelbspan about global warming
ROSS GELBSPAN: In the US right now the Federal Government spends about US$25 billion every year subsidising coal and oil. In the industrial world overall that figure is about $200 billion a year. We're saying take those subsidies away from coal and oil, put them behind renewables, several things will happen. The oil companies will follow the subsidies and there will become aggressive developers of solar panels and wind mills and fuel cells and so forth. I think that subsidy switch would bring out of the woodwork an army of energy entrepeneurs and engineers with successive generations of turbines and I think that would be the kind - almost like an explosion of creativity in the energy field that would rival the dot.com revolution of the 1990s.
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/ ... 720435.htm
