"so called" global warming is "for real"

[zudobug]

A few links for anyone interested.

The Bush government's hand-picked climate change expert, Dr Rajendra Pachaurihas, is trying to get global warming taken seriously in the US (bless.) But with a little help it looks like they may have managed to spin it into another attack on the IPCC and more importantly the UN.

Meanwhile, the “Biggest-ever climate simulation” predicts climate-change could be far worse than the experts have predicted.

Some choice quotes from the above articles for non-clickers:

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in the pollution if humanity is to "survive".

His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming, complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the issue.

Why should Exxon have such influence?

"It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming," he wrote. "My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy."

Says the guy who blames periodic climate shifts and slight warming of the ocean for the increase in hurricanes... How could global warming not have an effect?

Policies aimed at keeping greenhouse-gas levels below a safe threshold may miss the point, says team member Myles Allen, a physicist at the University of Oxford. Uncertainty over global warming may mean that no such threshold can be determined; rather, we may need to keep cutting greenhouse gases for many years to come. "The danger zone is not something in the future," he says. "We're in it now."

-zudo

[zudobug]

Governments, not oil companies, must act now on global warming or there will be a "disaster", the chairman of Shell's UK arm warned last night.

 :-o

Shell boss warns of global warming 'disaster'

"Whether you like it or not, we live in a capitalist society. If we at Shell ceased to find and extract and market fossil fuel products while there was demand for them, we would fail as a company. Shell would disappear as any kind of economic force," Lord Oxburgh maintained.

:getmad:
It's easy for oil companies to say it's up to the government to reduce the market, which they can't be blamed for continuing to exploit while it exists. But with the other hand they are influencing the government to do anything but reduce their market and hurt their precious profits. Such as Exxon influencing who runs the IPCC (see above post) - even if they did then get the wrong man for the job. :lol:

-zudo

[PMC]

You can't seriously leave it to the oil industry to self-regulate in order to avoid environmental catastrophe.  It's a bit like saying that tobacco companies must self regulate to avoid health problems for smokers.

So what do they both do?  Seek out new marketplaces where environmental legislation isn't quite so stringent and exploit them.  It's why we have the oil companies still selling leaded fuel to the third world and sportsmen going into Russia and the far east to market cigarettes.  

Global warming is a potential serious problem, but we've got our priorities WAY wrong.

In the UK, we have the most expensive petrol/diesel prices in Europe "to discourage inefficient use".  Problem is that the humble motor car accounts for less than 8% of greenhouse emissions, seeing as engine technology has far advanced beyond the scope of the legislators.

Blair's environmental message is to "Cut global warming and CO2 emissions".  So what's happened?  We're shutting nuclear plants at an unprecidented rate.  What's replacing them?  Natural Gas fired power stations (even with a GCSE in chemistry I can work the rest out).  

While the motorist is being hit with ever increasing bills, our CO2 emissions are increasing because of the shortfall in power generation caused by the decomissioned nuclear plants.  

Air travel is growing at an alarming rate and in raw terms a Boeing 747 will burn as much fuel in one transatlantic cruise as my Alfa Romeo V6 will in 144 years.  Guess how much fuel duty is incurred by aviation fuel sales in Britain?  Nada.

Why aren't we being more energy efficient?  Instead, we're having our skylines blighted by wind farms, which although they count as renewable energy aren't nearly as efficient as they need to be.  

In what must be the first known instance of common sense in their eight year history, The government's environmental committee have concluded that perhaps shutting down so many nuclear plants wasn't so clever after all.  All we need to do now is spend the billions of pounds needed to bring them online and at least we have an interim solution until nuclear fusion steps off the pages of a sci-fi novel and into reality.  

[KennyR]

zudobug wrote:
Such as Exxon influencing who runs the IPCC (see above post) - even if they did then get the wrong man for the job. :lol:

One of the problems with hand-picking scientists as spin-doctors is that scientists, unlike lawyers or politicians, are usually actually quite scientific and so have an an annoying habit of going where the evidence does. Unfortunately for the oil companies and the big industries, if they skip the scientists and elect their own people, they're about as credible as...well, Dick Cheney. And doubly unfortunately, they're fast running out of scientists who'll dig up 5% of the evidence to try to obfuscate the other 95%.

But there's always some gullible pseudoscientists left...check out www.junkscience.com, which has now become a funny parody of its title. Be sure to smirk at their "People dead because of the ban on DDT" counter, and wonder why it's not a "People dead because pharmaceutecal companies don't care about drugs to treat malaria and are only interested in profiteering from fat and impotent Westerners" counter.

[blobrana]

Hum,
More gullible scientists and sceptics (organised by the Rebel Alliance) can be found here: