Socialized Health Care in the USA

[kandrathe]

Done. However, he does say "There is a strong possibility that there are some other natural causes of global temperature fluctuations that we do not yet fully understand and which may account for the 1998 temperature peak..." (god I wish this weren't a pdf so I could just copy and paste). He proceeds, if I read correctly to summarize his general complaints so the rest of the paragraph is irrelevant. It is part of the same paragraph so maybe the next part is somehow correlated but then I have no idea what he's saying.

Do you think we know everything there is to know about the Earth's climate? You don't think it is possible that there may be some mechanism in this complex system that we do not understand or misunderstand?

Ambiguous (to me) actually. It's hard to say what's his point with lines like "Global temperatures have declined-extending the current downtrend to 11 years... At the same time atmospheric CO2 levels have continued to increase and CO2 emissions have accelerated". Either he means since CO2 has gone up and temperatures haven't in the last 11 years they can't be correlated or he means temperatures aren't going up. Either way it's an argument assuming that since for 11 years the global temperature has been declining therefore on a broader scale something. If he's not saying that global temperatures aren't generally on the rise I don't see why he wouldn't (I'm not trying to strawman here - either there's something about the last 11 years which isn't generalizable in which case it's not relevant to CO2 causing warming or it is generalizable and global warming is just not happening.

He may have studied the topic more than you have. One criticism of the models is that they are based on changes in surface temperature, where many of the measuring stations have become over time enveloped within urban heat bubbles due to pavement. Measuring the temperature of the troposphere shows an 11 year decrease in global temperature. Now, it is clear that the CO2 load of the atmosphere continues to increase much higher than it has been for thousands of years. Therefore, he is just asking a question about how strong the correlation of CO2 to global temperature. It may be there, and masked by some other climactic event (like cloud cover, or ice melts cooling ocean temperature) which will only reveal itself in some number of years or decades.

The other options he's considering are that the recession is minimizing emissions. He mentions that this needs to be considered in discussions of future plans. I really hope this recession isn't your idea of a permanent solution. If it's only temporary I see no reason to involve it in plans for the future and I have no idea what he wants with that.

He is reacting to the idea that projections always assume a linear or (usually) exponential rise in production and therefore emissions. He is critiquing a particular EPA paper that was made before the current recession, so it assumed a world GDP (and carbon production) that is false, therefore makes false assumptions for this year, and every subsequent year into the future. The EPA paper, as you can read for yourself, is heavily weighted toward the 2007 conclusions of the IPCC and CCSA. It doesn't invalidate the long term trend, only the financial burdens and the criticality of making changes now. Recognizing that there is a problem and requesting Congress act is one thing, but having the EPA regulate CO2 as a pollutant with the force of the Clean Air Act is quite another. (source)

Personally, I prefer to choose win-win options and move quickly (like having the DOE build many nuclear power plants and implement a waste recycling program as is done in Europe.) So, these projections based on bad reasoning are wrong, just the way that population projections from the 1960's were vastly wrong (see The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich). Ehrlich was a sensationalist of that era, just as Al Gore (and his junk science) is sensationalist now. I would like us all to make reasonable decisions based on *real* information, and not based on hypothetical nonsense (otherwise we'd all end up with a survivalist bunker in Oregon).