Wait till the headlines adorn our newspapers about the triumph of the man-made global warming fanatics and Obama in coming to a agreement at Copenhagen.
Of course, it’s non-binding, meaning no one has to do anything:
President Barack Obama announced Friday a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough” on a global effort to curb climate change. But Obama said, “It is going to be very hard, and it’s going to take some time” to get to a legally binding treaty.
The ego on this man is blinding. Unprecedented? Dude, it’s NON-BINDING!
President Barack Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and South African President Jacob Zuma have agreed to a political “accord” that the official said will “provide the foundation for an eventual legally binding treaty.”
In the accord, the official said, “nations will list their actions and stand behind them.”
World leaders were looking to President Obama to help break a deadlock at the climate conference in Copenhagen, but prospects had looked bleak as White House officials indicated that Chinese officials were refusing to budge on their refusal to allow a transparent verification system, a stance that would have made a deal difficult to achieve.
Of course Obama will ensure our economy is further weakened by “standing behind” the accord….India and China, not so much.
…Many environmentalists, as well as leaders from both Europe and the developing world, have said they are disappointed there will not be a legally binding treaty finished here in Copenhagen. To delay it until 2012, as the new drafts states, could cause a major outcry from some groups.
The proposal, a political statement labeled “the Copenhagen Accord,” also lacks the kind of independent verification of emission reductions by developing countries than the United States and others are insisting on. It calls upon the world’s nations to collectively reduce their emissions 80 percent by 2050.
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Everything is “unprecedented” or “unexpected” with these guys. I don’t think those words mean what they think they mean.
Well,as far as I can see,the only thing ‘unprecedented’ here is the unprecedented use of the word unprecedented by Barokeydoke….with any luck he will be ‘unPresidented’ before too much longer
LOL — This is the biggest farce ever heard. A non-binding agreement to keep yapping.
The things LIARS will do for their fraud.
Yeah but…….. Chris Matthews thinks this is “history making” and all the liberal media thinks this Precedent has a “deal”…….whoo hooo!
Over $2 million of your tax dollars to see this social media side-show. I don’t know about you, but I sure feel fulfilled. Now all I want for Christmas is a dead health care bill.
I “FEAR” for my “COUNTRY”.
Delicious irony: as Zero flies back to Washington clutching his meaningless treaty to combat non-existent global warming, the only thing falling faster than the snow in Washington is his approval ratings.
China slaps Obama in the face! I guess they can do whatever they want to the Mesiah after all they own him!
And another thing, Im in Washington DC right now watching 25 inches of GLOBAL WARMING fall to the ground!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC!
It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC!
It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC!
It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC!
It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC! It’s HISTORIC!
There……..now that that’s out of the way………
The man is an ass.
A HISTORIC ass…..
Ah, man, look, horror: with the failure of the Copenhagen Steal-a-thon where they screamed action today or die tomorrow, the sky will now fall, the ice will quickly melt, the seas will fast rise, and we shall anon bake to death on the beach now at Charlottesville in the foothills. Washington DC will be under water, as will the NY Times, who thus will not be able to report to us once the blizzard is cleared and they are able to get out and about looking at the damage done by not preventing global warming in our time. But, Obama does have a piece of paper. He would have waved it in his hand at airplane door, but blizzard limiting visibility prevented limited vision reporters from further reporting vision limiting economic disaster as a recipe for our troubled times of over-warmth. Ah, but good news: A snow shovel factory did open up overnight to take advantage of the blizzard: message – Jobs! Alas, bad news followed, for they were making a profit and emitting CO2 and were immediately taxed out of existence to prevent the warmth which would still the blizzard. Other snow jobs are reported here and there, and 2074 pages deep is a blizzard indeed. But good news: it will burn for at least four to five hours in any fireplace.
@Jim H
*Stands, and applauds*
Hey, I’m here in PA-6 .. whatever they did in Copenhagen worked immediately. Maybe too well.
As the only person here who supports action on global warming, I’m glad nothing legally binding was signed. Not that it would be ratified by the congress anyway, but most of what was under discussion looked like it would do more harm than good. I continue to favor unilateral action – let’s get our own house in order. I believe we can save money and reduce a critical strategic vulnerability at the same time. China can be motivated to reduce their emissions not by sending them free money, but by levying the same carbon taxes on the embedded emissions in their exports to us. The stick, not the carrot.
As for all the accolades being collected by Obama for just showing up, well, nothing new here, right? 🙂
Well Doug, in case you haven’t noticed, the U.S. has probably done more to reduce pollution etc. than ANY other country in this world. We’ve “had our house in order” for quite some time now. This is not to say that there can’t be more done, but I think we’ve LED the world in reduction of pollutants, technology, etc. Since water vapor is more of a “pollutant” than co2, this whole business is nothing but a mercenary hoax. Man made global warming (“climate change”) my ass.
Oh yeah…..lets TAX the Chinese. Who is it O’Zero is getting all this money from for his agenda? Who is it that for all intents and purposes OWNS this country (thanks to your saviour). Think the Chinese would tell O’Zero to shove it up his ass if he tried something like that? Well, they didn’t exactly roll over for him in Nopenhagen did they? So I’m thinkin’ they probably would.
How about this. You take care of your own fucking “carbon footprint” and we’ll take care of ours. And quit trying to think of ways to TAX people. Makes you sound like a progressive.
http://i979.photobucket.com/albums/ae277/RAPH6969/19419_185.jpg
@Doug
The only “action” we need to take regarding global warming is to enjoy it while we can, because “colding” has begun. And to call for a tax on Chinese products while this government borrows trillions from them is close to the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
The only thing you have right is getting our house in order, and that means supplying our own energy, and getting out of debt.
I’m going to tackle the issue here in two parts. Part one is the depletion part of the problem, and part two is the warming part.
I’ve been worried about depletion since the oil shocks of the 1970s. At the time we were using 14 million barrels / day (mbpd) of which 1/3 was imported. We’re now at 20 mbpd of which 2/3 is imported. The biggest single component of our trade deficit is the tab for our oil imports. Much of that money goes to countries that don’t like us much.
Here’s a statistic that may shock you: the average American consumes his or her body weight in oil every week. Yeah, I didn’t believe it either, so do the math: 20 mbpd x 7 x 42 gallons/barrel x 7.5 pounds /gallon, divided by 300 million of us – 150 pounds of a resource we can’t replace, every week, per person. We clearly can’t continue that for very long; if oil’s not already in depletion globally, it will certainly be in depletion by 2030.
We’ve got a lot of coal, though perhaps not as much as you think. In the 1970s I remember reading that we had 450 years worth of coal. Today, the R/P ratio for US coal is 250 years; no, we didn’t burn up 200 years of coal in the last 30; instead, R (reserves) dropped by 30 years worth of production while P (production) was increased. Coal currently meets 50% of our electricity needs; if we called upon it to meet our transportation needs as well, it won’t last out the century.
The good news is that there’s more energy in America’s coal than in all the oil in the middle east. In fact, the US, Canada, and Australia are potentially in the catbird’s seat with respect to fossil energy in the long run, if we play our cards right.
There are many critical applications where there is no good substitute for the grunt that fossil energy sources provide. In particular, aircraft, heavy equipment, ag machinery, long-haul freight and shipping, etc., to say nothing of military hardware. We won’t be running any of those things off windmills or solar panels any time soon. We also need fossil resources (currently oil, but coal could be substituted) for 1000s of critical products such as chemicals, plastics, paint, etc. Used carefully, our coal resources could run our civilization and power our defense for 100s of years, perhaps 1000. That’s long enough to develop some other way to run ’em.
Since I learned to drive (again in the 1970s), I’ve seen us do an about-face from smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles to a kind of vehicular arms race, as people moved into larger and larger truck-platformed vehicles, ironically built to get around CAFE regulations. Yet there’s no real economic benefit to burning 2 gallons of fuel to go X miles when 1 gallon would do. The European countries didn’t back down from their response to the 1970s crises, and as a result they use about 1/2 the oil we do, while still enjoying a first-world lifestyle. The main difference in policy response is fuel taxation.
I think it’s unwise to continue charging the cliff on fossil energy resources, hoping that some sort of alternative will emerge to replace them when they start running out. We can at least see several on the electric power front that are proven. But for liquid fuels, not so much. I could write pages debunking hydrogen and explaining why biofuels are problematic, but I’ll give a quick summary of both.
There’s no natural source for hydrogen, methods of producing it are very energy-inefficient, and we don’t have good ways of transporting or storing it because the small molecules easily escape. Even if we could produce hydrogen (nuclear thermal is the least-inefficient method and it still sucks), we’d first use it to replace nat gas as an input to fertilizer production, then in cracking operations in refineries, and then if, decades later, there was yet more available, in coal-to-liquids conversion. It ain’t gonna happen.
Biofuels are problematic because the first step of the process involves photosynthesis to capture inbound sunlight. Even the best examples from the vegetable kingdom can’t capture 1% of the energy. All further processing steps lose energy due to the laws of thermodynamics. We may find, centuries from now, that we’ll need to accept the inefficiencies and produce ’em anyway to run those critical applications I mentioned earlier. On the whole, that’s something we’d rather face much later than right now. These comments apply to all biofuels, including biodiesel. Yes, some of these fuels can be produced from waste material, and in general that’s helpful, but since those materials came from the existing processes, the end result won’t make much of a dent in the problem. Efforts to find ways to turn cellulosic material into fuel seem similarly misguided, since, with no scientific breakthroughs at all, we can extract more energy from any such waste material simply by burning it for heat and power. The 1% figure is just insurmountable – solar panels are 15% efficient, so you’d get 15x the energy for a given amount of land devoted to energy production.
By the way, David MacKay calculates that it would take a solar panel the size of the state of Arizona to power the US – again, that just ain’t gonna happen. Now you can see why I’m a fan of nuclear power.
Part two, the warming issue. Yep, things are heating up.
Fact: sea level rise has accellerated, it’s now rising at 3.1 mm/year, up from an average of 1.5 mm/year in decades past. Most of this is due to thermal expansion as the oceans heat up. Water has a much higher heat capacity than air – it’s basic physics, and you can test it yourself in your refrigerator. Thus, arguments over air temperature measurements seem somewhat beside the point to me.
Fact: Greenland is losing ice. Yes, there’s always new ice forming as snows fall inland, and yes, there’s always some ice calving off at the edges. However, careful measurements have proven that the net mass balance is negative, and all that mass is ending up as more water in the oceans.
I’ve sent an email to Dr. Michaels and I’ll post something if I get a response (I doubt he remembers me but being an alum may carry some weight). Michaels doesn’t consider himself a skeptic by the way; he acknowledges that CO2 (and other gasses) have a radiative forcing effect, and that humans have added CO2 and produced a net temperature increase. Michaels is skeptical only to the extent that he believes that the temperatures will come in at the low end of the IPCC range. He bases this on the fact that the radiative forcing effect is non-linear and decreases as you add CO2. This is true as a matter of basic physics, because you can’t completely close the radiation bands no matter how much CO2 you add. Miloy (a true skeptic who write junkscience.com) has probably the best layman’s explanation of this on his web site, but I’ll try to summarize it. Imagine you look out through a layer of tinted auto glass. Now imagine stacking another layer of that glass on the first layer. If each layer cuts the light getting through by X%, then you can see why, as you stack layer after layer, each successive layer blocks less radiation simply because there’s less left to block, and you’ll never reach zero.
So far so good, but the problem is that forcing response is itself a rate of energy flow, not a temperature increase. Forcings are generally measured in watts/m-2 (meters to the -2 power). A reasonable number for the forcing we’re getting from CO2 added to date is 1.66 watts/m-2. Notice that the number is watts, not watt-hours or watt-years or some other measure of energy. In other words, the CO2 creates an energy imbalance and the imbalance allows energy to keep accumulating, until the biosphere becomes warm enough to re-radiate the energy in a lower band. (Unlike everyday experience with hot objects that cool by convection, the Earth is in a vaccuum and can only lose heat, or gain it for that matter, by radiation flow.) I’ve asked Michaels to comment on this, but it’s of concern because it implies that even if CO2 levels stopped where they are now, we’ll keep heating up until a new equilibrium is reached.
Note that in all of the foregoing there was no need to appeal to computer models, feedback theories, or whatever. Just basic physics and direct observations involving sea level and ice mass flows. You don’t have to believe any of the theorized effects such as stronger hurricanes, droughts, etc. (and I don’t) to be worried, because sea level rise alone is a sufficient problem.
@Doug: Cough…..lookie over there Doug:
@Doug….
A lot of mumbo jumbo.
The world in its history has seen 60 periods of glaciation and 60 periods of warming. If you are worried about rising sea levels, don’t build on the shoreline. Neaderthal man was smart enough to move to higher ground when the oceans rose. Maybe you’d prefer to have NY under ice. I rather like the warmer temperatures.
Concerning Hydrogen…. you can store it in the form of water. Aluminuum Oxide can chemically release the bonds.
Maybe these genius scientists would be more usefully employed if put to work unlocking the secrets of fusion.
If ya can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance……..baffle ’em with bullshit.
@Patvann
Your forgot to mention getting rid of Obama, the UN, and a few score politicians that are selling the citizens of this great nation down the river which I believe also comes under the heading of “house cleaning”.
The only word other than unprecedented that I’d like see the incorrect use of stopped, is decimated.
People are using it like it means heavy casualties or damge.
@ Doug
Was there a “tipping point of no return” 300 million years ago when CO2 levels were over 5000ppm? Nope.
In fact, seen on the long scale, the CO2 concentration in the present cycle of glacials (ca. 200 ppm) and interglacials (ca. 300-400 ppm) is on average lower than it has been for the last 300 million years.
Present CO2 levels are at .0388ppm. subtracting all of man’s contributiion, it would be at .0376ppm, (thats the biggest estemate, btw) and the rate of the CO2 increase would be withing the margin of instrument error. In fact if you look at the Mauna Loa daily readings, it swings more than that difference between night and daytime temps.
It wasn’t long ago (sept, 2007 in realscience) that these “scientists” swore that 760ppm was this dreaded “tipping-point” and that we are already past it, yet temps have fallen by .4C in the past 10 years, virtually erasing all of the temp-increases of the past 100, which was given to be .8degC! Their models did NOT predict this, and I have the e-mails showing that they know this as well. They lament that the solar-guys were right, and that they have only a short time to convince everyone before the next 20-30year cooling period starts. (Please don’t doubt that, as I have personally read every damn e-mail IN CONTEXT, and can back up what I claim they say in short order.)
Most importantly, CO2 is a follow-on, not a leading indicator, as shown by the fact that this rate-of-rise started in the 1700’s and has not strayed from the slope much at all. It is a result of the after-effects of the MWP, not what we are adding.
Please take some time and watch this. It’s edjumacational.