Stinky, is climate change not happening or is it just not caused by man? Are CO2 levels rising? If so, is this caused by man?

Aunty -- nobody is running around like the sky is falling, but remember the two choices aren't abject panic and actively obstructing any forward progress. This seems to be the two positions you see...

What I'm for is prudent governmental policy that incentivises market to develop creative solutions. Hopefully we can sell those solutions to the Chinese, since they'll obviously need them too. Your amusing anecdotes about slimy scum and chunky air are again the classic "actively obstruct" arguements... Entirely emotional and anecdotal. How about some data... CLICK HERE for the data on Puget Sound air quality, flip past the cover page to the very first chart... (I'm exerpting at ~9 year intervals)

Number of "GOOD" air quality days/year:
1980 - 73 (!!!)
1989 - 231
1998 - 317 (a pretty large outlier in the data set, in a positive way)
2007 - 285

So you go on remembering the good 'ol days with the same make-believe lenses that cause you to believe all the junk the Texas school board is doing to their textbooks.

And again, I'm all for local projects too--and commend you for the work you've done on fisheries as an example. But one need not exclude the other. They BOTH matter, even though the national/global stuff is much more challenging politically and logistically.

With that logic, i suppose I should quit voting, cuz what am i gonna do as one individual? Don't answer that Aunty.

StinkingWaders,

It has very much to do with climate. Free flowing rivers add oxygen and nutrients to the marine ecosytem, but mainly serve to cool ocean temperatures.

Please do yourself a huge favor and stop embarrassing yourself with your idiocy.

Aunty, YOU crack ME up. Thanks!

My whole point AP is that the answers to your questions appear to be inconclusive and not worthy of the destructive economic policy being proposed.

The real question scientists are debating is;

Is the current warming period anamolous to earth's natural climate fuxuations? And there is serious debate going on.

The very term "climate change" is ambiguous, and for good reason. Climate change in some form or another has been occuring since the formation of the planet. Also, CO2 fluxuations have been measured through ice core samples going back millions of years. The highest point of measurement during the last four ice ages being about 325,000 years ago.

Currently we are approaching high end levels that are consistent with normal fluxuations observed every 100,000-125,000 years. These current levels have been rising from their lows going back roughly 15,000 years.

Global tempuratures have also gone through cycles of fluxuation throughout the course of history. The heavily relied upon "hockey stick graph" created by Michael Mann in 1998 and made famous by Al Gore has been shown to have serious flaws.

The Mann study relied heavily upon tree ring data out of a single location in the Sierra Nevada Mountains as a basis for assessing past temperature changes from 1000-1980. They grafted the surface temperature record of the 20th century onto the pre-1980 proxy record. The result was visually dramatic. Gone were the diificult-to-explain Medieval Warming Period and the awkward Little Ice Age. Mann gave us 900 years of stable global temps until about 1910. Then the 20th century's temps seem to skyrocket out of control. A neat little trick really.

The Mann study gave carbon credit advocates the quick answer they wanted to the argument that natural climate variations exceed whatever affect human activity might have had in the 20th century by claiming, quite simply, that the biggest past historic changes in temperature simply never happened.

Is the earth warming? Yes, it has been for 15,000 years. Are CO2 levels rising. Yes, has been for roughly 15,000 years as well. Is that warming trend caused by the last 200 years of industrial activity? In my mind that is not likely.

Again, my greater point is that the science is anything but settled. Add to that the propositions made by advocates as how to solve the problem are highly destructive and point to a wider agenda.

Not exactly something I'm willing to defer to the spoon-fed reports coming from the lame-stream media and our benevolent government benefactors.

Dude, do you understand big numbers?

Take an event that MAY be random/natural, and MAY have a cause/effect -- you're not sure. Say like a slot machine paying out two jackpots back to back. Now that could be random, or it could be someone is cheating/hacking on the machine somehow, or the machine is broken.

The odds that the two jackpots occurred naturally back-to-back? Let's say it's 1/100,000. So you are the floor manager. The 2nd jackpot occurs. What do you do? There's a very small chance that the win is legit. There is a VASTLY MORE LIKELY scenario -- someone is cheating.

Your answer? Ah, let him win, he's just a lucky dude! Why presume anything is amiss!?!?

AuntyM,

Seriously, which side are you on? Of COURSE I want 365 good days. The point is the improvement is due to people supporting governmental regulation and action on air quality. Those regulations raised the cost of manufacturing cars (catalytic converters are not free, e.g.) but got you 4x as many days with good air quality right here in town.

What I would suggest we all do as individuals is support (or at least stop actively obstructing) efforts to do similar work on greenhouse gas emissions. I don't care if it's cap & trade, or tax credits, or whatever... But the active obstruction is fantasy-land stuff. As is throwing your hands up because it's too hard to get your head around the problem.

You got rocks in your brain? That was a terrible analogy.

More like a slot machine that hits a jackpot every 5,000 pulls over the course of the last 100,000 pulls.

You want to examine the data of the last 5,000 pulls and exclude all other historical data. When the jackpot strikes on pull 5,000 there you are to say "see!! the statistics are rising!!!"

Who's being "willfully ignorant" now?

SW,

CO2 levels now are ~380 PPM.

There are multiple, independent ice-core studies which show that over 800,000 plus years (2.1M years in one case) there has never been CO2 levels above about 280 PPM outside our current (quite recent on these time scales) run up.

So I don't know where you got your 1/5000 number. But either you think you know better than the guys doing the historical research, or you agree with me that we are at a 1/1,000,000 event right now. Which is it?

You can ALWAYS tell when Stink and AntiM are losing the argument...

Tow vehicle and pleasure boat emissions don't even show up on the EPA's radar screen, compared to the carbon footprint of coal.

Hank, your 2nd point is emotionally compelling (certainly in my case, I burn gas to fish, both driving to Edmonds, and running my boat from there)....

But factually, you (and AuntyM) know that the real solution to this is not single people buying hybrids, it is a systemic problem and needs systemic solutions. I'll take the same efforts required to row my boat, and geometrically increase it's effectiveness by re-directing it into developing technology, advocating policy, and dispelling the fictions circulated by Fox News. I believe my contributions there are more likely to succeed with scale than rowboat fishing as a "lead by example" move.

And by way of analogy, there are plenty of advocates for the health and well-being of salmon and steelhead runs, who happen to be salmon and steelhead fishermen too. This doesn't strip their moral authority in my view, either.

Thanks for once again proving my point!

Once a brain-dead wingnut retard... ALWAYS a brain-dead wingnut retard.

When someone figures out how to immediately turn a profit by settling down our out-of-control, gonna-kill-yer-ass-soon Earth, you will have a winner. Biggest problem I see is that the solution(s) all cost money. With the brightest of the brightest minds (cough) wringing their hands in dispair, perhaps a viable solution is near??

Didn't think so......

ah, but the rain should bring in a fish or two.....all is good

I never trailer the boat, just in case you are wondering. It sits in dry storage 100 feet from the water. I get 30 MPG in my ULEV vehicle on my way to Edmonds.

Jackass.

Hank appears to have switched from playing the Rory Bellows role to playing the TheKing role.

If you don't live in a cave and eat dirt, you can't be concerned about global warming.

He's really filled in well for the two of them.

Hank seems a little cranky the last couple days, too. He must be irregular.

ULEV.....

What's that?

Ultra Liberal Eunic Vessle.....

Irish Wanker...I still get a good chuckle about that.

He's still pissed about me peeling the FORD/DOLE '76 sticker off his Pinto last week.