Wednesday, July 18, 2012

In Denial


A couple days ago the Spokesman Review published a Q&A on 15 topics presented to Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Topic number 12 was global warming.
12. Do you believe the human activity is significant factor that causes global warming? Should the federal government regulate carbon emissions to slow or reduce the impact of global warming?
Her response: 
Scientific reports are inconclusive at best on human culpability for global warming. Regardless of which theory proves correct, the goal is the same – to reduce carbon emissions, we need innovation in the private sector; not excessive government regulation to stifle some industries while rewarding others. I oppose “cap and trade” and other Big Government schemes because they will destroy jobs while likely having minimal impact on the climate. Further we have little influence over excessive and unregulated emissions from foreign countries like China that opens one coal fired electric plant every week.
I would ask our congresswoman to have a look at the information NASA and the Washington State Department of Ecology present on global warming and climate change. The science is not inconclusive.
In its recently released Fourth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world under the auspices of the United Nations, concluded there's a more than 90 percent probability that human activities over the past 250 years have warmed our planet.

The industrial activities that our modern civilization depends upon have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 parts per million to 379 parts per million in the last 150 years. The panel also concluded there's a better than 90 percent probability that human-produced greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have caused much of the observed increase in Earth's temperatures over the past 50 years.

They said the rate of increase in global warming due to these gases is very likely to be unprecedented within the past 10,000 years or more.

Our congresswoman would have us wait until it's too late. Meanwhile, the poles melt, the glaciers recede, the crops wither, and the storms kick our butts.

4 comments:

Baberaham Lincoln said...

Personally, I've seceded from the Corporate States of America and its meaningless political parties.

Anonymous said...

The federal and state government may agree that global warming is real, but that doesn't mean that either will stop the coal trains and ports from delivering to China via Washington State.

The political parties and Homeland Security will shut down any protests with the same alternately stealthy and violent methods that they used to shut down Occupy.

Why not just admit it's game over?

Aguanot said...

Obama's Border Patrol has been destroying water jugs left in the Sonoran Desert by the group No More Deaths.

This is both a scandal in its own right, but also a global warming metaphor. We are not in this crisis together, and the elites will quash our attempts at unity.

Even now the national drought is further dividing haves and have nots, already separated by the elite-engineered depression.

Welcome to the near future, a land of scarce water, high food costs, and jack-booted corporate/government enforcement of class lines.

Eventually, we'll all be tonks.

Crusty said...

Here come the higher food costs:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/business/food-prices-to-rise-in-wake-of-severe-drought.html?hp