The American 'allergy' to global warming.

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**rubiksnoob**

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/24/ap/business/main20111268.shtml

I found this to be a very good read, thought I'd share.

(AP) NEW YORK — Tucked between treatises on algae and prehistoric turquoise beads, the study on page 460 of a long-ago issue of the U.S. journal Science drew little attention.

"I don't think there were any newspaper articles about it or anything like that," the author recalls.

But the headline on the 1975 report was bold: "Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" And this article that coined the term may have marked the last time a mention of "global warming" didn't set off an instant outcry of angry denial. ___

EDITOR'S NOTE: Climate change has already provoked debate in a U.S. presidential campaign barely begun. An Associated Press journalist draws on decades of climate reporting to offer a retrospective and analysis on global warming and the undying urge to deny.

___

In the paper, Columbia University geoscientist Wally Broecker calculated how much carbon dioxide would accumulate in the atmosphere in the coming 35 years, and how temperatures consequently would rise. His numbers have proven almost dead-on correct. Meanwhile, other powerful evidence poured in over those decades, showing the "greenhouse effect" is real and is happening. And yet resistance to the idea among many in the U.S. appears to have hardened.

What's going on?

"The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton.

He and others who track what they call "denialism" find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democrat gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign.

From his big-windowed office overlooking the wooded campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., Broecker has observed this deepening of the desire to disbelieve.

"The opposition by the Republicans has gotten stronger and stronger," the 79-year-old "grandfather of climate science" said in an interview. "But, of course, the push by the Democrats has become stronger and stronger, and as it has become a more important issue, it has become more polarized."

The solution: "Eventually it'll become damned clear that the Earth is warming and the warming is beyond anything we have experienced in millions of years, and people will have to admit..." He stopped and laughed.

"Well, I suppose they could say God is burning us up."

The basic physics of anthropogenic — manmade — global warming has been clear for more than a century, since researchers proved that carbon dioxide traps heat. Others later showed CO2 was building up in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. Weather stations then filled in the rest: Temperatures were rising.

"As a physicist, putting CO2 into the air is good enough for me. It's the physics that convinces me," said veteran Cambridge University researcher Liz Morris. But she said work must go on to refine climate data and computer climate models, "to convince the deeply reluctant organizers of this world."

The reluctance to rein in carbon emissions revealed itself early on.

In the 1980s, as scientists studied Greenland's buried ice for clues to past climate, upgraded their computer models peering into the future, and improved global temperature analyses, the fossil-fuel industries were mobilizing for a campaign to question the science.

By 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen could appear before a U.S. Senate committee and warn that global warming had begun, a dramatic announcement later confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a new, U.N.-sponsored network of hundreds of international scientists.

But when Hansen was called back to testify in 1989, the White House of President George H.W. Bush edited this government scientist's remarks to water down his conclusions, and Hansen declined to appear.

That was the year U.S. oil and coal interests formed the Global Climate Coalition to combat efforts to shift economies away from their products. Britain's Royal Society and other researchers later determined that oil giant Exxon disbursed millions of dollars annually to think tanks and a handful of supposed experts to sow doubt about the facts.

In 1997, two years after the IPCC declared the "balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate," the world's nations gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to try to do something about it. The naysayers were there as well.

"The statement that we'll have continued warming with an increase in CO2 is opinion, not fact," oil executive William F. O'Keefe of the Global Climate Coalition insisted to reporters in Kyoto.

The late Bert Bolin, then IPCC chief, despaired.

"I'm not really surprised at the political reaction," the Swedish climatologist told The Associated Press. "I am surprised at the way some of the scientific findings have been rejected in an unscientific manner."

In fact, a document emerged years later showing that the industry coalition's own scientific team had quietly advised it that the basic science of global warming was indisputable.

Kyoto's final agreement called for limited rollbacks in greenhouse emissions. The United States didn't even join in that. And by 2000, the CO2 built up in the atmosphere to 369 parts per million — just 4 ppm less than Broecker predicted — compared with 280 ppm before the industrial revolution.

Global temperatures rose as well, by 0.6 degrees C (1.1 degrees F) in the 20th century. And the mercury just kept rising. The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.

Satellite and other monitoring, meanwhile, found nights were warming faster than days, and winters more than summers, and the upper atmosphere was cooling while the lower atmosphere warmed — all clear signals greenhouse warming was at work, not some other factor.

The impact has been widespread.

An authoritative study this August reported that hundreds of species are retreating toward the poles, egrets showing up in southern England, American robins in Eskimo villages. Some, such as polar bears, have nowhere to go. Eventual large-scale extinctions are feared.

The heat is cutting into wheat yields, nurturing beetles that are destroying northern forests, attracting malarial mosquitoes to higher altitudes.

From the Rockies to the Himalayas, glaciers are shrinking, sending ever more water into the world's seas. Because of accelerated melt in Greenland and elsewhere, the eight-nation Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program projects ocean levels will rise 90 to 160 centimeters (35 to 63 inches) by 2100, threatening coastlines everywhere.

"We are scared, really and truly," diplomat Laurence Edwards, from the Pacific's Marshall Islands, told the AP before the 1997 Kyoto meeting.

Today in his low-lying home islands, rising seas have washed away shoreline graveyards, saltwater has invaded wells, and islanders desperately seek aid to build a seawall to shield their capital.

The oceans are turning more acidic, too, from absorbing excess carbon dioxide. Acidifying seas will harm plankton, shellfish and other marine life up the food chain. Biologists fear the world's coral reefs, home to much ocean life and already damaged from warmer waters, will largely disappear in this century.

The greatest fears may focus on "feedbacks" in the Arctic, warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.

The Arctic Ocean's summer ice cap has shrunk by half and is expected to essentially vanish by 2030 or 2040, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Sept. 15. Ashore, meanwhile, the Arctic tundra's permafrost is thawing and releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

These changes will feed on themselves: Released methane leads to warmer skies, which will release more methane. Ice-free Arctic waters absorb more of the sun's heat than do reflective ice and snow, and so melt will beget melt. The frozen Arctic is a controller of Northern Hemisphere climate; an unfrozen one could upend age-old weather patterns across continents.

In the face of years of scientific findings and growing impacts, the doubters persist. They ignore long-term trends and seize on insignificant year-to-year blips in data to claim all is well. They focus on minor mistakes in thousands of pages of peer-reviewed studies to claim all is wrong. And they carom from one explanation to another for today's warming Earth: jet contrails, sunspots, cosmic rays, natural cycles.

"Ninety-eight percent of the world's climate scientists say it's for real, and yet you still have deniers," observed former U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who chaired the House's science committee.

Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican head of the U.N.'s post-Kyoto climate negotiations, finds it "very, very perplexing, this apparent allergy that there is in the United States. Why?"

The Australian scholar Hamilton sought to explain why in his 2010 book, "Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change."

In an interview, he said he found a "transformation" from the 1990s and its industry-financed campaign, to an America where climate denial "has now become a marker of cultural identity in the 'angry' parts of the United States."

"Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism," he said, a movement that has "a visceral loathing of environmentalism."

An in-depth study of a decade of Gallup polling finds statistical backing for that analysis.

On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering "yes" plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010, while liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring's Sociological Quarterly.

A Pew Research Center poll last October found a similar left-right gap.

The drop-off coincided with the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president and the Democratic effort in Congress, ultimately futile, to impose government caps on industrial greenhouse emissions.

Boehlert, the veteran GOP congressman, noted that "high-profile people with an 'R' after their name, like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, are saying it's all fiction. Pooh-poohing the science of climate change feeds into their basic narrative that all government is bad."

The quarterly study's authors, Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State University and Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State, suggested climate had joined abortion and other explosive, intractable issues as a mainstay of America's hardening left-right gap.

"The culture wars have thus taken on a new dimension," they wrote.

Al Gore, for one, remains upbeat. The former vice president and Nobel Prize-winning climate campaigner says "ferocity" in defense of false beliefs often increases "as the evidence proving them false builds."

In an AP interview, he pointed to tipping points in recent history — the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dismantling of U.S. racial segregation — when the potential for change built slowly in the background, until a critical mass was reached.

"This is building toward a point where the falsehoods of climate denial will be unacceptable as a basis for policy much longer," Gore said. "As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'How long? Not long.'"

Even Wally Broecker's jest — that deniers could blame God — may not be an option for long.

Last May the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, arm of an institution that once persecuted Galileo for his scientific findings, pronounced on manmade global warming: It's happening.

Said the pope's scientific advisers, "We must protect the habitat that sustains us."

**Mr. Self Destruct**

I was willing to accept global warming until we found that 'hockey stick' graph in An Inconvenient Truth to suggest the temperature change was complete made-up bull gak.

**rubiksnoob**

Mr. Self Destruct wrote:I was willing to accept global warming until we found that 'hockey stick' graph in An Inconvenient Truth to suggest the temperature change was complete made-up bull gak.

Yeah, some politician making up a graph doesn't disprove an already well-researched and proven phenomenon. Sorry.

**Kilkrazy**

Are you happy to ignore all the other evidence?

**Amaya**

What other evidence? The only reliable information on the climate we have is less than 200 years old. Earth is alleged to being millions of years old. There might be a climate change, but I think it is much more believable that Earth goes through cyclical climate changes than to say that this is a man made issue.

**Mr. Self Destruct**

rubiksnoob wrote:
Mr. Self Destruct wrote:I was willing to accept global warming until we found that 'hockey stick' graph in An Inconvenient Truth to suggest the temperature change was complete made-up bull gak.

Yeah, some politician making up a graph doesn't disprove an already well-researched and proven phenomenon. Sorry.

It wasn't entirely the fact that he bulled it, it was the fact that he essentially revived the entire global-warming hysteria with false evidence. I don't ever remember hearing anything about it until one day Mr. Gore makes a movie and then HOLY gak WE'RE ALL GOING TO DROWN IN FLAMING WATER.
It wouldn't have made much of a difference to me if he wasn't trying to make himself into the Great Paragon and Poobah of all things global warming.

**Dakkadan**

Amaya wrote:What other evidence? The only reliable information on the climate we have is less than 200 years old. Earth is alleged to being millions of years old. There might be a climate change, but I think it is much more believable that Earth goes through cyclical climate changes than to say that this is a man made issue.

Actually scientists have journied to both poles. Using special tools they have, and are recovering ice that is millions of years old. Using this ice a person can determine what the climate of the earth was millions of years ago. So in fact it is possible to gather reliable climate information which is older than 200 years old

**Amaya**

Dakkadan wrote:
Amaya wrote:What other evidence? The only reliable information on the climate we have is less than 200 years old. Earth is alleged to being millions of years old. There might be a climate change, but I think it is much more believable that Earth goes through cyclical climate changes than to say that this is a man made issue.

Actually scientists have journied to both poles. Using special tools they have, and are recovering ice that is millions of years old. Using this ice a person can determine what the climate of the earth was millions of years ago. So in fact it is possible to gather reliable climate information which is older than 200 years old

And how reliable is that? Wouldn't such materials be affected by the current climate?

**rubiksnoob**

Amaya wrote:What other evidence? The only reliable information on the climate we have is less than 200 years old. Earth is alleged to being millions of years old. There might be a climate change, but I think it is much more believable that Earth goes through cyclical climate changes than to say that this is a man made issue.

First, the planet is billions of years old, not millions. The generally accepted age for the Earth is 4.1 to 4.2 billion years.

Second, in order to dispute the fact that humans are contributing to global warming you would have to ignore two indisputable points:
1) CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere.
2) Humans pump CO2 into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels.

Can you deny either of those two facts? If not, then I can't see how you can claim that humans aren't contributing.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Amaya wrote:
Dakkadan wrote:
Amaya wrote:What other evidence? The only reliable information on the climate we have is less than 200 years old. Earth is alleged to being millions of years old. There might be a climate change, but I think it is much more believable that Earth goes through cyclical climate changes than to say that this is a man made issue.

Actually scientists have journied to both poles. Using special tools they have, and are recovering ice that is millions of years old. Using this ice a person can determine what the climate of the earth was millions of years ago. So in fact it is possible to gather reliable climate information which is older than 200 years old

And how reliable is that? Wouldn't such materials be affected by the current climate?

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core

**Amaya**

And exactly how much CO2 are humans pumping into the atmosphere?

**rubiksnoob**

Amaya wrote:And exactly how much CO2 are humans pumping into the atmosphere?

http://geology.com/nasa/human-carbon-dioxide/

NASA wrote:Human activities add a worldwide average of almost 1.4 metric tons of carbon per person per year to the atmosphere.

So multiply 1.4 metric tons by approximately 6.96 billion, annually.

**Kilkrazy**

Amaya wrote:What other evidence? The only reliable information on the climate we have is less than 200 years old. Earth is alleged to being millions of years old. There might be a climate change, but I think it is much more believable that Earth goes through cyclical climate changes than to say that this is a man made issue.

You agree that climate change is happening, but you doubt the anthropogenic component.

**Amaya**

Kilkrazy wrote:
Amaya wrote:What other evidence? The only reliable information on the climate we have is less than 200 years old. Earth is alleged to being millions of years old. There might be a climate change, but I think it is much more believable that Earth goes through cyclical climate changes than to say that this is a man made issue.

You agree that climate change is happening, but you doubt the anthropogenic component.

Yes.

**biccat**

Even if everyone were to accept the standard model of CO2 -> OMG WE'RE ALL GOING TO DROWN, we should still have a debate about what the proper role of government and regulation should have on the issue. Specifically, is anthropogenic global warming a bad thing and is it better to

Unfortunately, neither side is really interested in advancing the debate. The right, correctly IMO, is arguing against the underlying position of global warming while the left refuses to discuss anything other than Kyoto or the like.

**Azure**

rubiksnoob wrote:
No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core

Those are unreliable as the ice freezes both from the top down And bottom up, assuming that we are basing these Ice Core findings off of ones found in water

**mattyrm**

Amaya wrote: Earth is alleged to being millions of years old.

Ok lets start at the top.

The earth isnt "alleged" to being millions of years old. The earth is 4.54 billion years old.

Plus, something that has been alleged is something that is said to have taken place without proof, and there is more proof for the age of the earth being in the billions than there is proof that I am an extremely ill tempered, heavily follicled little ewok. And this is proved thanks to eye witness testimony, thousands of pictures in cyber space, and a conversation with my almost as hairy siblings and parents.

**Dakkadan**

Azure wrote:
rubiksnoob wrote:
No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core

Those are unreliable as the ice freezes both from the top down And bottom up, assuming that we are basing these Ice Core findings off of ones found in water

You should actually read the ice core artical he linked if you are interested in the science. The are links at the bottom to outside websites with lots of information on the exact science. Its very accurate in some cases they can tell you what volcano erupted 1000 years ago.

**Phanatik**

rubiksnoob wrote:
Second, in order to dispute the fact that humans are contributing to global warming you would have to ignore two indisputable points:
1) CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere.
2) Humans pump CO2 into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels.

Can you deny either of those two facts? If not, then I can't see how you can claim that humans aren't contributing.

Lets look at the various contributions to greenhouse gases:

Greenhouse gases as part of the total atmosphere: 1-2 percent (the rest being @ 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen)

Of that 2 percent:
95 percent is water vapor
3.62 percent is carbon dioxide (harmful)

Of that 3.62 percent, humans account for 3.4 percent from co2 emissions.

So, humans do contribute to the greenhouse gases, however it doesn't even amount to the tip of the tail that wags the dog.
If global warming is occurring, its because of the Sun. If there is global cooling, it's because of the sun. Plain and simple.

Enviromentalist Nazis can ban grills, SUVs, aerosol cans, and cow flatulence, but it won't amount to a hill of beans.

So, King Canute, feel free to command the sun to stop shining, but don't touch my grill.
Regards,
Phanatik

**Some_Call_Me_Tim?**

mattyrm wrote:
Amaya wrote: Earth is alleged to being millions of years old.

Ok lets start at the top.

The earth isnt "alleged" to being millions of years old. The earth is 4.54 billion years old.

Plus, something that has been alleged is something that is said to have taken place without proof, and there is more proof for the age of the earth being in the billions than there is proof that I am an extremely ill tempered, heavily follicled little ewok. And this is proved thanks to eye witness testimony, thousands of pictures in cyber space, and a conversation with my almost as hairy siblings and parents.

Actually, according to the scientific method, scientific truths are not absolute. Right now, the general consensus is that the earth is 4.54 billion years, BUT, if a new discovery was made, next year, the general consensus would be that the earth is maybe 5.69 billion years old. My point is, I guess, that when it comes to science, it is silly to say that "the earth is 4.54 billion years old", because, as I said, new discoveries are always being made...When my dad was in school, the earth was generally thought of as 3 billion years old, or thereabouts.

Did any of that make sense?

**Monster Rain**

Some_Call_Me_Tim? wrote:[When my dad was in school, the earth was generally thought of as 3 billion years old, or thereabouts.

Did any of that make sense?

Is your dad 1.54 billion years old?

That might be causing the confusion.

**sebster**

Amaya wrote:What other evidence? The only reliable information on the climate we have is less than 200 years old.

That is nonsense. We have tracked temperature back more than 400,000 years through the study of ice cores.

Here's an article on ice cores, if you're so inclined to read it;
http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/icecore/review.php

You have believed a liar, who lied to you. The result is that you've looked foolish when you repeated that lie here. Do you like being duped?

No? Then stop believing the liars who tell you these things for political motivations, and start reading about the actual science that's going on in studying climate change.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Mr. Self Destruct wrote:It wasn't entirely the fact that he bulled it, it was the fact that he essentially revived the entire global-warming hysteria with false evidence. I don't ever remember hearing anything about it until one day Mr. Gore makes a movie and then HOLY gak WE'RE ALL GOING TO DROWN IN FLAMING WATER.

The lack of priority that climate change had before Gore's documentary speaks volumes of the lack of respect towards science in the popular consciousness, but that's about all.

It wouldn't have made much of a difference to me if he wasn't trying to make himself into the Great Paragon and Poobah of all things global warming.

You can dislike Gore all you want, but that doesn't give you the ability to deny the scientific consensus.

You don't get to deny gravity because Mr Newton was a weirdo, either.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

biccat wrote:Even if everyone were to accept the standard model of CO2 -> OMG WE'RE ALL GOING TO DROWN, we should still have a debate about what the proper role of government and regulation should have on the issue. Specifically, is anthropogenic global warming a bad thing and is it better to

Uh huh. I too have noted a distinct lack of honest and forthright debate about whether it might be better for the pacific island nations to sink under the sea.

Meanwhile, climate change is bad. We may get more arable land in some places and other kinds of things, but the simple fact is we've built up centuries of infrastructure based on weather patterns that have remained more or less constant over that time, or changed very slowly. The cost in rebuilding that infrastructure to account for new weather patterns is immense, far greater than the cost of capping emmissions, in the long term.

As well as making a simple, intuitive sense, this idea was explored in detail in the Stern Review. Stern found that the cost of stabilising carbon dioxide at about 550ppm was about 1% of GDP. The cost of adapting to climate change would be at least 10% of GDP.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Azure wrote:Those are unreliable as the ice freezes both from the top down And bottom up, assuming that we are basing these Ice Core findings off of ones found in water

That's complete nonsense. I don't know who told you that nonsense, but they were lying to you. Instead of bing duped and repeating that nonsense and looking foolish, please go and read the science.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Phanatik wrote:Of that 2 percent:
95 percent is water vapor
3.62 percent is carbon dioxide (harmful)

Which would be relevant if all particals trapped heat in the same fashion. Of course, that's something we've known isn't true for more than a hundred years, when we first studied the properties of carbon dioxide. It certainly isn't hard to come across knowledge, it was even given in the article posted by the OP.

At this point, pride should kick in, and tell you to stop listening to whoever told you that nonsense, and made you look silly repeating it here.

Oh, and for the record, as per the OP's article that you didn't bother to read, carbon dioxide has increased from 280ppm to 369ppm from the start of the industrial age until now, making human's responsible for just under 32% of the total carbon dioxide in the air. So that's another piece of nonsense that's made you look silly. Not that the total proportion is a relevant figure anyway, what matters is that impact of that proportion on temperature.

**Phanatik**

Oh, you called me silly. I guess you win the argument.

But, there's just that little matter that enviromentalists change the data to support their position.

But you called me silly, so you win the argument.

And you do have the video of icebergs and glaciers melting, that will raise sea levels destroying coastal cities. (Icebergs and glaciers and polar bears, oh my!)

But, that video was falsified as well. It's from different locations.

But you called me silly, so you win the argument.

Well, you DO have that great enviromental champion Al Gore, who will at the drop of a hat leave one of his many homes (burning more electricity than Thor) and hop on his private plane (burning fossil fuels) to bring the message to the masses around the world. What a guy!

But, he stands to profit billions from the offset rights he's purchased.

But, you called me silly, so you win the argument.

Best,

**Frazzled**

Kilkrazy wrote:Are you happy to ignore all the other evidence?

As noted in other threads, under an enlightened Frazzled Administration, not only are we cognizant of the possibility, we're ready to profit from it.

Antarctica + luxury beachside townhome timeshares = PROFIT!

**notprop**

Why does the Global Warming debate revolve around Al-flipping-Gore all the time?

Surely there must be more than just Al saying this stuff in the US other than that bloke.

The rest of the world [I suppose I should say developed] seems to have got the message fine without him, can't you just drop him given that any politician in the US just seems to engender 50%+ of the public ingnoring him/the point on sight.

Have you tried getting Elmo to say a few word yet? He's good. (the little red feller not the comedian)

**Frazzled**

Phanatik wrote:Oh, you called me silly. I guess you win the argument.

But, there's just that little matter that enviromentalists change the data to support their position.

But you called me silly, so you win the argument.

And you do have the video of icebergs and glaciers melting, that will raise sea levels destroying coastal cities. (Icebergs and glaciers and polar bears, oh my!)

But, that video was falsified as well. It's from different locations.

But you called me silly, so you win the argument.

Well, you DO have that great enviromental champion Al Gore, who will at the drop of a hat leave one of his many homes (burning more electricity than Thor) and hop on his private plane (burning fossil fuels) to bring the message to the masses around the world. What a guy!

But, he stands to profit billions from the offset rights he's purchased.

But, you called me silly, so you win the argument.

Best,

Don't forget Al Gore is making serious cash, as in tens of millions of dollars on this, including private equity funds that invest in government supported "green energy." Whether or not global warming is occuring, whether or not it is man made, when your proponents are shucksters who have blindingly high personal financial interests, then color me skeptical.

OTT but your avatar is excellent. Wedding photo?

**Rented Tritium**

Phanatik, how can the sun be causing warming? You're aware that the sun is on a COOLING cycle right now, right?

**Frazzled**

notprop wrote:Why does the Global Warming debate revolve around Al-flipping-Gore all the time?

Surely there must be more than just Al saying this stuff in the US other than that bloke.

The rest of the world [I suppose I should say developed] seems to have got the message fine without him, can't you just drop him given that any politician in the US just seems to engender 50%+ of the public ingnoring him/the point on sight.

Have you tried getting Elmo to say a few word yet? He's good. (the little red feller not the comedian)

Actually the rest of the world hasn't. Just a few Euro nutters and others paying lip service. The Chinese and Indians are pumping the smog as fast as they can.

The positive I have is that "clean energy" generally is domestic energy, breaking us from reliance on dictators and psychopaths who have a thing for blowing up children at the local market square.

**Rented Tritium**

Unfortunately, it's just as hard selling the gore crowd on nuclear power as it is selling the right on climate change, so it's going to be remarkably hard to do anything about this.

**kenshin620**

Bah be glad we changed from horses to cars

I think it could be a lot worse, while not perfect I think we're not doing too shabby

Of course I barely know too much about this so I dont care about whos right or wrong, etc

**notprop**

Ergo the developed world comment old fruit.

I agree on the clean/renewable energy sources. The sooner we have Fusion energy and or enough Wind/Solar/Tidal energy the sooner we can cut the Middle-East and Balkans loose to fight it out amoungst themselves and for our entertainment.

Fraz, Thats also a little unfair on dictators, some of them only like torturing people. Lets not pigeon hole everyone now.