I'm with ya on this one, the core samples did it for me, I've seen/read to much into this not to believe it. The credible sources that release information regarding climate change are bonafide. Any other resource or gov't data released disputing global climate change is either heavily influenced by big business that has economics at stake or lobbyists that have other interests in mind.

I'm not a far left, hemp wearing, pot smoking, hybrid driving hippie. To the contrary, I, like a lot of people am a suburbanite with a gas guzzling car. Its going to take a lot to get people to change, heck, it seems to be a lot just to get people to accept the notion.

Whether or not he practices what he preaches does not matter if he is saying things that are true. What he'* saying is not dependent upon what he'* doing. (For example, I could say that murder is wrong, and then kill someone. That doesn't mean what I said isn't true. While his case is more debatable, since most people know murder is wrong, the analogy is rather similar. His point doesn't depend on his actions in this case). I could care less if he makes money off of it. If he weren't, he would be a fool. He is no scientist, but I doubt there are many scientists that can publish and publicize as well as he can, and those that can are notable, and few/far between (Stephen Hawking, etc..). And while we can speculate that climate change is common, we can not say that the type of variations we are seeing are part of a pattern or be some fault of ours. It would be hard to deny that we have no effect on the planet at all, whether or not what we're doing is catastrophic or not is debatable but rather unprovable with current methods.

Good discussion from what I read so far. Everyone'* keeping a cool head and being really civilized. I almost forgot I was on the internet.

This hemp wearing, pot smoking hippy has a point. I am particularly peeved by polluting cars (I live in Riverside) and the fact that the enforcement and regulation of these vehicles is so lax.

I really HATE the fact that Al Gore got involved in this. As a politician he knows NOTHING about climate science. All he does is provide a target for climate change deniers.

and by the way, don't feel all that bad about your cars, guys. The biggest contributors of greenhouse gases are coal fired power plants, cement factories (yes, it'* odd but true), industrial manufacturing and clearing of tropical forests (that prevents carbon from being uptaken and stored in trees). Cars are there and raising CAFE standards would help, but there are much bigger problems than changing a few Bonnevilles to a few Priuses.

That'* what I've been trying to tell my parents for oh so long. Do you have any sources? I'd love to prove it to them

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emi...troduction.pdf

Page 12. Mobile combustion is second only because they break down stationary combustion into three categories. Cars contribute only because there are so many of them, not because they are particularly inefficient.

Power generation from fossil fuels dwarfs cars.

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emi...6/07Trends.pdf

Page 10. Transportation is the single largest sectoral emitter but is is not really that much more than other sectors. But page 27 is not good news. Because there are so many cars they are the single largest contributor under transportation. IMPORTANT NOTE: these are figures for the US ONLY, not the world. Once the entire world is figured in, my previous post is accurate.

Glad you brought that up, because that is the crux of my argument. It may seem a bit convoluted, but it goes like this:

Whether you believe in Global Warming as truth or theory is a moot point. It'* an exercise in the assignment of blame, not a path to a solution to our current problem, which is power and how to generate it. What good is a clean enviroment if you are not around to enjoy it? (I'll pass on having "Eco-Friendly" carved on my tombstone)

We have been addicted to oil since the 1950'*..about the time when oil prices were so low that power generation was switched from coal to oil. From that point forward, we have been trapped by the supply of oil to continue going about our day to day lives. Even at the height of oil crisis of the 1970'*, OPEC managed to maintain just enough of a margin on the pricing of oil vs. coal to keep power plants fired on oil. Oil was always a little more expensive...but not enough to justify the expense of converting back.

The enviromentalist movement that has become popular also keeps us from switching back or persuing the only other viable energy source at hand...which is nuclear power. Arguing the effects on the enviroment doesn't keep the lights on, but it does keep us bound hand and foot to a supply of oil that we do not posses.

The clean alternatives being touted are not feasible: Hydro-electric power generation is maxed out...it'* unlikely we are going to sprout any more rivers with enough kenetic energy to tap. Solar is a great idea, and has been making steady progress, but still isn't up to a level where the power generation makes up for the cost (yes, some places are doing it, but give the technology another 20 years or so of devlopement and we may see some really great stuff that will make a dent in our power needs.) The list goes on of ideas for clean alternatives, none of which are ready to take over from oil yet.

So, that leads me back to my point...we have enough coal buried under Pennsylvainia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Wyoming to power us for the next 100 years. That'* enough time to break the back of OPEC and give the alternative technologies time to get it in gear. With luck, perhaps even break our addiction to oil. What we lack is the will to use the coal and accept the consequences of doing so. As I said earlier, it means telling the enviromental movement to get stuffed.

If we don't remove oil from our diet now, we will go bankrupt and starve long before climate change catches us. It might get us in the end regardless of what we do, but I'm not ready to get turned into Soylent Green chips without putting up a fight.

And no, I never have felt guilty about driving my car..since anymore, I ride a 40mpg motorcycle to work most of the time. (something I've been doing as often as I can since the late '80s.)

I agree with both sides since both sides have taken the same information and used the parts they want to to present their view. Just like all arguments the real truth is somewhere between the two sides.

[quote="clm2112"]Just a side note on this: if we were to convert 100% of every bit of grain this country produces right now to bio-desel, we would have about 20% of the oil we need. Never mind the fact that we are burning FOOD to do it. I like the idea of bio-algae production, though - we wouldn't be burning food.


Whether you call it climate change, or global warming, no one is helping anything by crying the sky is falling. Personally I don't CARE what the truth is - the solution is something we should be doing ANYWAY - cut down on our excesses, examine and implement alternate energy, recycle, stop burning fossil fuels, etc etc etc. These are all things we should be striving for anyway, regardless of what the global environment is doing. So what if it is humans causing it? There is nothing we can do about what has already been done, except for clean up our acts - which we are already ahead of when compared to China. The US is no longer the #1 polluter, we have made big strides to cleaning up our act, and we will make more in the coming years! It has become cool and in fashion to be "green".

Nuclear power is one of the cleanest power sources there is. New reactor designs can even consume spent fuel from older reactors. The problem is the word "nuclear" generates such negative emotion that the environmentalists cant see past that word to see what a good source of energy nuclear is.

Coal spews more radioactive elementssl into the air than the Chernobyl and Three mile accidents combined. And coal plants continue to spew that junk out daily.

A true solution should be a multi-pronged attack - we SHOULDN'T get all of our energy from one source. A combination of wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, wave, etc would be the ideal way to go.