McCain to the Rescue?

Warner-Lieberman doesn't deal with it.

Can yhou call Brooke and ask her what his position is on Real ID?

That's another issue where he will have to break with Bush, or risk unpopularity in the west.

Good to know that he "pretty much" "wants to support" the bill. What a bold Maverick!

Who is "Swampland"?

Thank for reporting this Michael. I am glad to see that McCain is placing renewable energy into his campaign platform by supporting the LIberman-Warner bill. But, I am sure the Democrats will want to attached many PORK laden amendments for more social program spending which will fall to the Presidential veto. This is unfortunate for our energy independence struggle.

I remain on the fence so far as nuclear power is concerned. On one hand I see nuclear as a potentially cheap form of energy once a safer use is created, if possible. But I personally favor wind, solar, or water energy generation.

In my own area, the bulk of the people living here are totally opposed to wind power turbines. I disagree with them on this one subject. I am guessing the disagreement is a result of all the "bitterness" from the hunters, who oppose the restrictions to their hunting territories the windmills pose once erected, who Obama so proudly identified.

Maybe once he is President, they will all see the truth that he has identified about them, and they will be able to "process their anger, resolve their differences", and support this great intellectual man.

McCain is my HERO!

BTW -- "Nobody reported it?"

From a press conference today?

You might want to wait for tomorrow's papers. . . .

The fact that McCain scores points for merely recognizing the existence of global warming is further proof the Republican party is run by fundies and crackpots.

Ah, Eric Pooley is "Swampland". I missed that earlier.

Also, I'd be more excited about this if McCain didn't have a long history of doing the opposite of what he says.
I'll expect to see a news article about him chainsawing some redwoods tomorrow.

I really, really wish people in the media and politics would quit using the phrase "climate change" to describe carbon-restriction/energy research/environmental protection bills.

Climate change is one of the great hoaxes of our generation.

---
Ok, I'll pause to explain that statement because I know people will freak out unreasonable about it. Suppose a bunch of very smart economists from Harvard and Princeton etc got together and created a computer model of the economy. This model is incredibly advanced, it takes literally millions of variables into consideration, and all the best economic minds agree on its validity and accuracy. This model is now predicting a massive super big world depression unless everyone takes immediate and drastic action.

However, the computer model, if fed in data from the past several hundred or thousand years of human economic activity, doesn't predict some depressions that we know happened, and does predict some booms that we know didn't happen.

Who wants to re-order the entire world's economy and social structure based on this computer model? That's what "climate change" is. A computer modeled prediction of what will happen to the Earth's climate if certain inputs are maintained over time created by many of our best and brightest. These models don't predict or explain many large, massive climatological shifts that we know happened historically. ----

I know it's popular to talk about how many billions of raw tons of carbon are being dumped into the atmosphere every year, but between 1944 (or was it 1954? been awhile since I read the study) and 2004, that resulted in an atmospheric shift of 69 parts per million more carbon atoms, a change of 0.00000069%.

If you go deeper into the "climate change" arguments and research you'll see that water vapor is listed as a greenhouse gas. Hydrogen fuel cell cars that are always listed as the savior? Their exhaust would be water vapor, so from a true climate change perspective, you're actually not gaining anything by the switch.

Oil, coal and gas are going to be with us until we create or discover another form of energy storage which is small, compact and potent enough, and is as easily accessible from an energy extraction standpoint as carbon based fossil fuels.

Oh, and yes, I have seen "an inconvenient truth" and read some of the IPCC report. I saw a lot of statistical cherry picking and isolated event magnification.

Sean--

two points. There is an enormous amount of macrodata in support of climate change. Things like butterfly population boundaries in England where these things have been tracked since the 18th century. The ice melts you've heard about.

Second, the carbon we're burning has been sequestered (Plants dying and not rotting) over literally millions of years. Do you really think relasing 100 million years worth of carbon in the space of a century will not make any difference?

Jay--

There's an enormous amount of economic macrodata about the economy too. The reason I used economics as an example is that its an incredibly complex system with lots of variables, a lot of which we don't understand as well as we think we do. Economics is also a system that humans have been trying to predict for hundreds, if not thousands of years.. and with rare exceptions those predictions have been fairly horrible.

We've only just now started trying to predict the enormously complex climate system. I sincerely doubt we're getting it right on the first try. Then there are also all of the problems with the simulators not getting climactic history right.

As far as the 100 million years worth of carbon getting released in a century goes.. it'll make a difference, but whether that difference is simply relocating most of it to the ocean, raising the planets temperature, spurring massive plant growth, or something we don't even notice.. I don't honestly know.

But I do know that treating computer models that have verifiable faults like reality is a really awful idea.

The other point I'd make is that even if you did put all of that carbon into the atmosphere in one day, it wouldn't be enough to significantly impact the statistical makeup of the atmosphere, (78.1% nitrogen, 20.9% oxygen, .9% argon, .1% methane, co2, rare/inert).

Didn't McCain get a rating of zero from environmental group? This new found environmental concern, seems to be much like his gas tax an election year ploy to get elected.

Sean, you are a buffoon. Ok, I'll pause to explain that statement because I know you will freak out unreasonable about it.

As jayackroyd pointed out, the release of the carbon that has been sequestered over millions of years IS the immediate and drastic action.

Since the last ice age, the Earth's climate has been more or less puttering along, with the natural variability that one would expect in a complex, chaotic system of its nature. SUDDENLY, immediately and drastically, we start pumping carbon into the atmosphere at a massive rate. From a geologic and climatological standpoint, a century is but an instant.

Applying your economic analogy, imagine if, suddenly, immediately, and drastically, everybody on the entire planet suddenly decided that they were only going to work one day per week.

Now, imagine that every single economist in the world, including all those Harvard and Princeton minds, concluded that this immediate and drastic change in the world's work schedule must be stopped or it would cause a massive, global depression.

Two questions.
(1) What kind of buffoon would say that the entire consensus of economists was wrong because these economists' models did not predict past variations in the chaotic economic system?
(2) What kind of buffoon would conclude, not only that all these economists were wrong, but that they were engaged in a massive hoax?

In all likelihood you will find the answer to these questions by walking into your nearest bathroom, standing in front of the sink, and and looking at the wall directly in front of you.

As far as the 100 million years worth of carbon getting released in a century goes.. it'll make a difference, but whether that difference is simply relocating most of it to the ocean

Yes, "simply relocating most of it to the ocean" couldn't possibly hurt anything.

After all, his stance on global warming —it's real, and we need to deal with it —is his campaign's best evidence that he's not just like George W. Bush

Whoo-hoo! He's my hero!

Sure, he agrees with Bush on the Iraq war, torture, the Iran war bailing out rich people, health care, whatever other wars PNAC has planned, and investing excessively dictatorial powers in the Presidency, but he has a slightly different position than Bush on the environment! What a maverick!

BTW, Great bumper sticker. "John McCain: Not Just Like George Bush."

I'm sure that's a winner. I guess it is better than "McCain '08: His solution may suck, but at least he believes there's a problem."

"Sean, you are a buffoon."

Way to ostracize people there.

How about, instead of calling Sean a buffoon, you point out the various hard data that support the global warming theory.

If all we were going off of, with respect to climate change, was a computer model, then that would be fine to be skeptical. But we do have a lot of verifiable information pointing to climate change.

How about, instead of calling Sean a buffoon, you point out the various hard data that support the global warming theory.

Because, unlike most liberals, I don't engage in fruitless good-faith dialogues with people that I know are impervious to reason. The man said that he read at least part of the IPCC report. His conclusion: there is a world-wide hoax being perpetrated by climatologists. Do you really think there is some DATA that is going to sway poor Sean?

Climate change isn't a crackpot idea. Thinking climatologists might be wrong isn't a crackpot idea. But thinking that it is a hoax is a buffoonish, crackpot idea and I have no compunction about saying so. In fact, shaming buffoons is a much more effective tool than trying to reason with them.

Its ok Sean, they also believe that Al Gore also "invented" the internet. Imagine that!

Maybe you can give Rusty some DATA there, Cliff.

Sean: The whole thing is not just based on models--although the models are nothing to sneeze at at all:

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11649

There's also a number of studies that detected the "signal" of greenhouse gases in the warming:

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=3458&method=full

And there are proxy studies that showed the relationship between CO2 levels and temperature differences in the past:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past_1000_years

Scientists don't base conclusions on nothing. It's a competitive enterprise and someone can build a career by refuting scientific paradigms. This hasn't happened--despite massive funding of studies to refute climate change. George W. Bush's own National Academy of Sciences wrote in a White House commissioned study in 2002:

"Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising."

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=3713&method=full

space,

"Climate change" is a hoax in the same way the temperance movement in the 1910's was, or the way get tough on crime bills in the 1990s were, as is the supposed success they had in cleaning up the streets. Demographic shifts led to the 1990's crime drop, not community policing. Community policing only made people feel better about their neighborhoods.

In the 1970's there was an experimental police program called the "Kansas City Experiment". During this program, three areas of the city were selected that had very similar profiles. In one sector, police patrolled heavily in cars and on foot. In another they only appeared in response to calls. One was a "control" sector, where normal policing methods were maintained. Now, it would be logical to assume that the results for these three areas were different right? They weren't, crime rates in all three areas remained the same. People's perception of crime and safety differed greatly, but actual crimes did not.

I bring this up because it's the reason so many people tend to accept global warming/climate change etc. without close examination. We're burning hundreds of millions of tons of fossil fuels at a high rate. This has to have some kind of an impact, right? Wrong. As I noted in my first post, according to pro-warming studies, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by as much as 40%. It doesn't matter. CO2 in the atmosphere is only measurable in the parts per million. We're talking about an incredibly small change in atmospheric composition.

The argument about "100 million years of carbon" is inherently flawed for a variety of reasons, one of which is that theres never been that much CO2 in our atmosphere for plants to take out anyways, another is that the vast majority of that sequestered carbon is completely inaccessible to us. A lot of it is under the ocean, but most of it is just useless for energy purposes. Did you know that the United States has significantly more oil than Saudi Arabia? We do. We can't use it though because its too young. It hasn't compressed enough to be useful yet, and it won't for several million more years.

I don't mean to be uncivil, but you strike me as the type who worries about the melting Arctic ice causing sea levels to rise. Arctic ice melting won't ever affect sea levels though because all of that ice is already in the ocean and even though a lot of it is above sea level, water has more volume as a solid than a liquid.

Actually make that 2001--and the case since that study was commissioned has actually gotten stronger, not weaker.

I bring this up because it's the reason so many people tend to accept global warming/climate change etc. without close examination... We're talking about an incredibly small change in atmospheric composition.

Doesn't sound like you've made all that close an examination:

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11638

"Arctic ice melting won't ever affect sea levels though because all of that ice is already in the ocean..."

ever hear of greenland, sport?

I don't mean to be uncivil, but you strike me as the type who worries about the melting Arctic ice causing sea levels to rise. Arctic ice melting won't ever affect sea levels though because all of that ice is already in the ocean

Go grab a world map. I'll wait.

See that big island called Greenland? It's land, not ocean. Know what substance covers 80% of it? Know what's going to happen as that substance starts melting and/or breaking off and falling into the Atlantic?

Arctic ice melting won't ever affect sea levels though because all of that ice is already in the ocean and even though a lot of it is above sea level, water has more volume as a solid than a liquid.

Um, Greenland's ice is mostly over land. And a lot of the rest of the world's ice is like that too. That you didn't stop to think of that, and you thought world scientists had a massive brain fart and didn't take that into consideration speaks volumes. Again, I trust scientists more than I trust some random crank telling me this on the internet:

http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn11083

Ah, Dennis, you beat me to it...

"CO2 in the atmosphere is only measurable in the parts per million. We're talking about an incredibly small change in atmospheric composition."

Try adding a few parts per million botulin toxin to your diet, sparky...

J.J.

I appreciate the links and studies, but the simple fact remains that there are many significant past climatological events that cannot be explained or accounted for. The last Ice Age, for example, or the mini Ice Ages that have occurred and then receded, all for completely unknown, though heavily speculated on, reasons.

I know this type of contradiction exists in a lot of sciences (for example, strictly speaking, physics says its impossible for Bumblebees and Chinook helicopters to fly) but climatology is not an old, well established science with lots of hard, proven discoveries behind it. It's a brand new science that's trying to figure out what's going on and is still busily testing out all sorts of new and exciting theories and hypotheses.

I don't say that to denigrate or in any other way criticize the work of the very smart, dedicated, and talented people that are working on this, but if someone was building an experimental rocket, and it exploded, would you really be surprised? Sad, sure. Surprised, no. Science generally gets things wrong, then it gets them right. To paraphase the Edison quote, "I didn't fail to invent the lightbulb 3,000 times, I discovered 3,000 ways not to make a lightbulb."

Sorry to double post,

Yes, I am quite aware that the sea level change predictions are based on ice that's on land melting and sliding off into the ocean. And while Greenland is in the arctic, I was referring to the ice over the arctic circle, which is not on land. I apologize for any confusion.

Also, the OMG WER ALL GUNNA DRUUN ice is on antarctica, not greenland.

"Did you know that the United States has significantly more oil than Saudi Arabia? We do. We can't use it though because its too young. It hasn't compressed enough to be useful yet, and it won't for several million more years."

Tell that to Shell Oil, who has very serious ongoing plans for oil shale production. (Not compressed enough?..oy...actually, it's a lack of thermal maturity, but Shell (and others) plan to help that along by cooking the shale in situ.

I love it when folks support a pre-set worldview with whatever disjointed snippets of poorly-understood "science" that they pick out of the air...

Sean: I doubt you're worth arguing with because you continue to make some very basic and silly mistakes.

The science of climate change is well over 100 years old.

And as for new hypotheses, none of them come close to beating the explanatory power of the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. As science historian Naomi Oreskes put it:

Some climate-change deniers insist that the observed changes might be natural, perhaps caused by variations in solar irradiance or other forces we don't yet understand. Perhaps there are other explanations for the receding glaciers. But "perhaps" is not evidence.

The greatest scientist of all time, Isaac Newton, warned against this tendency more than three centuries ago. Writing in "Principia Mathematica" in 1687, he noted that once scientists had successfully drawn conclusions by "general induction from phenomena," then those conclusions had to be held as "accurately or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined...."

Climate-change deniers can imagine all the hypotheses they like, but it will not change the facts nor "the general induction from the phenomena."

None of this is to say that there are no uncertainties left - there are always uncertainties in any live science. Agreeing about the reality and causes of current global warming is not the same as agreeing about what will happen in the future. There is continuing debate in the scientific community over the likely rate of future change: not "whether" but "how much" and "how soon."

Also, the OMG WER ALL GUNNA DRUUN ice is on antarctica, not greenland.

This is the internets, why do I have to use the Google for you?

"...the simple fact remains that there are many significant past climatological events that cannot be explained or accounted for. The last Ice Age, for example, or the mini Ice Ages that have occurred and then receded, all for completely unknown, though heavily speculated on, reasons."

There are few simple facts in this debate, however, the ice ages and other past climate events most certainly can be "well explained and accounted for" through complex combinations of cyclic changes in solar output, Earth orbital eccentricities, and tectonic events that alter atmospheric compositions, oceanic circulation patterns etc. Complex enough so that they cannot likely be completely explained, but they are clearly NOT completely unknown...

Do you think the tobacco-cancer link has been sufficiently established yet, or are you still waiting for "more data" to come in?

I don't mean to be uncivil, but you strike me as the type who worries about the melting Arctic ice causing sea levels to rise. Arctic ice melting won't ever affect sea levels though because all of that ice is already in the ocean and even though a lot of it is above sea level, water has more volume as a solid than a liquid.

And I'm not allowed to call this buffoon a buffoon?

Sean, I will admit one thing. When the Antarctic ice melts and the Greenland ice melts and the sea levels rise and our climate careens wildly between massive droughts and megastorms, and thermohaline circulation currents are disrupted and some fool blames it all on melted icebergs in the arctic circle, you will have one hell of a comeback...except for the thermohaline circulation stuff. But you'll still be pretty awesome.

Sea level would rise significantly even if there were no ice to melt into the ocean, because of the thermal expansion of water due to increased ocean temperatures. Ocean levels have increased 1/2 inch in 4 years, which is a remarkable rate.

Answer this one question for me. If weather in general cycles, why wouldn't it also cycle from a warm, humid, high CO2 level in the atmosphere, now coined "greenhouse effect", not cycle back to an ice age in a "natural" progression.

Man has only lived on these lands for approximately a couple of million of the billions of years. And hypothesis of the last 100 years being the end all of end all scenarios due to our gluttony of oil is just that, computer generated possibility.

The earth was much warmer with a much higher level of CO2 during the dinosaur age, than we presently are experiencing. Ice core's from Antarctica show this to be true in recent tests of this "anthropological ice".

I am all for conservation, recycling, and driving the most gas efficient cars possible. But, the "chicken little" run-amok people such as Global Warming Al Gore and his minions of liberal rats rushing head-long into dire predictions for the end of mankind are simply hyped up scare tactics.

"The end of the World is near. Send me all your money and material things and go sit on top of the mountain and wait for your ultimate destruction, Democrats". I'll sell it all back to you when you figure out that this is all just a natural cycle of our earth.

"Contributor Eric Pooley on the McCain global warming news the media missed today..."

No one else finds a statement about missing news absolutely comical coming from Swampland contributer? This is best laugh I have had in a while. I would take it a lot more seriously if he had just said "This just in! McCain the Maverick does something awesome, again!"

Wow what an adversarial media we have! Thanks for the McCain press release Eric,
But the proper form, as shown by Scherer, is to find a way to link directly to McCain2008

Name any "real" votes McCain has made about global warming in his 30 years in congress.

Not statements to his media fluffers, but actual "real" votes.

Rusty:

No one has suggested that the cycling stops here. The likely coming warm excursion may last 10k or 100k years. Who knows? Who cares? And yes, the orbital eccentricities and other large scale drivers that control long-time-scale climate variation will still be in play. Problem is, the time duration of even the shortest natural Earth cycle perturbations likely outlast any individuals life span by orders of magnitude. So perhaps your great great great great... (etc) grandchildren can sell our great great (etc)grandchildren our stuff back...

You may want to read up on the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM): a major climate event 50 my ago that was driven entirely by natural causes (C02 from volcanism with an added kicker of CH4 release from marine gas hydrates). It was very short-lived (geologically speaking), was very acute (10 degrees of global change), and was devasting to the animals that were caught in it.

Also, note that the climate changes that are being discussed in serious circles here will be massively disruptive and will have profound ecological impacts (and this time economical impacts). But it's not the end of the entire world. Its not gonna blow up or anything. It'll keep right on spinning. But it will be the end of the world for those species and ecological systems that can not quickly (on species time-scales) and appropriately adjust. It is difficult to judge all the ramifications to our species, but the impacts will be very very serious and we are not all that matters in any case. So, if it is possible to blunt, mitigate, even halt this change (as one of the major inputs to it is under all control), then we really should.

Rusty,

according to Vint Cerf, the creator of TCP/IP protocol, Al Gore had more to do with creation of internet than any other politician (source: Vanity Fair). But given your huge intellect, being able to spell internet is a gigantic accomplishment for you than say as opposed to laying the foundation of internet as Vint Cerf did.

'Who is "Swampland"?'

Posted by Cliff | May 9, 2008 6:33 PM

Good question. Maybe its Charlie Black?

And Bush called for a reduction of CO2 in 2000. What's your point? Republicans would not support a bill on climate change if they thought it would pass, or when passed, actually work.

John McCain still refuses to support Lieberman-Warner without heavy subsidies to the nuclear power lobby.

That is not techincally news because that is not new; John McCain's staff has said that before and has just said that again.

John McCain demanding kickbacks to his lobbyist supporters... "is his campaign's best evidence that he's not just like George W. Bush"

Whoops!