Political Cortex: The Right's Reckless Stance on Global Warming

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The Right's Reckless Stance on Global Warming

By Bill Hare
12/31/2008 06:13:17 PM EST

"Change it or lose it" is the operative phrase regarding planet earth. If dramatic changes are not made to combat the severe impact on global warming international authority is in broad agreement that the response will be calamitous.

Bob Herbert of the New York Times in a luminously scathing critique of the Bush years on appropriately the last day of 2008, the final year of Bush's shameful custodianship, that it is not enough to let him pass quietly from the Washington scene. Herbert stated that loud demonstrations outside the White House replete with bullhorns would be appropriate.

Bush and Cheney have marched in unfailing lockstep with the most reactionary elements of a ruthless corporate establishment bolstered by an unrelenting New World Order and full speed profits ahead and damn the consequences entities such as Halliburton, the Carlyle Group and Kissinger and Associates.

Not only has war been perpetrated on a tissue of lies predicated on non-existent weapons of mass destruction; not only has torture been meted out with crass and destructive indifference at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, replete with waterboarding; the savagery of a global profit motive bereft of conscience has challenged survival of the planet.

As Kirsten Weir wrote in Salon.com and the January 1-15 issue of The Progressive Populist, not only does the planet have to live with the potential destructive consequences of carbon dioxide emissions. There are also vast stores of "carbon hidden deep beneath our feet." Methane hydrates, or clathrates, are "ice like gas deposits buried under permafrost and deep below the seafloor."

What is the potential danger of methane hydrates? According to the doomsday scenario if global temperatures continue rising, some methane hydrates will melt. This process will send methane gas bubbling up through the ocean and into the atmosphere. The methane will trap heat close to the earth's surface, causing temperatures to climb even higher.

David Archer, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, states with blunt brevity that the story "has a great apocalyptic side to it."

It is time to get moving on this important issue. How many times have you heard the issue of undersea methane discussed by George Bush or Dick Cheney? Have the Bush-Cheney-New World Order Republican lackeys Mitch McConnell in the Senate and John Boehner in the House been on top of this issue? Actually, in response to the undersea element, they have not even been on the bottom of it.

What great shame that so-called leaders of what Bush has prized as the world's fountainhead of a democratic spirit he intended to spread throughout the Middle East did nothing but battle the issue of climate change.

What did the people of Luxembourg or Tasmania do to us, Mr. Bush? Let's take everyone down in our despotic ocean of global indifference as we sink deeper and deeper into a quicksand of selfish profiteering.

Ah yes, and what is your final message? Gee, I'll be missing those Air Force One flights and those tasty White House meals. Such is the pathetic story of gluttonous world indifference set aside for hedonist desires.

Come to think of it, isn't hedonism one of those words that your brainwash merchants over at Fox News and the circuit of ditto heads of the radio circuit of drug-addicted Rush Limbaugh say applies to the progressive left?

: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Global Warming, Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner

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The Right's Reckless Stance on Global Warming | 2 comments (2 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Drastically cutting emissions a unrealistic scheme (none / 0)

"Processes that would normally regulate climate are being driven to amplify warming. Such feedbacks, as well as the inertia of the Earth system -- and that of our response -- make it doubtful that any of the well-intentioned technical or social schemes for carbon dieting will (work). What is needed is a fundamental cure." --Dr James Lovelock

Here is what Climate Code Red says:

--Human emissions have so far produced a global average temperature increase of 0.8 degree C.

--There is another 0.6 degree C. to come due to "thermal inertia", or lags in the system, taking the total long-term global warming induced by human emissions so far to 1.4 degree C.

--If human total emissions continue as they are to 2030 (and don't increase 60% as projected) this would likely add more than 0.4 degrees C. to the system in the next two decades, taking the long-term effect by 2030 to at least 1.7 degrees C. (A 0.3 degree C. increase is predicted for the period 2004-2014 alone by Smith, Cusack et al, 2007).

--Then add the 0.3 degree C. albedo flip effect from the now imminent loss of the Arctic sea ice, and the rise in the system by 2030 is at least 2 degree. C, assuming very optimistically that emissions don't increase at all above their present annual rate! When we consider the potential permafrost releases and the effect of carbon sinks losing capacity, we are on the road to a hellish future, not for what we will do, but WHAT WE HAVE ALREADY DONE.

"I know of no realistic person who thinks carbon dioxide emissions are going to do anything but grow. Most European countries are not meeting their emissions goals, and of the ones that have, it's because their economies are collapsing. In the United States, this notion that we're going to reduce our emissions by 80 percent is pure fantasy." --Pete Geddes, Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, 2 April 2008

"I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't: we may not be able to stop global warming. We need to begin curbing global greenhouse emissions right now, but more than a decade after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the world has utterly failed to do so. Unless the geopolitics of global warming change soon, the Hail Mary pass of geoengineering might become our best shot." --Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine, 17 March 2008

"The alternative (to geoengineering) is the acceptance of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself but in the hot state." --Dr James Lovelock, August 2008

by dobermanmacleod on 12/31/2008 11:54:40 PM EST

: Thank you for (none / 0)

supplying all these informative comments. I will be reading them carefully as they enhance my overall perspective on this critical issue that needs to be tackled with immediate gusto, but naturally in a manner that comports with steady scientific reason.
Have a great 2009 and keep watching our site as we delve into the political sphere globally as well as nationally.
by Bill Hare on 01/01/2009 01:01:22 PM EST

[ Parent ]

The Right's Reckless Stance on Global Warming | 2 comments (2 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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