Climate Change

I've been scanning through various articles on the air quality in Beijing as the Beijing Olympics nears its opening day.

As well, I have been following some of the e-mails that environmental journalists have been sending out requesting names of reliable environmental sources in Beijing.

It's apparently not always easy to get "good" information. The International Organizing Committee has also, from what I've gathered, not been especially interested in talking about air pollution. But of course why would anyone want to chat about this?

This is above all about nationalism, power politics, corporate money, and a lot at stake for many of the professional athletes that are participating in the 2008 Olympics ... and maybe, most important of all, global insanity.

Bill Nye, better known as "The Science Guy" and a member of the Skeptics Society, was on the Larry King Show this past Friday night, along with a number of participants who believed in UFOs, extra-terrestrials or both.

When Nye said that while he did not doubt that they thought they might have seen some unexplained phenomena in the sky, it was a considerable stretch, according to Nye, to assume or believe they had seen vessels carrying aliens from another world. At this point, some of the participants became angry and directed personal attacks at The Science Guy.

We humans love to believe in spirits and various gods. It's part of our very nature as Homo sapiens. We generally however don't take kindly to people who ask us to see things as they are, and not as we believe or feel. It is often seen as an attack on our basic human instincts.

Earthworks 2008 organized a global cartoon competition dealing with climate change. Some 600 competition entries were submitted. The winner "Coat Star" comes from Russia. The cartoons were published in The Independent. Go to Climate Change.

Was the method of gathering data a reason for temperature decline between 1940-1970? Go to Ocean Temperature Change

From the Natural Resources Defense Council comes an analysis of the "price tag" for global warming. Go to The cost of climate change.

For some basic information go to Fact Sheet.

For the full 42-page report go to PDF Cost.

We've heard the often-quoted remark about how the generals are always fighting the last war. In a way it reminds me of the recently passed farm bill with massive subsidies to wealthy sugar growers and large soybean farmers among others.

I don't think it's simply because Congress is stupid, corrupt or both. It has a lot to do with inertia, familiarity, and the path of least resistance. It's probably not unlike what the Pentagon does in many cases, preparing for the "one before."

John Robb, a futurist, who writes about "asymmetrical" warfare and military subjects, is the author of Brave New War. He believes the nation-state will have an increasingly difficult time defending itself against a new type of enemy, which can adapt to change faster than a central government, create new information systems rapidly, and in many cases set up a parallel government quite capable of confronting the "legitimate" institutions.

From The Vancouver Sun, an interesting article on how the climate change deniers might be "playing" a game with unintended consequences. Go to
Deniers.

A global warming denier sent me a message listing two videos I needed to watch.

The path of least resistance for me would have been to simply delete the message, and certainly not spend any time watching videos that proclaim global warming a "hoax." The problem is that (even now) the lurching denial industry is not going to simply vanish anytime soon in the U.S.

In a country where a sizeable number of Americans believe the Sun circles the Earth, according to a survey I saw not long ago, and the Earth itself is supposedly less than 10,000 years old, and Intelligent Design ought to be taught in a science classroom, foolishness is all too frequently accepted as fact.

Maybe it was the movie about the "pod" people that Donald Sutherland was in years ago. All I remember is that the folks taken over by the aliens started screaming upon discovering people that were still human.

While their numbers are slowly shrinking and in many cases the climate change deniers, at least the most extreme, can be simply ignored, the fact that Americans in general are scientifically uninformed and oftentimes elect politicians that are equally challenged, means that the deniers are not completely harmless nor irrelevant.

We have in the White House right now, for example, an individual that may have committed irreparable harm to not only the U.S. and will, in my opinion, turn out to be one of the worst disasters in American history.