Here’s a couple of columns well worth reading, in case you missed them.
In today’s Tacoma News Tribune, Peter Callaghan rips Tim Eyman a new one: “Tim Eyman, professional victim for hire.”
How do we know he’s telling the truth now? We don’t, of course. Given his history, I find it best to assume everything he says is a lie until proved otherwise.
As Callaghan reminds us, Timmy is an admitted liar, with a well documented and steady string of deceptions. And yet our state’s editorial pages continue to give him free reign (and hundreds of thousands of dollars of free press) to run his lying, self-serving guest columns. Amazing.
Meanwhile, over at the Seattle P-I, Joel Connelly had a great column Friday comparing the shrinking reputation of the self-absorbed Ralph Nadar with the growing global stature of Al Gore: “Nader has withered; Gore has grown.”
Connelly contrasts how Nadar has self-destructed under the weight of his own ego, while “the man ridiculed by Nader in 2000 has attained new and global stature.”
Al Gore has watched his early global warming warnings be vindicated by a landslide of scientific evidence.
With the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” he has found a way to outflank the political press and make complicated material accessible to the public. The film is up for an Oscar, and Gore has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
What a transition: While Nader worships at the altar of his own unappreciated brilliance, Gore speaks to the world.
Man, do I hope Gore runs for president.
Bashing Nader for giving Bush the election obscures the real issues of massive voter fraud (and/or incompetence in the electronic tally process), and the Democrats virtually abandoning the left-center for so many years, of which the Nader campaign was merely a symptom. Putting the Republican-lite (e.g. Hillary-Gore) folks back in the White House will only set us up, yet again, for the center left to become disenfranchised, while the religious right swallows some bad pills to get the Repubs back in control of just about everything.
Besides, bashing Nader is so 1999. Couldn’t Connelly come up with something new? There’s a strong argument that Nader’s ego contributed to the left wing of the Democratic Party to get in gear, enough for the Neo-libs (remember them?) to have to step aside and for people who got their teeth cut with the Greens to actually step up and do something.
There is a real opportunity in 2008; seems as though we are so ready to settle for mediocrity.
I hope he does too!
hmmmm
“The film is up for an Oscar, and Gore has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.”
I’d Submit that the oscar nomination is worthless. “My Cousin Vinny won” an Oscar.
Also, Other noteable Nobel peace Nominations:
Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Bennito Musselini.
Didn’t gore invent the internet???
@4 Al Gore invented KiroKing.
I agree with Georgetown Stew. I used to hold Ralph Nader personally responsible for the election of W, but I realize that a wrong tact. Dems should co-opt Nader like they did in ’04 (Kerry had a high-profile meeting with Nader before the election, and Nader had little traction that year). Issues Nader cared about at his Key Arena rally in ’00 have been adopted by many Democrats; John Edwards talks about rich and poor like Nader, and also talks about payday loansharks. I NEVER heard a presidential candidate talk about that until Edwards.
Here’s a great new documentary on Nader:
http://www.anunreasonableman.com/
How Nader did hurt the election effort was through fund raising efforts in his behalf. There seems to be some evidence that Nader received funds, covert or otherwise from repuke sources. That isn’t my beef. My beef was an effort to raise funds from college students and other grassroots sources. Every dime, every minute, siphoned off to serve this megalomaniac hurt progressives.
@7: Any coin or volunteer help that Nader supposedly got likely would have not gone to Democrats anyhow, so it’s hard to fathom that such was a net loss for thier candidates. Many hardcore Nader supporters have dissolved into NGOs or left politics altogether. Also, various Dems have taken plenty of money from people who also fund the right, so that argument does not hold much water either. Blaming Nader was a way to for some to not take responsibility for leaving the left in the cold, but as Will pointed out in @6, getting those issues out into the mainstream did a hellava lot.
Can someone please explain to me how Algore’s rantings about global warming relates to a Nobel PEACE Prize?
Here’s a bombshell for you: no matter what we do, global warming, assuming it’s real, will not be reversed. It will go on for centuries, according to the U.N. report. The sea levels will continue to rise as polar ice caps melt. So I guess if Al Gore wins his Nobel Peace Prize, we’ll still experience global warming. So much for riding to work everyday in your hybrid car…it’s not doing a thing. The situation is futile, according to the U.N. report.
But really, it makes sense that the global warming crowd would come to this conclusion. After all, global warming is a religion. The anti-capitalist enviro-nuts don’t ever want the problem to be solved. After all, if global warming were to be solved tomorrow, what would they blame the United States for? They’d have to find some other reason.
Sorry .. I’m still a skeptic. In no particular order here are just a few of the reasons why I’m not buying this man-made global warming scare:
· Because the sun is warmer .. and all of these scientists don’t seem to be willing to credit a warmer sun with any of the blame for global warming.
· The polar ice caps on Mars are melting. How did our CO2 emissions get all the way to Mars?
· It was warmer in the 1930s across the globe than it is right now.
· It wasn’t all that long ago that these very same scientists were warning us about “global cooling” and another approaching ice age?
· How much has the earth warmed up in the last 100 years? One degree. Now that’s frightening.
· Because that famous “hockey stick” graph that purports to show a sudden warming of the earth in the last few decades is a fraud. It ignored previous warming periods … left them off the graph altogether.
· The infamous Kyoto accords exempt some of the world’s biggest CO2 polluters, including China and India.
· The Kyoto accords can easily be seen as nothing less than an attempt to hamstring the world’s dominant capitalist economies.
· Because many of these scientists who are sounding the global warming scare depend on grant money for their livelihood, and they know the grant money dries up when they stop preaching the global warming sermon.
· Because global warming “activists” and scientists seek to punish those who have different viewpoints. If you are sure of your science you have no need to shout down or seek to punish those who disagree.
· What happened to the Medieval Warm Period? In 1996 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a chart showing climatic change over a period of 1000 years. This graph showed a Medieval warming period in which global temperatures were higher than they are today. In 2001 the IPCC issued another 1000 year graph in which the Medieval warming period was missing. Why?
· Why is the ice cap on the Antarctic getting thicker if the earth is getting warmer?
· In the United State, the one country with the most accurate temperature measuring and reporting records, temperatures have risen by 0.3 degrees centigrade over the past 100 years. The UN estimate is twice that.
· There are about 160,000 glaciers around the world. Most have never been visited or measured by man. The great majority of these glaciers are growing, not melting.
· Side-looking radar interferometry shows that the ise mass in the West Antarctic is growing at a rate of over 26 gigatons a year. This reverses a melting trend that had persisted for the previous 6,000 years.
· Rising sea levels? The sea levels have been rising since the last ice age ended. That was 12,000 years ago. Estimates are that in that time the sea level has risen by over 300 feet. The rise in our sea levels has been going on long before man started creating anything but natural CO2 emissions.
· Like Antarctica, the interior of Greenland is gaining ice mass.
· Over the past 3,000 years there have been five different extended periods when the earth was measurably warmer than it is today.
· During the last 20 years — a period of the highest carbon dioxide levels — global temperatures have actually decreased. That’s right … decreased.
· Why did a reporter from National Public Radio refuse to interview David Deming, an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma studying global warming, after his testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee unless Deming would state that global warming was being caused by man?
· Why are global warming proponents insisting that the matter is settled and that no further scientific research is needed? Why are they afraid of additional information?
· On July 24, 1974 Time Magazine published an article entitled “Another Ice Age?” Here’s the first paragraph:
“As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.”
Which side, really, has the closed minds?
Bob @ 9-
Just to pick the most absurd of your comments:
“There are about 160,000 glaciers around the world. Most have never been visited or measured by man. The great majority of these glaciers are growing, not melting.”
If they’ve never been visited or measured, how do you know they’re growing?
re 4: And Milton Friedman.
re 4: No. But he was instrumental in creating legislation that nurtured the internet and made it available to half-ass nitwits like yourself.
Bad Bob: WE are ankle deep in your BS with no end in sight!
@9
I remember the 1974 Time Magazine issue. I was in my third year at the UW studying to become an exogeologist, with a degree in Poly-Sci. Planned to work for NASA.
One of the toughest concepts for many people to wrap their minds around is the abstract nature of scientific research. It isn’t binary like a sports score – winner/loser/game over.
Hypotheses are created; data collected. The nature of this activity is new, or newly reinterpreted information may change, alter, or dismiss old paradigms, older hypotheses, which may in turn be reinstated in the face of fresh evidence. We still have so much more to learn about the Sun, eccentricities in our own planet’s orbit, the wobble on it’s axis, etc.
The problem is an old one: politicizing research.
“Man, do I hope Gore runs for president.”
Me too.
@4 “Didn’t gore invent the internet???”
Let’s examine this wingnut canard, because it’s a case study in how the Republican Noise Machine peddles its lies.
“Claim: Vice President Al Gore claimed that he “invented” the internet.
Status: False.”
According to the Urban Legends web site, this claim is “just silly political posturing” and “misleading, out-of-context distortions.” But even though Gore never claimed he invented the internet, he in fact made significant legislative contributions to its development.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
Roger Rabbit Commentary: The “Al Gore claimed he invented the internet” myth is a lie invented in a right wing boiler room and disseminated via e-mail and constant repetition on rightwing blogs in a nakedly partisan attempt to discredit a Democratic presidential candidate.
Why? Because Republicans are 100% dependent on character assassination and can’t afford a debate of the issues because they would lose every time.
Moi aussi to Gore.
•••
# 8 says:
“Any coin or volunteer help that Nader supposedly got likely would have not gone to Democrats anyhow…”
On what theory do you say that? Much as Naderites were contemptuous of the Democratic Party, it’s where they started and their natural home. I can’t believe that the split would have favored Bush.
@9 So the wingnut argument is: Since wingnuts have already fucked up the planet, we should keep fucking it up?
@9 Bob’s statement that the majority of the world’s glaciers are growing is pure, unadulterated, utter bullshit.
No more bullshit than global warming is caused by man.
Nobody seems to want to dispute that the polar ice caps on Mars are melting…..or, the sea levels have been rising since the last ice age ended. That was 12,000 years ago. Estimates are that in that time the sea level has risen by over 300 feet. The rise in our sea levels has been going on long before man started creating anything but natural CO2 emissions.
Again, I’m not saying the earth isn’t warming up….. just that wingnuts haven’t “already fucked up the planet”.
@20
Technically the Martian poles aren’t melting, they’re subliming, and as seasons change on Mars the frozen CO2 at both poles will wax and wan. Mars’ rotational axis is tilted with respect to the orbital plane by nearly 24 degrees, so seasonal differences in the amount of sunlight hitting each hemisphere is significant. Just how this correlates (along with the eccentricities in the orbit itself) to the recent observations – beginning only in 1999 – of increased pitting, ridging and mounding in the CO2 at the south pole is unclear. After more than three decades of Martian exploration, UCLA and JPL researchers are still relatively clueless about the climate of Mars.
Back Home, the concern is not that ‘wingnuts’ have caused a warming in the Earth’s otherwise cool climate. The concern is that the detritus of the Industrial Revolution in the form of greenhouse gasses – ongoing from the mid-19th century – is paying thermal dividends and accelerating the warming in the current inter-glacial phase. We appear to be kicking a very natural cycle into high gear. Global warming is an excellent theory.
Bad Bob:
Interesting tidbits you post, although most of them seem to be at odds with the published research from the vast majority of the world’s climatologists.
I am simply a layman when it comes to this, so I tend to defer to the experts, and while most of the experts in the various fields related to global warming do agree that it is both real and is directly related to human activity, I will listen politely to your alternate view, if you would just tell me where you got your PhD in climatology (or a related field) and which peer-reviewed papers you have published on the subject.
Otherwise, you’re just another wingnut, spouting right-wing talking points.
The right-wing mantra includes a stanza about how the oceans are definitely NOT going to rise, so just go on with your stuff, folks.
Then how come the Bush family bought a quarter of a million acres in the middle of a continent?
John Barelli says:
Bad Bob:
“Interesting tidbits you post, although most of them seem to be at odds with the published research from the vast majority of the world’s climatologists.”
Again, why are global warming proponents insisting that the matter is settled and that no further scientific research is needed? You stated earlier “Hypotheses are created; data collected. The nature of this activity is new, or newly reinterpreted information may change, alter, or dismiss old paradigms, older hypotheses, which may in turn be reinstated in the face of fresh evidence. We still have so much more to learn about the Sun, eccentricities in our own planet’s orbit, the wobble on it’s axis, etc.”
So…. the climatologists that say we are the cause of global warming have issued their final word on this? Case closed? Minds closed?
“I will listen politely to your alternate view, if you would just tell me where you got your PhD in climatology (or a related field) and which peer-reviewed papers you have published on the subject.”
And Algore holds HIS degree in Climatology from where?
“Otherwise, you’re just another wingnut, spouting right-wing talking points.”
I’m a wingnot, your a nutroot, and we’re ALL spouting our own, slanted, talking points….. agreed?
Interesting posts Laurence, thanks.
Maybe Clinton and Gore didn’t “invent” the internet. It was “invented” a couple of decades earlier under government grants as a defense of government computer networks against nuclear attack.
But Clinton and Gore “freed” the internet to the public, allowing public access instead of restricting it to government and academic computers.
If the Republicans had held the presidency in the 1990’s, they would have auctioned off control of the internet to the highest bidder, or better yet, awarded it to politically connected firms in no-bid “black budget” contracts. Then Halliburton, Enron, or some other such entitity would decide who gets access, who gets to post, and at what price.
Clinton/Gore did the same thing with respect to access to global positioning technology, previously closely held by the military. Now just about every boat and airplane, and quite a few hickers, have access to the technology, saving thousands of lives over the past decade.
I find it interesting although Republicans often speak about the virtues of the free and unfettered market, with thousands of entrepreneurs exercising innovation and risk-taking, it is the Democrats that most often really set the market free. The modern Republican party doesn’t really want a free market, they want an economy where the government assists favored corporations to gain control of markets, give them public resources under very advantagious contracts, and discourages any real competition from the upstarts below.
For further reading, check out Gerry Stanhill’s research on Global Dimming – published in 2001 – which received much skepticism at the time. Overall declines in solar radiation are 1-2% globally each decade for the past 50+ years. It took a sadly fortuitous 9/11 study to wake people up. Like the warning of a proverbial canary in a mineshaft, this decline in sunlight points a very accusing finger at mankind’s direct contribution to Global Warming.
Mr. Gore went to the trouble of getting a number of well-respected climatologists and others that actually had PhDs and peer-reviewed papers to put together his documentary.
He did not claim that he was the expert, merely the spokesman.
On the anti-global-warming side are a few researchers who have published very few papers, and most of those have been lambasted by their peers.
Essentially, the vast majority of folks that have the expertise to know agree that global warming is real, and that a major cause of that warming is human action.
You are welcome to disagree, but if you want to try and make a case for that here (and have any chance of being taken seriously) you will need to either be a climatologist or line up as large and distinguished a group of climate specialists as have strongly endorsed the current theories and observations.
Since that would require changing the opinions of over 90% of the world’s climate specialists, I assure you that should you succeed at that, you will have my undivided attention.
Is it possible that the overwhelming majority of respected climate specialists are wrong, and those few disrespected, apparently insignificant researchers that deny global warming are correct? Sure.
It is also possible that the world is really a large, flat disk carried through space on the back of seven elephants.
Should you choose to ignore the evidence compiled by the vast majority of the world’s climate specialists in favor of the few lonely holdouts, I might also suggest another outfit you would feel comfortable joining.
http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/
rhp lies by saying.. But Clinton and Gore “freed” the internet to the public, allowing public access instead of restricting it to government and academic computers…
lets see, Clinton started in 93. same year Mosaic released first browser….so what did clinton do that made Mosaic usable? I mean what did he do to “free” the internet
Answer is nothing.
Glad to hear Goldy say, “Man, do I hope Gore runs for president.” For those who agree, you can download a petition to draft Al Gore at the following URL:
http://www.algore.org/images/m....._color.doc
Please join the crusade.
While Al Gore has made contributions to the “Free Internet” as it exists today, remember, there are many, many people on the right and left who had the same adgenda – just not as publicly as Al Gore.
He seems to have a desire to be the “poster boy” for the “epic” issues of this generation. He clearly wanted the “information superhighway” term to be attached to “Al Gore.” He constantly pushed the limits of truth when describing his personal role in things he had an interest in putting his name on. In his defense, he never said “I invented the internet.” In fact, what he said is “I took the initiative in creating the internet.” An irresposible statement that he should have realized as soon as it came out of his big mouth – he’s a professional politian.
He knows exactly what he said – it is grandiose – in his mind I’m sure it was a statement in line with the size of his own ego.
@28
Al Gore cherry picked his “experts”, as do ALL advocates of ANY issue. Gore WILL NOT EVER debate or do a sit down with an “expert” that contradicts his “theories”. Don’t belived me? Ask Google.