Thomas Jefferson was, judging from his own annotated Bible, a Unitarian. Modern-day UUs are about as far from mainstream Christianity as is possible. Also, I'm sick and tired of hearing "someone/thing isn't Christian." There have been plenty of horrible acts committed in the name of Christ, and you can't just wave them away as "not Christian." Like it or not, people will interpret their religion how they want to. If you want to distance yourself from them, then you have to find a new religion.

I also don't see why you single out Islam. Islam is actually quite similar to Christianity; both are monotheistic religions with a poor track record for tolerance and plenty of believers willing to commit atrocities in the name of God. Again, America is not a theocracy; were it one, things would be a lot bleaker. If you don't believe me, try reading the Constitution, specifically the disestablishment clause of the First Amendment.

Now, back on global warming: the IPCC report clearly states that human activities are causing detrimental changes to the environment, global warming among them. I don't want to hear "the IPCC is biased" unless you have some strong proof that they purposely falsified data or something similar. Also, this hole in the ozone? Maybe it doesn't cause too much trouble in Antarctica (besides, you know, melting more ice and raising sea levels), but when it goes over a populated area, it's dangerous, as Australia can attest.

I'm not going to speculate on what would or would not have happened had the stimulus bill not been passed, or if it had been smaller, but I think we can all say that someone who graduated from Harvard knows what they're doing much more than some kid on the internet. Quite frankly, we elect leaders in this country because the people as a whole are not competent to run the country. How many people here wanted to eat junk food all the time when they were kids, and would have if their parents hadn't told them not to? Sometimes the government needs to do unpopular things to fix problems.

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member

WHAT? What do you think the constitution means when it says, by the people for the people? And you do realize, you just called yourself incompetent, right?

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^^Want a signature like this? Visit my Sig Stall!^^

Government by the people and government for the people are two separate things, and are sometimes contradictory. Mob mentality can lead people to make the wrong decisions as a group. For example, according to Gallup polls, a majority of Americans want reduced government spending and reduced taxes. However, they also want increased support for social programs from the government.

I am incompetent to be President, and I'll freely admit that. I don't think anyone on this thread is competent to be President. It's quite a hard job.

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member

Haha....aahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaa. Oh that's rich.

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"Civil disobedience is still disobience."

I think the biggest falsehood is the fact the IPCC exists. It's an organization devoted to proving that humans cause climate change. That philosophy is inherently flawed just in the premise of an organization trying to prove a conclusion rather than a truly scientific organization trying instead to find out what is going on with the world and then finding why.

Furthermore, the organization DOES NOT represent the scientific community. It is an organization with a select group of member researches with vested interests in building up their theories. Claiming it as "THE accepted scientific view" is simply incorrect.

The best evidence is shown in the correlation between the natural cycles of the planet. As best I know... the Roman Empire or the Mayans weren't burning ridiculous amounts of coal and oil.

And on top of that, if we stopped ALL "green human house gas emissions" it wouldn't change anything.
The best solution to greenhouse gasses are coating swamps and wetlands in 6 feet of cement.
Otherwise the methane, co2, and other gasses will leak out. As far as CO2, humans count for about 2%
where nature and the simple decay of things and other natural sources make up the rest.

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/4600/chartdk.png


And then throwing this out there,
even assuming that God is speaking directly to the IPCC and they know 100% factually
that climate change is happening and humans are the sole cause...
Can we afford it?

Regardless of political stance on this... scientific issue... we can't afford these changes some people 'demand'
Fuels account easily for over 75% of ALL POWER from cars, industry, steel making, electricity and so on.

Even by the most doomsday scenarios portrayed by the IPCC, the solutions to 'climate change'
are worse than the actual climate change itself. Not to mention that the solutions will not
only NOT stop climate change, but they will cripple the world economy. A prosperous economy
simply can not deal with electricity costs doubling or tripling from the current values.

So what happens... people pass all kinds of cap and trades, taxes, whatever to the point
where coal is no longer an option. Then we're forced into solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas
all of which cost 4-5x, 3x, 2x and 2x respectively to coal. The economy will tank
then people will re-discover coal eventually... it's only a matter of when and how much damage is done.

Regardless of who uses it, the US's coal and oil reserves WILL be used. The thing is more of will it be the US using it? Or will we rent those out to China to save our moral superiority.

I own plenty of solar panels, I collect them for fun when I find them on clearance or on sale somewhere,
The thing is to charge a nintendo DS, you need about 2 square feet.
To power the blower fan on your car... 20 square feet
A refrigerator... about 5000 dollars worth of solar components
They're great supplemental power supplies or for remote areas.. but you can't depend on them for real power.
It would take 16 years for that to break even in cost for the refrigerator which is probably about as long or longer than the panels life span.
Or.... well that's if you lived in space with direct sunlight 24/7...

I haven't seen any proof that a cap and trade, carbon tax, or carbon regulation has
any economic benefit to US interests. It simply makes electricity too expensive to produce
and places a higher demand for expensive power sources and imported energy.

And then people come with the retort "well what's your solution"
Use what we've got. The US has hundreds of years worth of coal and oil within US territory.
What's so horrible about using our own resources now...? Use the coal and oil we have,
then use that cheap energy for research on better methods for later on.

One example of this is the US military is looking to switch into coal derived fuels for the armed forces,
the simple reason is it's a 100% domestic fuel we can rely on, lower costs etc.
A diesel train running on coal based fuels can carry goods over the nation at a fraction
of the cost of even ordinary diesel, and then compare that to over land trucking, it's not even close to that cost.

But hey, if you can cut your electric bill in HALF or two thirds... a carbon cap won't effect you.
The problem being most people like cooking food, refrigerators, keeping warm, and getting products made.
All of which take electricity.

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"The good warrior knows when to fight, and when to withdraw."
- Sun Tzu

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Source for IPCC actively trying to prove human relation to climate change? I don't see anything of the sort on the IPCC website.


The environment has been putting off greenhouse gasses for millions of years, and also taking them back in. It's a dynamic equilibrium that humans have upset. I'm sure you're heard of the Mauna Loa carbon curve; if not, here's a link: http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseu ... tmCo2.html
This graph clearly shows a marked increase in carbon dioxide levels in the air over the space of several decades. It's also obvious that this isn't a natural geological change; on a geological scale, that amount of time is a blink of an eye. Humans may not be responsible for much of the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, but they're responsible for the increase in greenhouse gasses, as that little 2% exceeds what nature's mechanisms can re-absorb. In fact, burying wetlands in cement would kill off the plants that live there and reabsorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

As to whether we can afford it: if we could go back ten years and start then, we could. If we could somehow reverse everything that Bush did and get back to the surplus Clinton was running, we could use government subsidies to kick-start green energy and grow the sector to the point where it was self-sustaining. However, today, with the economy and national debt the way it is, I don't think we're in a position to afford much of anything. I have no doubt that, once the green energy economy gets going, it will become affordable; the problem is getting it there. I'm going to branch into the budget issue and say that the obvious solution to this problem, the deficit, and a bunch of other problems is to tax the rich more. Add a new tax bracket for people making 1 million and over, set it at 50-60%, and close off all those tax loopholes. That should give the government enough money to subsidize green energy, give the poor and middle-class tax cuts, inject more money to fix our economy, and still run a surplus.

Using coal is just kicking the can down the road, to use the political term. What happens when our coal starts to run out? Green energy isn't going to get any better if you shun it in favor of cheaper fossil fuels. We'll just be stuck in the same situation a century from now, except the Great Plains region will be closer to a desert and we won't have any more fossil fuels to fall back on when they run out. Pulling back to the primary topic, I can't see how anyone could actually fix all the things that need fixing with our bureaucracy the way it is, and I think Obama's doing quite well if he can actually get stuff done.

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member

How exactly does a graph listing less than a century proves wrong that its a natural cycle over the course of several thousand years?

How can you have an organization devoted to researching climate change unless you already believe the climate is changing...

And.
"What happens when the coal runs out"
By that time ... roughly 200-400 years down the road..
Don't you think some time within even 100 years we might have a better solution?
One perhaps that won't completely cripple the world economy for the next foreseeable future..

The US alone not even counting tar sands and coal reserves in Canada, has the world's
largest reserve of fossil fuel in the entire world. Cheap energy brings prosperity, research, and growth.

China is making more and more coal plants daily. And they don't have nearly as
good of coal plants as the US coal plants and also lack the tech to produce the IGCC coal plants.

The future coal plants are far better and cheaper and can be produced in much greater output
than any possible 'renewable' source could ever be within the next century.

And yet in spite of the evidence of energy availability and economic growth,
people would propose to cut off HALF of our energy supply for a moral superiority.

__________________
"The good warrior knows when to fight, and when to withdraw."
- Sun Tzu

I'll smith anything up to 93 smithing if you have the material for me to make it with
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Because it's less than a century. If it was a natural process, then at that rate, we'd all have suffocated from carbon dioxide, or two hundred years ago there would have been no carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at all. The graph goes from 320 ppm to 380 ppm in the space of forty years; 15 ppm every ten years. Extrapolating that, 250 years ago there would have been next to no carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That means something in the past two hundred years or so has happened to increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Now, I'm not placing everything on this graph alone; it's one of many. The IPCC looked at the aggregate of many studies and data sets, and concluded that humans are responsible for global warming. To answer your second question, the climate is changing. Temperatures are increasing, and global studies going back a century confirm that. You can't deny that the climate is changing, and you're not; you're only denying human involvement.
We won't risk crippling the economy if we just wait long enough for the economy to go back to being robust enough to handle the change. Personally, I blame Bush for the state the economy is in right now. There's no need to wait until we're at another energy crisis; why not start as soon as possible? Why procrastinate?

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member

Donal Trump in 2012?

Who else is excited?

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I hope no one's actually taking him seriously. He's the sort of rich person that landed our economy in the crisis we're just getting out of. The only reason he's doing so well is that the Republican Party is fractured and lacking a strong candidate. At this point, I think Obama's in for a second term, barring anything happening.
EDIT: Just found some political statements from him. Seems to be the pretty standard conservative, party-line crap, and he pledged not to raise taxes. I don't see how we can balance the budget without raising taxes myself; Bush was an idiot to think that taxes should be cut in wartime.

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member

I thought the crisis was because bleeding heart lefties and sub-prime mortgages. My bad.

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He has a shot. People though Obama would fail and Palin was a shoe-in at one time.

At least he has SOME business experience. The government is just a big business.

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I don't think anyone seriously ever thought that Sarah Palin had a shot. At least I sure hope not.

bartoron

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His hair is worse than Boris Johnson's, and that's saying something.


Don't think even Palin thought she had a serious chance.

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Crazy as a loon
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I disagree with both of you. I'm pretty sure Sarah Palin, and her strong supporters, thought she had it in the bag.

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You reckon? I don't know... she polarised the country and it didn't seem likely that moderate Republicans or independents would back her. Her net approval rating has been consistently in the negatives. It seems to me that she was (still is I guess) playing the game of will she or won't she to keep her media profile alive. Assisted, I might add, by a lot of progressives, who seemed to delight in playing up her chances.

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Faint as a will o' the wisp
Crazy as a loon
Sad as a gypsy serenading the moon

"We won't risk crippling the economy if we just wait long enough for the economy to go back to being robust enough to handle the change."

That's my point. Obama HAS NOT waited until the economy can handle it.
The EPA has been running rampant and unopposed. Just last year he passed an order
to completely stop all future mountaintop removal surface mining for coal mining
under the guise of the CWA. And then on top of that the coal mining industry as a whole
has been coming under continual harassment by the MSHA organization under Obama's administration.

In his fervor to pass all his eco-causes and destroying coal, our cheapest form of energy,
he's already been damaging the economy and an entire industry that provides half our power.
This coming from somebody who vowed to make coal harder to use and "make energy prices skyrocket"
in order to make pie-in-the-sky sources like wind and solar more 'viable'.

Both he and his supporters have tried multiple times to pass cap and trade legislation
and then when they can't do that, they go through underhanded executive orders and
then the EPA to try and impose restrictions any way they can.

We simply can't risk another term of Obama in office if he keeps this path going.

__________________
"The good warrior knows when to fight, and when to withdraw."
- Sun Tzu

I'll smith anything up to 93 smithing if you have the material for me to make it with
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Again, blame the economy on Bush and Wall Street. Plus, I fail to see how opening up a new sector in the economy to create jobs would be bad for it. I doubt that coal companies are actually struggling; they're only complaining because the execs don't want to have their exorbitant bonuses cut.

As for the whole thing against coal, even you must admit that strip-mining and mountaintop removal have huge detrimental effects on the environment, global warming or not. Quite frankly, we don't currently have a safe, environmentally-friendly way to mine coal; on a death-per-power unit ratio, coal and natural gas perform worse than nuclear power.

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member

I thought the crisis was our government throwing all of our money at a pile of rocks and sand.

CNN in 2004 wrote:



Maybe it wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back, but I'm pretty certain that we would've been in a better financial situation had we not gone to war.

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Thanks for the sig, Viruz.
"Ambition is the last refuge of failure." ~Oscar Wilde

Eh, we kind of had to go into Afghanistan to cut off Taliban support to al Qaeda. However, Iraq was completely unnecessary, and if we had stayed out of it, we'd have been out of Afghanistan years ago. Just one of the several things Bush did that killed Clinton's surplus.

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member