If you'd like to see the lengths the current administration has gone to distorting science for its own ends, please take a look at Union of Concerned Scientists

This administration (and I'm sure others) has systematically twisted the results of accepted research in order to support its own pocket-lining.

I first became incredulous when, about 2 years ago USDA's Anne Venneman cited an economic study of impacts on the cattle industry as authority for declaring the US food system safe after a Mad Cow made it into the distribution network. I'm like, "WTF? This study isn't about food safety. Its about industry impacts!" Like Katrina, no cause for alarm, since it ended up in a Vietnamese supermarket in California. These folks are both sloppy and fuzzy.

So, where were the SUVs, coal fired plants, et cetera when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth? How about during the warm period during the middle ages? Oh, I get it. You only want to count the last 100 years as "history". All natural warming/cooling cycles prior to 1900 don't count. Apparently, nobody considered that the Earth has went through many warming and cooling cycles throughout history. How about this:

If there were no polar ice caps, and for some reason we decided that it would be beneficial to have them, could mankind make ice form at the poles? How about if we were to undergo a drastic operation to melt all of the polar ice, could we do it completely? Sure, nuclear warheads would destroy a great bit of it, but could we melt it all, and prevent them from ever coming back? How about stop a hurricane from forming, or force it to reduce in power, could we do that? (discounting C2C AM theories). Global change I am not arguing against, just mankind's involvement in it. Krakatau blowing up released more pollutants into the atmosphere in less than 2 weeks than mankind has released in the entire 18th, 18th, and Th centuries. Yet somehow the ecosystem managed to recover, didn't it?

I'm not worried about global warming one bit. If it happens, it happens. Not much we can do to change it. The Earth's ecosystem will evolve and adapt to the conditions that prevail. It has many times in the past with great success. What I don't understand is why people expect it to stay the same forever, when fossil records prove that many warming and cooling cycles have happened throughout Earth's lifespan. Changes in the environment will still happen 1,000,000 after the last man dies.

Uh...I think the point here is that there is a very good chance that mankind's use of fossil fuels over the last century or so has had a significant effect on our climate. This effect will most likely have some consequences that will severely impact our current economy and even geography.
The current administration of the country that has disproportionately contributed to this problem is twisting and ignoring scientific research in order to continue its raping of the economy and our natural resources.
Of course the earth will survive whatever the climate does. It's a big rock. We could burn off the entire atmosphere and the earth would still be here. Of more interest is when our accelleration of the current warming trend makes currently populated areas uninhabitable and current croplands worthless.

In the last coupla hundred years we have moved half of the fossil fuels from "captured" to partly up to the Earth's filtration system for in-coming sunlight, where it is bouncing around and changing the composition, slowly. I don't have any layman's concept of the magnitude of CO2 loading. I'm not a scientist, but everyone would say that the professional thing to do is to try and quantify that and compare it to pre-fossil fuel atmospheric conditions. The US shouldn't refuse to measure impacts because "all the scientists are liberals." (Democracy says you can be a liberal if you want to.) Its like saying, "We can't find anyone to tell us what we want to hear, so we're shutting off the discussion in denial."

But the more unequivocal part of it is that human behavior can mitigate the damage even if it was not human induced. They shouldn't have to be paranoids AND fatalists. <g>

I think it all boils down to an administration which is afraid to do anything about long-term or abstract concerns because it would be politically unpopular. Ironically, the American people sort of see it as government's job to take care of such things. If I were President, I would raise the debate, be forthright with the facts and listen for solutions from everywhere instead of listening to solutions from nowhere.

You know, this kind of amazing ignorance of the global climate change issue just astonishes me. Do you honestly think you know more about the Earth's climate than people who study it for a living?
Nobody is arguing that global climate change will "destroy the earth." That's ridiculous. What is being argued is that climate change will damage the current ecosystems and possibly make the planet uninhabitable by humans. More likely, it will make the planet incapable of sustaining civilization. There has been no rapid and largescale change in climate since civilization developed. Small-scale climate change, such as the mini-Ice Age, caused widescale famine.
Whether humans are aggravating climate change is largely irrelevant at this point (in my own personal opinion). Rapid climate change is occuring now and we're going to have to deal with it.

Nope. But I knew that it would get a rise out of somebody. Plus, since oil is just highly compressed plant matter over millions of years, would releasing it all into the atmosphere revert the planet's atmosphere to a pre-mankind era? 65,000,000 years ago, dinosaurs roamed the earth. As you know, dinosaurs were much larger than humans, so why couldn't the earth support man? We would have no large predators running after us, and we have many skills that dinosaurs did not have such as agriculture, the ability to move, the ability to improvise, and excellent adaptation skills. Mankind would survive, but the earth would be drastically different from today, I will grant you that. Plus, it's not like its going to happen overnight. It would take hundreds of years to render the planet inhospitable unless you want to irradiate the planet with nuclear weapons. Even then, most of the damage and radioactive fallout would be contained to the northern hemisphere. Mankind could survive south of the equator.

Rice to Visit Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan

Diplomacy in Central Asia is so fascinating now. With the rise of China and India and the Russians keep to remain influential in this area, things are going to be interesting for years.

Do those nations have fancy shoe stores?

"Their oil"? I thought it was "America's petrolium lifeline".

I'm posting the entirety of a Boston Globe Editorial here as I believe it has relevance.


GLOBE EDITORIAL
Foreign policy realism

October 9, 2005

QUIETLY, THE Bush administration is abandoning many premises and practices that defined its first-term conduct of foreign policy. On one issue after another, President Bush has permitted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to navigate the slow-turning ship of state away from the unilateralist course set by doctrinal neoconservatives during the first term and back toward a multilateral pragmatism like that of Rice's first mentor, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and his mentor, Henry Kissinger.

This is the foreign policy of what some call the realist school. It may not be more humanitarian or peaceful than the statecraft of neoconservatives. But the realists are more prudent, more worldly, more fearful of intervening abroad to remold despotic or failed states. They set great store on cooperating with allies and pursuing American interests through international treaties and organizations.

At her Senate confirmation hearing last January, Rice telegraphed an intention to revive the realist tradition by paying tribute to the ''visionary leaders" of the mid-20th century who ''helped to establish the United Nations and created the international legal framework for this and other institutions that have served the world well for more than 50 years." Unlike her realist predecessor Colin Powell, Rice and her team of professional diplomats have a policymaking role, and the resulting policies regarding Iran, North Korea, and the UN are not merely a little different from those pursued during the first Bush term; they are often antithetical.

Realists tend to abhor the go-it-alone swashbuckling of right-wingers who scorn the United Nations and have made the United States seem like a petulant, paranoid superpower thanks to their rejection of the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the treaty banning antipersonnel land mines. By contrast, realists understand that as hard as it may be to act in concert with allies to stop a nasty regime like Iran's from developing nuclear weapons, it is infinitely harder to do so without allies.

The unacknowledged course correction in foreign policy is better late than never. One reason it is not being acknowledged is that some of the promoters of the discredited lone ranger approach, such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are still at their posts. Another reason is that it would be harder for Bush to reverse course if he also had to concede, overtly, that many of his initial forays into foreign policy led to dead ends or incipient disasters.

In his first term, for example, Bush's approach to North Korea's nuclear weapons programs was rooted in contempt for anything that might resemble the 1994 Framework Agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration. There was no chance to rid North Korea of nuclear weapons and fissile material as long as Cheney and company were able to persuade Bush that to negotiate a deal with Pyongyang would be to reward bad behavior. And with Cheney's protege, John Bolton -- who was then in charge of arms control and disarmament at the State Department -- hovering over six-party talks in Beijing and making certain that no credible US incentives for a deal were presented to the North's negotiators, no such deal was possible. Instead, Pyongyang went on reprocessing plutonium that could be used for nuclear weapons while US officials made derogatory statements about North Korea's ''Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il that seemed calculated to keep North Korea away from the bargaining table.

In the last few months, however, there has been a dramatic, if tacit, turnabout. With Ambassador Christopher Hill, a veteran of the Dayton negotiations that ended the Bosnian-Serb war, conducting talks with a North Korean counterpart in Beijing, an agreement on principles was reached in September. There is certain to be a lot of hard bargaining ahead, but with Rice calling the shots instead of Cheney and with Bolton shunted to the United Nations, where he is out of position to block negotiations, it may now be possible to strike a pragmatic deal with Pyongyang.

Such a deal would, to some degree, reward the North's bad behavior and replicate the 1994 Clinton agreement with the North. And in accepting the need to offer Pyongyang security assurances, normalized relations, and economic benefits for dismantling its nuclear programs, the Bush administration is belatedly heeding the counsel of its allies South Korea and Japan and its crucial commercial partner, China.

A similar decision to work with allies explains Washington's support for the diplomatic efforts of Britain, France, and Germany to persuade Iran to relent on its drive to enrich uranium that could be used for nuclear weapons. Last February, Bush met in Germany with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and the French president, Jacques Chirac, received their assurance that they will not accept a nuclear-armed Iran, and agreed to cooperate in their pursuit of a negotiated deal with Tehran.

The Europeans' diplomacy may not stop Iran's drive for nuclear weapons, but Bush's assent to it reflects Rice's sage aim of repairing a trans-Atlantic alliance that was badly frayed during the run-up to the 2003 invasion that removed Saddam Hussein from power.

No less indicative of a turn toward realism was the decision not to veto a UN resolution last spring that called for officials of Sudan to be tried by the International Criminal Court at The Hague. The administration had previously sought to undermine the court in ways that roused indignation around the world.

When Rice told senators during her confirmation hearings that now is a time for diplomacy, she was not indulging in an idle platitude. She was foreshadowing an effort to undo the damage done to US interests by ideologues of unilateralism. She could just as well have said the time for hubris is over.

That's the first good news we've heard in years about this administration.

I don't know why anyone would pay any attention to fmr Chevron exec Rice. All she cares about is having more shoes than Imelda Marcos.

Maybe someone was told that the world's biggest debtor nation was about to have the economic rug pulled out from beneath it unless it cooled its jets.

I noticed that both Rice and Bush changed their tune about invading Iran just after meeting with Putin last year. Did he give them the bad news?