My mother and brother are going to Washington next week for the inauguration of Obama and it does make me ever so slightly nervous, because you never know if some fool KKK jackass might be wanting to do something, or some fools from the middle east might wanna be wanting to meet their 40 virgins or something equally whacked....
...eating my genero rice krispies from Aldi this morn and just wonder whatever happened to milk. Yeah, I know I have been eating the 2% fat free skim devoid of life milk for sometime now. But its so sad to almost feel as those I am eating cereal and water with a touch of white...
... its supposed to be getting super cold here later ths week. Wasnt it not too long ago that everyone was talking about global warming... er... "Climate change"? ...speaking of which, with all the Clinton people Obama has chosen to posts (whatever happened to "Change we can beleive in" for Washington?), where is Al Gore? Oh wait, I guess jetting around in his Lear jet burning fuel all over the world making speeches...
...While I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop with Tiger basketball, I remain optimistic that this team will make some noise this year. speaking of which, after watchng them knock off NCstate the other day, I am ready to see what happenes now that the true tests on Wake, UNC and Duke loom on the horizon. But I must admit that the long term future of the team seems very bright...and where did this Tanner Smith kid come from? just when I had him typed as the slow white kid picked up from Fike, he goes zooming in with the ball in one hand, then switches to a two hand power slam. I'm like.."whoa...kid's got skillz!!!" when I saw that and i bet a lot of people in the ACC suddenly sat up when they saw that and definitely changed their opinion of him.
...still wondering why Isaac and Ishmael are fighting over sand and rocks after all these years. Saw plenty of room in Nevada the other week. I would have long ao caught the first boat out of dodge from the land of milk and honey...
9 comments:
1. I bought skim milk for the first time. It IS basically water with white food coloring.
2. Global Warming isn't an overall "warming." It exaggerates the seasons. Summer will be hotter, overall, and winter will be colder, overall. Just ask Mr. Gore...
Jerome's Wife
Don't worry about the Obama inauguration. It's a moment in history and I would be there too, if I could. I went to the Obama rally held here in Raleigh - it was about 200 feet behind the state building I work in, so I watched most of it from a friend's cubicle. Interesting times.
2%, uh, yeah. I can even handle 1% now most of the time, these days. Damn skippy, it is just watery milk. The irony is that "whole" milk is basically like 3% (check the label). And here's another of those bitter "you can't win" ironies in life - usually the more "skim" milk is, the more expensive it is. A classic case of "more work to give less value."
And kudos on the generico cereal. It's all we eat around here too, except when the "good stuff" is on sale + coupons. But another irony: that generico is frequently made side-by-side with the good stuff, in the same plants.
And on Clemson b-ball... Let's just enjoy the honeymoon, shall we? Probably will beat Wake in a close game, everybody will REALLY take notice, and... they (or an "invested" official) will blow it. Prove me wrong boys, prove me wrong! And this Tanner Fike pickup ringer, he's, well, a ringer. We all know what happens to ringers.
Your good friend (and Happy New Year),
josh
Come on, Jerome, you know better... hot = global warming, cold = global warming, even stable temperatures = global warming. I mean, how else will Mr. "Carbon Credits" Gore get his groove on unless we're warming (though I swear it seems every time I've ever heard he's giving a speech somewhere he gets snowed out). Look for the kids' schoolbooks soon to explain that the ice ages were actually extreme global warming periods ;-) That is unless Mother Naure humbles us to our rightful place by having the Yellowstone caldera erupt whereupon it will be so dark and cold even old Gore won't be able to sell his snake oil! ;-)
And can't help but add one more note for the warmer summer/colder winter theory... oddly I didn't hear this part of the theory as much when we were having warm winters and all the rage was about polar melting DURING THE WINTER. Just seems that the theory gets molded to the conditions of the day... and will also say this, if the theory of warmer summer/colder winter is to be true this year it better be one HELL of a summer with temps nationwide warming up to the 120 range if it's to match the cold spell we're seeing now ;-) And don't you remember hot summers when we were a kid, Rome. I ABSOLUTELY remember frying eggs on the pavement out at my Dad's place and our attic fan not putting the least bit of a dent in the hellishly hot summer temps... bet you have similar memories.
yep...that's right. global warming is just a fabrication by dems to scare us all into raising taxes and giving poor people money.
yep it is just a political tool to make sure al gore can ride around in a lear jet, which is a great explanation for giant swaths of the artic going from frozen land masses that polar bears could use to hunt to shipping lanes and places we can now argue about oil drillig rights.
no way, no way at all could you couldn't compare global warming trends over millions of years (or 6000 years i suppose) to how when you turn on a heater in a 40deg room it doesn't instantly get up to 70deg...it's absolutely true that we shouldn't believe anything that can't be proved in 50 years because surely that means that it must not be true.
there's no such thing as the ozone layer either...carbon monoxide doesn't affect it, and if there was an ozone layer (which there ain't) it'd look the same as it did 2000 years ago because there's nothing about our existence on earth that could be considered harmful.
that's right, as long as we just figure global climate change/warming is just a political tool of whatever side we don't like, we don't have to look at our own hand it it.
anyone interested in a balanced discussion of scientific and political ramafications of our affects on global climate can copy/paste these links
http://globalwarming-factorfiction.com/2007/06/10/how-to-talk-to-a-climate-skeptic-climate-scientists-dodge-the-subject-of-water-vapor/
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html
of course, then you'd be on the hook because you read something outside msnbc/fox news spin
erik b.
Typical liberal respons... resort to insulting anyone who doesn't agree with you. Well, as a former philosophy major (and well-read one I might add :-) surrounded by liberals and also having been a professional statistician I fear you've underestimated my intelligence and willingness to analyze data. Ever heard of natural variation? Actually imagine you have and if you look at enough charts you'll appreciate data inherently moves and varies. Liberals want to challenge anyone who disagrees with them on having "hubris"... talking about the pot calling the kettle black. Inherent variation is one of the key reasons so MANY scientists AREN'T supporting the global warming nazi fear-mongering effort and are arguing that trends we're experiencing are statistically normal. Here's some links I encourage you to visit... guess they'll show you 1) I don't lean on MSNBC or Foxnews for analysis, and 2) I'm not at all scared to look at my role in "global warming", but neither am I scared to consider the weight that God/nature might have that can be so IMMENSELY larger than my own (see Yellowstone caldera...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008597
http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/majority-of-scientists-dont-support-man-made-warming-theory/
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/12/15/scientists-denounce-ap-hysterical-global-warming-article
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/06/13/EDGDOILMDO1.DTL
http://www.nationalcenter.org/TP38.html
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming091307.htm
And Erik, with us both being friends of Jerome I trust you're intelligent and very likely have a great sense of humor. Mines a bit sarcastic, much like Jerome's, but I don't take kindly to being stuck in a box, stereotyped and words put in my mouth for me. Voted Democrat during my life as much as Republican and increasingly am leaning to libertarian views. Say this as I don't feel beholden to any party and you imply I think the global warming effort is a welfare one... never said it and didn't even think it. Now that I've said you're likely a nice guy, I'll resort back to my sarcastic humor and will say I'm just pretty much thinking Mr. Gore's a "tool"... and I actually pulled for him back in 1988 before he grew into such a "tool" ;-)... and to your point, his hypocritical flying around in Lear jets DOES make me think him all the more a "tool"... ask Jerome some time and he'll likely tell you I use my legs as a key form of travel FAR more than most folks now days so I feel the right to be angered by such hypocrisy.
well,
first let me apologize for my snark. i am sorry that i insulted you. it was not my intent.
i don't "fear that i underestimated your intelligence" because i would never make assumptions about anyone's intelligence. i perscribe to the mark twain school of thought about intelligence, and moreover, tend to worry about my own intelligence instead of the intelligence of others.
i also apologize that you're "surrounded by liberals", and forgive me if i take the impression that the word "liberal" seemed to drip off your keyboard like it was profanity.
that being said, i will continue in the assupmtion that you - like jerome, and myself for that matter - aren't beholden to any party. i will also continue in my belief that "liberal" is no more defined by keith olbermann or barney frank than "conservative" is defined by rick santorum or ann coulter.
since i don't really know anything about statistics and had to take calculus twice, i will defer to you about any charts and graphs that come up in future conversations. i'm just a furniture designer. however, i have been doing work in sustainability and renewable energy for almost 10 years, so i am comfortable with some of the data i read. of course, that also means that i'm not taken in by all the bluster and hype by the "green" community who wants to make it seem that the world is going to burn, and that al gore's movie predictions are only 2 years away (or will happen at all)
what i will say is this: the link that i referred to http://globalwarming-factorfiction.com/ could be described as skeptical of gore's theory, and i don't think i'd find any unchallenged posts that sink to "the global warming nazi fear-mongering effort" it seems to talk more about what the data actually means in terms of our effect on planet post-industrial revolution than fear-mongering.
you were right in assuming that i have looked at a lot of charts and graphs, most of which i found really instructive, like when i argued with several in the green community about trying to hoodwink people into thinking that simply replacing petrol-based products with renewable ones will mean automatic savings. i found this info in trying to design/develop solar-powered unit that could lower a home-owner's dependency on the grid for electricity, while using the waste (hot water) to lower the load on a conventional water heater (which put us no closer to being "fee of dependence on foreign oil" than it does from the detroit lions being good next year) so, my experiences actually put me closer to a skeptic than a "liberal who resorts to insulting anyone who doesn't agree with you"
i also read over the links that you provided, and found that most of them have to do with reaction to al gore's piece. i'm not a huge fan of al gore, and i find his willingness to lecture the world about global warming while flitting about the globe in a lear jet the same character flaw that allowed him to give those sorry performances in the 2000 debates (that's another conversation) while he thinks he's doing the work of spreading the word, he only serves to exacerbate the debate - giving both sides the excuse to argue about extremes instead of the fact that our mega-industrial existence does have a negative impact on our planet.
so this was the eye with which i read all of the links you provided, and i was not proven wrong. the most specific discussions had to do with chastising gore on saying there was a "consensus" in the scientific community, which doesn't make any sense.
most of the specific discussions, however, involve themselves in the same tactics they rail on gore for using. the majority of the articles seem to make it seem like that because there is no consensus that scientists therefore believe that there are no negative affects of human action on global warming.
the icpp reports and surveys that keep being referenced show that around 30% of the scientists think that there is some sort of climate emergency that is caused by human action. those guys are probably on greenpeace's payroll. however, that same report also points out that only about 6% of those totally reject the idea of consensus about global warming and human action's role outright. like i said before, i'm no statistician (although i did spend 5 years in legal research), but it seems to me that - like most things in life - the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and that most scientists would rather spend their time collecting data than involving themselves in the "pot & kettle" argument about who's blacker then whom.
since pots, kettles, and what they call each other was brought up as well, i also must point out that the same major folks in these links calling al gore out aren't free of hypocrisy themselves:
richard lindzen's (who wrote the wsj op-ed) major papers were funded at different points (god, i hope not all at once) by 1. opec (i wonder if lindzen rails on foreign oil as well) 2. western fuels, and 3. wait for it...exxon
Roy Spencer, the NASA expert from the univ. of alabama, used by - the sf chronicle's version of david brooks at the ny times - conservative columnist debra j. saunders...was involved in work also funded in part with money from exxon
last but not least, the canadian free press links by timothy j. ball, who filed a libel suit against those who called him out for being funded by large oil companies - despite knowing that over 1/3 of his organizations, Friend of Science's, budget comes from several oil companies who decided it best to funnel that money though not only a non-profit, but again through the univ. of calgary, so that the cash couldn't be traced back to them.
so i think we can say that pot and kettle are always both the same color, and that we can only depend on al gore and richard lindzen to slap at each other and give us information that serves their own interests... those guys are another conversation.
again, i don't think the link that i provided fell into any extreme. in fact that site probably falls more into the skeptic camp.
all of these issues are of great personal interest to me. i devote the majority of my day that ain't spent watching pti ;-) to sustainability/ecology issues, but i wouldn't pretend to be a scientist either. so, while it is certainly no excuse for my snark, i tend to get my back up when i feel like expressing a concern over our use/misuse of our planet's recources is made to seem like "liberal whining" as i think i've pointed out, the people screaming about al gore's hypocrisy from the other side have the same hypocrisy in their backyard, and that's typical when people yell from the fringes.
i did not intend to underestimate or insult anyone's intelligence, john, and i'm sorry that my words made it seem that way. in the same way you don't take kindly to being stuck in a box and stereotyped, i don't take kindly to what i consider to be my life's work reduced to a punch line because of al gore's relative toolishness (you did really just wanna slap him because of that dumb beard he grew after he lost in 2000, right?;) so again, apologies for any offense, none intended
so i think we can agree that the discussion would be better served by concentrating on the approx 60% of scientists (based on the %s from the studies referenced in your links) that think more study needs to be done on exactly what our impact on the planet is, but that we should still take steps to minimize them. here's a link we might find interesting -
www.climatechangefacts.info - just enough sarcasm to feed us, and plenty of data as well
erik b.
p.s. while my most people who know me would say that i'm not as funny as i think i am, i think i do have a pretty good sense of humor (even about green issues), and i always find these conversations better face to face and over a pint.
erik
Post a Comment