EU Calls on US to Help Lead Climate Change Fight

Should we treat this request for assistance with global climate change with the same consideration we received on our request for assistance with global terrorism?

Whoa wait a minute, what happened to Global Warming? What's with the name change? Great so the US and EU are going to bend over backwards whilst India and China continue to increase their emissions, I love it.

Here's a interesting little article on this topic:

http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice.asp

Right. Because, you know, if somebody is being irresponsible then it's OK for everybody to be so too.

And there we have it folks - global stewardship by the "teen party" method.

Very good article - says what I have been thinking all along. We can not trust the special interests and the biased media to properly and honestly report the data, statistics and science available, let alone an honest conclusion. Global warming became global climate change (a hedge) when some recent data seemed to indicate a slight cooling glitch.

I believe this issue has become just another political "trade off" strategy, hence my comment (to keep playing the political ideology game). The EU threw out the help request to counter the US help request. It will never make sense to throw $B (at the expense of harming economies and jobs) until we can truly understand the reality of climatic cycles and all nations agree to adopt a global "solution". Don't hold your breath!

So let me get this straight. Since this article points out that the news media is often a lousy source of scientific information we should...do nothing? Coffee is good for you - no wait, coffee is bad for you. Red wine with your dinner - a boon to health or a tragic mistake? The news media is very good at taking some bit of 'information' and turning it into an attention grabbing headline.

A couple of things strike me about this article. First, it is a classic example of this headline/catastrophe model - BREAKING NEWS!!!! NEWSPAPERS AND SCIENTISTS ARE WRONG. I don't think that many people would be surprised to find that the new media are, and have been for a long time, a hot bed of superficial thought. Nor would many thinking people be surprised that scientists often develop hypotheses that later turn out to be wrong.

The second thing that strikes me, is that the article is pretty detailed on the news media and scientific thought up to a point, and then mostly silent about the last 30 years. That is the time period during which the current global warming/climate change view has emerged, beginning with Dr. Hansen's (never mentioned in this article) study of Venus's atmosphere, and his hypothesis that increasing levels of greenhouse gasses in a planet's atmosphere would tend (all other factors being constant) to favor increasing planetary temperature. He reasoned that if a runaway greenhouse effect could turn Venus into a furnace, that a similar process could occur on Earth.

Based on an exhaustive look into the historic records, an avalanche of new evidence that was unavailable to earlier generations of earth-bound scientists, and an examination of changes in greenhouse gas concentrations in the earth's atomosphere, the vast majority of atmospheric scientists have come to the conclusion that Hansen's hypotheses is borne out by the currently available facts, and has been promoted to theory status.

So what is the good citizen to do? As this article 'proves', the news media is full of hysterical idiots. Some scientists have been wrong in the past, so therefore most scientists must also be wrong now. I guess we should listen to the impartial arguments put forth by the oil/coal/gas industry. How could anybody that rich and poweful be wrong?

I guess we should listen to the impartial arguments put forth by the oil/coal/gas industry.

Not saying we should do this either - just saying it does not make sense to hamper economies and jobs by following biased and unsientific politicians based only on "a theory" which we do not effectively understand.

But...it's OK to blindly forge ahead and expand economies and jobs even though we "do not effectively understand" something? Is that right?

Guess we should also let little kids run with scissors. Heck, it can't hurt them if they don't understand it!