Discussion on:

The mon(k)ey trap

Misinformation. Since those making a ton of money from the status quo don't want things to change, they finance the FUDdites to sow seeds of doubt and deception so folks can feel justified in ignoring the writing on the wall. The eagerness of folks to ignore reality is what Jared Diamond wrote about in his book Collapse, and it appears that our culture is headed down that path because of our lack of motivation/ability to take the time to learn how our planet works.

Most folks don't have a clue how the carbon cycle works, for instance, and yet feel perfectly comfortable in concluding that humans can't impact the climate. For those folks (and anyone else, for that matter), I think NASA's Earth Observatory has an excellent overview of the carbon cycle that puts everything in the context that we need to have in order to have a decent dialogue on the topic: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/page1.php

And you didn't even mention the Citizen's United decision by the SCOTUS and its toxic effect on the political discourse.

I think most people just want to live their lives without a lot of bother and they get annoyed when external circumstances force them to start paying attention. But once they do pay attention big changes can happen quickly.

So the powers-that-be may be able to keep things bumbling along for another 5 or 10 years but at some point the shtuff hits the fan and a lot of clueless people are going to be wondering "Wha' happened?". I kind of think the middle to latter half of this century may get pretty ugly with the effects of the climate changing rapidly and wars over resources. I feel there's a good chance the world population of homo sapiens will be substantially lower in 2100 than it is now in 2011.

...doesn't that mean that sites like SmartPlanet are bad too?

What does the Citizen's United decision have to do with SmartPlanet? Is SmartPlanet spending money on independent political ads without disclosing the source of funding?

Why should some corporations (media companies) have more freedom to communicate than others?

is about political speech, not corporate speech (to the extent it is not political). I have nothing against corporations, just some of the actions they take.

If McCain-Fiengold proved anything, it's a very fuzzy line. Either way, do tell me the difference between a corporation like, say the New York Times taking a political position versus any other corproation? Why should they get a free pass?

"Why should they get a free pass?"

The New York Times is a News organization, and doesn't buy up political influence wholesale, like Citizens United was meant to approve of.

Before Citizens United, if the Times had bought unlimited political advertising -- even their OWN advertising -- they, like any other business, would have been in violation of election laws.

This is only a "fuzzy line" to those unequipped to think of it in the proper terms. Stop watching FUX, for starters, and you will have fewer lies to sift through.

...why "FUX" should get a free pass, if they are just a tool of right-wing corporations?

There is no doubt that many of the comments made in the article are quite relevant, however I take issue with the Carbon Emissions position. There is no question that the Human Race is contributing to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, however in comparison to the amount of carbon NATURE contributes, in the form of volcanic eruptions alone, the amount contributed by man is a fractional amount of the total.

We should be spending time and effort to promoting and developing alternate clean energy sources. Over time effective alternate energy sources would help to reduce our petroleum consumption, and naturally reduce the minuscule amount of carbon output that mankind does contribute (in comparison to the whole).

It is useless to carp about reducing carbon output, when, if we were to somehow completely ELIMINATE every bit of mankind's carbon output it would only represent a minuscule fraction of the total amount of carbon naturally released. This has become the 'siren song' of the 'false environmentalist'. Most of the people who promote this are only singing with that particular 'choir' because it lets them piggy back their other opinions onto an issue that has been hugely and artificially inflated into something that has become nothing more or less than a worldwide scare tactic.

I suggest that you read the carbon cycle series put out by the earth observatory section of NASA (see link above). If you had done this, you would have found out that instead of human activity emitting only a "fractional amount" of CO2 when compared to volcanoes as you claim; humans actually are responsible for injecting 100-300 TIMES MORE than volcanoes, due primarily to coal combustion, which releases far more geologically sequestered carbon into the atmosphere than volcanoes do.

And shows the dangers in letting such a bastion of falsehood operate freely.

BTW, FUX could be LEGALLY reined in, by one measure: ending cable channel packages. Ala Carte program packages would only require payment for the channels actually WATCHED by the consumer. As it is now, FUX gets a share of EVERY CABLE BILL PAID, simply because FUX is featured in EVERY package!

Yours and yours and yours, is what I'm talking about. YOU pay FUX to lie to us 24/7, if you pay any sort of cable bill in the U.S.

Remember the term: Ala Carte Cable.

I've never paid a month of cable bills in my life and don't intend to. Why are you? Believe me, people will be amazed at how much you do because you aren't staring at the screen all the time.

And about the lie: we're talking science here. I can give you journal articles that talk about the amount of CO2 released by humans compared to volcanoes - please give me your sources that say otherwise.

Promoting and developing alternate clean energy sources is, I agree, an important consideration in dealing with current climate concerns. However, until enough people are convinced that there is really an issue, funding by those holding the purse strings will continue to simply trickle instead of flow. The pendulum of human change swings only when pushed by leviathan efforts.

BlackFireNova is wrong and Klassman is right about CO2 emissions from volcanoes. The annual rate of CO2 from volcanoes is insignificant compared with the current rate of man-made CO2 emissions. This is a feeble argument usually put out by uninformed climate skeptics.

What is true, however, is that the rate of man-made CO2 emissions rate is miniscule (only about 2%) when compared with the rate at which the environment as a whole puts CO2 into the atmosphere (predominantly from from decay of vegetation.

However, had you made your same point using that correct statistic, you would still have been challenged on the grounds that the natural emissions are balanced by natural carbon sinks (predominantly the uptake of CO2 by vegetation). So the argument goes that, since the natural ocean-atmosphere CO2 cycle is balanced, only the additional unnatural man-made CO2 emissions from fossil fuels should be counted towards the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere expected over the next century.

But the trouble with that argument is that the amount of CO2 retained in the atmosphere isn't actually related to the net CO2 flows in or out anyway! It is only related to the water temperature and hence the solubility of CO2. So the rise in ocean temperature that has occurred over the past 250 years could be due to a combination of natural causes and the supposed warming effect of man-made CO2, the problem being to determine the proportionate contribution of each source.

Hence the ongoing debate which is far from settled.

The amount of CO2 absorbed into the ocean is still going up despite the rise in ocean temperatures. That's why the ocean's pH is dropping (commonly know as "ocean acidification" although the oceans will never actually flip over to being acid.) The concentration of absorbed CO2 in the ocean is affected by two things primarily. Temperature as you already noted but also by the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere. So far the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is winning.

(Commenting system wouldn't let me post this paragraph with the previous one).

Of the total CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels about 43% remains in the atmospheric increasing CO2 levels. Some is absorbed by the biosphere but most of the rest is absorbed by the oceans. The level of CO2 is a function of the total CO2 in the carbon cycle and the balance between the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere and some smaller source/sinks. The burning of fossil fuels is increasing the total carbon in the cycle The ocean is not a net source of CO2 in the atmosphere and that's easily proven by measurements of CO2 absorbed in the ocean.

and at least you are attempting to find areas of ambiguity in the current attribution models that provide enough "wiggle room" to discount the role of humanity's role over natural processes. Could you possibly be "isotopious" in another venue? There is some very instructive dialogue between "iso" and Gavin Schmidt of NASA in the Real Climate website where some natural warming of the oceans since the holocene is discussed that seems so familiar to me that I have to ask. Schmidt's answer, of course, is that the natural mechanisms cannot account for but a small fraction of what is being observed, but I congratulate you on your attempts to go beyond the descriptive statistics when trying to downplay what is occurring in the climate!

After weeks of reading Neider's columns, he's finally talking some sense.

Yes, we humans don't like to look beyond tomorrow. Yes, we will argue endlessly over stuff such as pipelines that won't make a real difference one way or another.

But the truth is that the human race has faced many such crises over its history. This is hardly the worst. Ancient humans back in the days of hunter-gathering would have overrun their food supply if they hadn't discovered agriculture. Back in the '60s, I remember people worried about how we would feed the 6 billion people expected by 2000 when back then starvation was very common. Around 1600 the English faced a crisis when they had literally chopped down just about every tree on their island to keep people warm. Fortunately, they discovered they could burn peat and then later they figured out how to mine coal.

As usual, humanity is sitting on a knife edge. There's nothing new. As Neider says, we can't burn oil, coal, and gas forever. But if a solution is to be found, it won't be by wringing our hands. It won't be by suddenly stopping all fossil fuel burning and sending our civilization back to the Middle Ages. The truth is that solar and wind are promising, but they are no where near ready to take over for fossil fuels. There's nothing to be gained by forcing a transition now, and there's a chance for a great deal of harm. But history shows that when we do figure them out (particularly the storage problem), the transition will be a lot faster then even Neider might expect.

and if it falls apart, we get cut. So when you say that there is nothing to be gained by forcing a transition now and there's a chance for great harm, it's actually the other way around: a stitch in time saves nine. Now is the time to greatly reduce waste in our energy consumption pattern, reducing demand, while building a better grid, retiring polluting aging coal fired and nuclear power plants, and replacing them with ever-improving distributed energy sources, bi-directional electric vehicles, compressed air storage, etc. while investing in better energy storage technology. If we do this incrementally over time, we have a chance to avoid the worst effects of climate change and everything that comes with it: more frequent droughts and floods, large scale population displacement, political instability, environmental and ecological stressors and the rest.

Sorry, but replacing current technology with technology which does not do the job as well is not a solution. It's a waste of resources.

The increasing price of energy has done wonders to reduce consumption. Over the past decades the US has become much more energy efficient. If you compare our energy use with our GDP you will see that this is true.

We have lots of new energy efficient technology that isn't nearly as good as what it tries to replace. Just look at the Volt and the Leaf. They are heavily subsidized, but still they fail to meet sales expectations. Most people buying these vehicles have to accept higher cost/mile, smaller size than vehicles at the same cost, and the ability to use these vehicles without major restrictions in range or other factors. It does not help our economy to force people to go to these vehicles, but only makes it worse.

Even the old technologies aren't nearly as good as they used to be. The energy return on investment for fossil fuels used to be around 100 units return for every unit of energy invested back in the early 1900s; today it is lucky to be 10. Wind and solar are quickly coming down in price per kwh and going up in efficiencies and there is no reason to think that this won't continue to be the case. As far as transportation, the cheap, powerful cars of the 70s and 80s also guzzled fuel and belched lots of pollutants into the air. I was recently in Lima, Peru, and this city of 7-8million people had remarkably clean air. This would not be the case at all if instead of the plentiful small cars, buses and trucks, they were driving what we used to drive 30 or 40 years ago.

Klassman: Did you not read and understand what Zacker was saying?

As the price of oil goes up, so industry works to produce more energy-efficient ways of utilising it. All over the world, not just in Peru, cars that guzzled fuel have been replaced by more efficient models because the price of oil has increased.

That's capitalism at its very best.

which is that the dropping EROI of oil extraction is what has driven prices up, which is precisely why wind and solar have received a boost, AND why gas guzzlers/polluters are not the predominant vehicles found any more in places like Peru. Of course, it is not pure capitalism, as standards like our nation's CAFE standards has pushed change into a reluctant industry. Alas, the lack of leadership and poor labor relations resulted in Detroit losing valuable time in making needed changes....