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I generally try to avoid political topics in the "opinions" that I post here; frankly I don't want to offend any of my readers, who run the gammut of the political spectrum. Moreover, I don't care what anybody's political stance is, far-right or -left fringe or anywhere in between--provided they don't try to force me to agree with them. If they get their facts straight, I'll even respect their position, no matter how asinine I find it. But I just ran into something so egregiously wrong that I simply had to comment on it.
". . .the conservative principles on which our beloved country was founded. . ." Come again? The conservative values? Can we have a fact check here? Go back and read the founding documents. Try the Declaration of Independence, or Thomas Paine's Common Sense for starters. There's nothing conservative there; those are radical values. The United States of America wasn't founded on "conservative values." The conservatives of 1776 were the Tories, the people who wanted to remain loyal subjects of King George III. The quote is from a recruiting document posted on the internet by the Tea Party of Fort Lauderdale. You can read their entire pitch here: http://www.meetup.com/TEAPARTYFTL/
I was just involved in a multi-person email debate on Global Climate Change. I jumped in when one of the other parties called Al Gore's call to action "pseudo-science." Here is the first thing I said. I deleted the name of the person I was responding to.
You may think that "pseudo-science" people such as Al Gore are capitalizing on something that isn't necessarily so, but you, and I mean people such as—who believe that global warming is pseudo-science—need to keep a few facts in mind. None of the expeditions to find a Northwest Passage over the North American continent during the Nineteenth Century found one. It wasn't until the past few years that enough of the Arctic sea ice had melted that ships were able to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific via that route. In 1958, when the atomic sub Nautalus went under the North Pole ice sheet, the ice measured 20 feet thick. It's recently been measured at only eight feet. The Greenland ice cap is several feet lower than it was half a century ago. Antarctic glaciers have calved larger icebergs in recent years than ever before recorded. One of the three Larsen ice sheets on the Antarctic Peninsula is gone, and another is melting rapidly. Mean sea level has risen a couple of inches over the past century. Sub-tropical vegetation and animals are slowly migrating north, along with warmer temperatures. Global warming is real. But not to worry, Northern Virginia may not turn sub-tropical after all. The melting Arctic and Greenland ice caps will sink the Gulf Stream, the thing that allows palm trees to grow in Ireland—which is on the same latitude as Labrador. Stopping the Gulf Stream will likely bring on another ice age, in which case South Florida will have a climate more like that of today's New England, and Northern Virginia will be more like Baffin Island.
The person to whom I responded came back with the statement that climate changes, and there's no scientific agreement on how much of the current change is due to human action. He also quipped that my backup plan for massive hurricanes is a small plane in my backyard, which explains my opening sentence.
2/23 My backup plan is I have a very small carbon footprint. Yes, climate changes. Everybody not in denial acknowledges that fact, including the climate scientists who are so concerned about the coming crisis. What nobody knows, and most of those scientists agree on, is exactly how much of the current change is due to human activity. But there's no denying that. . . Excuse me. Of course there are those who deny that human activity has anything to do with the problem; there are people who deny that the world is a globe. People will deny anything they don't like. Human activity is affecting the rate of climate change. How much? Nobody know. But the tale told by ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica is that the rate of change is faster today than in the past. Just because nobody knows how much human activity is affecting climate change is no reason to do nothing about it. Climate change is happening, and it is going to cause massive disruption to humankind. We can ease the disruption if we act now. And for those who say it's too expensive to wean ourselves from the oil standard, or whatever they claim is too expensive, it'll be a damn sight more expensive if we do nothing.
The only response I got to that was from someone who mightily agreed with me on the benefits of doing something now.
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