Global Warming a Myth - says Dem State Rep in Kentucky - what a disgrace!

Legislators hear global warming disputed // Herald Leader - Nov. 15, 2007
Called a myth of Gore, U.N., media -- By John Cheves

FRANKFORT --Global warming is a myth concocted by former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, Hollywood and the news media, Kentucky lawmakers were told yesterday.

The interim joint Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing to dispute the idea that the Earth is warming, at least in part because of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere produced by industrial activity.

Chairman Jim Gooch, D-Providence, a longtime ally of the coal industry, said he purposefully did not invite anyone who believes in global warming to testify.

"You can only hear that the sky is falling so many times," said Gooch, whose post makes him the House Democrats' chief environmental strategist. "We hear it every day from the news media, from the colleges, from Hollywood."

Neither of Gooch's invited panelists was a scientist.

http://www.kentucky.com/454/story/231346.html

at least these people believe!

Database gives global view of carbon emission hot spots

Does mankind cause global warming?
Yes

No

Yes 250 73%
No 93
27%
Total Votes: 343

The State's party is so often not even closely aligned with the National party when it comes to either D or R especially in the south.

It seems to be changing slowly but a lot of Southern State's districts, especially the more rural ones, still see the Repukes as the party of the "war of agression".

I just wish they'd think that way when they voted Nationally but they recognize the National repuke party as the only one that will allow them to maintain a xenophobic, religious nutcase mentality just a little longer.

I don't believe anyone can argue that the earth's climate is warming, but the argument is or should be whether man's activities is the cause! First off, lets look at where the energy to potentially warm the earth comes from.

I see 4 sources of potential energy that over time could warm the earth:

Solar energy captured by plants as oxidizable carbohydrons.
direct Solar radiation that warms the earth's surface as it is absorbed.
Geothermal energy from the earth's inside that is formed by nuclear fission or left over from the earth's formation
Nuclear energy created by man's tinkering with nuclear materials
I doubt if man has much to do with any changes in 3. #4 may be significant someday, but probably not now, and either way this has nothing to do with burning fossil fuel.

Let's look at #1! I guess the big question would be, does all solar energy that is captured by plants have an inevitable release date back into the atmosphere. If so, does man really then effect that end result. I mean a huge oil field explosion or a massive unchecked forest fire could do what man does by slowly burning fossil fuel. We just do not know what has happened in the past and what may happen in the future outside of man's involvement. However, my point here is that the energy we are releasing for the most part came from the sun over time and was already here waiting to be released somehow. In fact considering #2, with the clearing of the earth, one could postulate that less carbohydrons are being formed now than ever in the past. What does that say for the future of solar energy being captured on earth by plants??

There is indeed a lot more questions than answers if you look at this problem from an original energy sources point of view, IMHO!

Yes we do: Ice cores.

Do you not understand the fundamental impact increased CO² has on increased temperatures?

I understand, but the CO2 comes from captured solar energy being released by actions of something. Maybe it is all man, but maybe in the past other more natural occurences have caused massive hydrcarbon oxidation with its resultant CO2 release. The amount of such total hydrocarbon sources is still a function of absorbed solar energy over the years, and is not a man-made function!!

Just a thought.

Oh, and if you find out what's going on with the formation of the "carbohydrons", do please fill us in, OK?

http://www.realclimate.org

solar radiation currently hitting the earth, but I am dwelling on how the current increased CO2 came about. We are currently releasing a large amount of stored CO2 because of burned fossil fuels, but that could have happen naturally in the past and maybe the future. The amount of potentially releasable CO2 from hydrocarbon oxidation is limited by the amount stored in the earth curently! Also, the amount of new stored hydrocarbons is likely rapidly decreasing due to man's effect on the lands, ie. no more coal or oil allowed to be formed now.

I am not arguing there is no global arming! I am only carrying on a mind activity showing that the potential CO2 is/was already here, and could be/have been released by other than man-caused activities. Then what??

eom

Your mind is made up and nothing said, no logic will be heard. I think we are talking about relatively different things here, but since what I am saying isn't following your accepted mantra, you attack.

Please go back and objectively read what I have written, and then just think about it a while! That is all I ask.

climatology that allows you to have any credibility in disputing the rest of the world's PhD climatologists?

(crickets chirping)

but only offering a different way of looking at the problem and the potential. Man may be the cause, but he was not always? Even if man did everything correct, natural events may well lead to the same warming via massive CO2 release from natural oxidation of existing hydrocarbon materials! Finally, with the lack of lands now producing plant growth because of human over-development, I can foresee a time soon when CO2 will build up and NOT be photosynthesized because of that reason alone!

Probably not...(and it's not about the Cat in the Hat)...

the atmosphere contained some 660 billion tons of CO2. Now it contains 880 billion tons. Human activity is currently increasing atmospheric CO2 at a rate of 4 billion tons per year. What difference does it make what factors may or may not have caused atmospheric CO2 to increase in the past? We have a problem right now, and human activity is contributing to it.

Existing hydrocarbons on earth have the potential to oxidize eventually. There very existence is likely a freak of nature as they should have been oxidized soon after they originally died. If there were no stored hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) on earth, we would still likley now be in a CO2 excess crisis because we are destroying the plants on earth that take the CO2 and make hydrocarbons from it at least for a while. There must be a balance between plants making hydrcarbons and the release of CO2 back into the atmosphere due to hydrocarbon oxidation! If you think of man as the short term cause of releasing or lowering the stored earth's hydrocarbon excess, then indeed we are the cause of current CO2 excess. However, maybe a better way of looking at the problems or dealing with it would be to concentrate on the CO2 cycle itself because CO2 could be released in large amounts by natural events such a forest fires or explosions in oil or coal reserves. Then what??

Maybe planting more plants on earth is the answer and then being careful to control the oxidation of the excess hydrocarbons produced as much as possible. I do not doubt the existence of global warming due to CO2 excess, but I do think the solutions are politically motivated without good science behind the longer term picture.

J. E. Harries, H. E. Brindley, P. J. Sagoo, R. J. Bantges (2001). Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997. Nature 410: 355 - 357

T. P. Barnett, D. W. Pierce, R. Schnur (2001). Detection of Anthropogenic Climate Change in the World's Oceans. Science 292: 270-274.

S. Levitus, J. I. Antonov, J. Wang, T. L. Delworth, K. W. Dixon, and A. J. Broccoli (2001) Anthropogenic Warming of Earth's Climate System. Science 292: 267-270.

D. J. Karoly, K. Braganza, P. A. Stott, J. M. Arblaster, G. A. Meehl, A. J. Broccoli, and K. W. Dixon (2003) Detection of a Human Influence on North American Climate. Science. 302: 1200-1203

B. D. Santer, M. F. Wehner, T. M. L. Wigley, R. Sausen, G. A. Meehl, K. E. Taylor, C. Ammann, J. Arblaster, W. M. Washington, J. S. Boyle, and W. Brüggemann (2003) Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes. Science. 301: 479-483

P. A. Stott, D. A. Stone and M. R. Allen (2004) Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003. Nature 432: 610-614

J. Hansen, L. Nazarenko, R. Ruedy, M Sato, J. Willis, A. Del Genio, D. Koch, A. Lacis, K. Lo, S. Menon, T. Novakov, J. Perlwitz, G. Russell, G. A. Schmidt N. Tausnev (2005) Earth's Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications. Science. 308: 1431 – 1435

T. P. Barnett, D. W. Pierce, K. M. AchutaRao, P. J. Gleckler, B. D. Santer, J. M. Gregory, and W. M. Washington (2005) Penetration of Human-Induced Warming into the World's Oceans. Science. 309: 284-287

M. Lockwood and C. Frohlich (2007) Recent oppositely directed trends in solarclimate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature. Proc. R. Soc.doi:10.1098/rspa.2007.1880 Published online

Carbohydrons????? WTF are carbohydrons???? I'm one course away from a minor in Chemistry and I've never heard of carbohydrons. I guess I didn't read my bible as an adjunct text for chem class as I should have.......

are known by some as carbohydrons. It may not be common, but do some searching and you will find the term.

First we've got to convince them the world isn't flat.

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Randy Mann is stupid TV "weatherman" and Cliff Harris is a fundy, with no degree at all!

Citing either of those two is an invitation to be laughed at.

http://polwatchers.typepad.com/pol_watchers/2007/09/lawmakers-retur.html

Lawmakers return pay for fruitless session

All but two members of the state House of Representatives made good on a pledge to forgo their pay for a fruitless special legislative session that stretched over most of July, House Democrats announced today.

House lawmakers returned nearly $105,000 to the Kentucky State Treasurer today, which represented their pay for July 5-10.

/snip/

Democratic Rep. Jim Gooch of Providence and Republican Rep. Jim Stewart of Flat Lick declined to return their pay, according to a spreadsheet obtained by the Herald-Leader through an Open Records request.

> Gooch, whose post makes him the House Democrats' chief environmental strategist

:banghead:

But he consistently gets 75% of the vote in the general. Sad state of affairs.

Too, too bad - Courier Journal - 11/20/07

While Kentucky's legislative agenda on climate change is in the hands of a global warming denier with strong ties to the coal industry, much of the rest of the world is moving on to address the problem.

The embarrassment of having Rep. Jim Gooch, D-Providence, turn an interim General Assembly committee meeting on this subject into a farce was underlined by the release, days later, of a report describing an international scientific consensus about the damage already done by greenhouse gases -- and the drastic potential consequences of doing nothing about the problem.

http://tinyurl.com/yuabop

No sound science in climate-change alarm
By Christopher Monckton
Kentucky's brave and hard-working coal miners, who do one of the toughest, dirtiest jobs in the world to keep our lights on, deserve better treatment than they received in the Nov. 15 Herald-Leader.

Its editorial unjustly criticized state Rep. Jim Gooch for inviting me to give expert testimony before a legislative panel on whether global warming is a global crisis.

Before the Herald-Leader ever again presumes to menace the jobs of thousands of Kentuckians on the basis of the pseudo-science behind the global-warming scare, it should be more careful with the facts.

The editorial implied that I was a paid lackey of coal. Yet I had told the legislature that I have no financial interest. The editorial cited a London zoologist as accusing me of "pseudo-scientific gibberish," yet the zoologist's paper published a correction from me demonstrating that it was the zoologist, not the mathematician, who had gibbered.

http://www.kentucky.com/589/story/241071.html

This crap makes me ashamed of my whole species.. WE'RE the educated first-worlders with the most power and biggest footprint, & we're electing pigs like this to run stuff for us.