[Warren Pease]

Plastic Bags suck. So does bottled water.

Bottled Water: What a Waste : TreeHugger
yes, treehugger.com

[Uncle Skeleton]

Worst page opener yet. Just terrible.

Shouldn't plastics be considered carbon sequestration, since they're made of carbon, and the less biodegradable the longer the sequestration will last?

[Warren Pease]

No.

Sequestration means to take something in the open and hide it. Not sure how taking petroleum out of the ground (usually a hidden spot), using it for plastic products, spreading them around the world and then watching them break into even smaller pieces to be dispersed even farther is considered hiding.

Not taking into account all the hydrocarbon energy needed to pull the stuff out of the ground, get it to the factory, produce it, then ship it back out to the world.

Yeah, it's a sucky first post for the page. My apologies.

[Uncle Skeleton]

But considering oil as a commodity, the oil that's been pumped is either going into fuel or into plastics; the demand for plastics is not going to significantly affect the rate of drilling. Isn't it better for the climate change issue if it's in plastics than in fuel?

[ebuddy]

Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton 

But considering oil as a commodity, the oil that's been pumped is either going into fuel or into plastics; the demand for plastics is not going to significantly affect the rate of drilling. Isn't it better for the climate change issue if it's in plastics than in fuel?

Plastic is certainly being used more effectively than fuel in my '02 Wrangler.

[Buckaroo]

Global Warming thread is here.

[peeb]

Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton 

But considering oil as a commodity, the oil that's been pumped is either going into fuel or into plastics; the demand for plastics is not going to significantly affect the rate of drilling. Isn't it better for the climate change issue if it's in plastics than in fuel?

That doesn't make any sense. Let's simplify and say demand for oil = demand for plastic + demand for fuel. Therefore reducing demand for plastic reduces the demand for oil. I don't know where you get the idea that demand for petrochems apart from fuel does not influence drilling decisions.

[Chongo]

Let's not forget that China and India are now consuming as much, if not more that the US is, thus driving up demenad. You have a billion+ Chinese, and a billion + Indians now buying and driving cars that were riding bicycles before.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

And that matters to his formula... how?



greg

[Chongo]

Originally Posted by ShortcutToMoncton 

And that matters to his formula... how?



greg

The law of supply and demand for one. I have no idea if the emission controls in India and China are like they are in the US.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Originally Posted by ShortcutToMoncton 

And that matters to his formula... how?



greg

Just as relevant now as ever!

The "law of supply and demand" doesn't change anything in peeb's simplified formula of "demand for oil = demand for plastic + demand for fuel."

Neither does the growth of India and/or China.

It just means there might be more of a demand for oil, that's all.

greg

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Originally Posted by Chongo 

The law of supply and demand for one. and I have know idea if there are emission control in India and China like they have in the US.

In terms of vehicle emissions, China is actually more stringent I believe.

Industry emissions are totally another story. That's probably to be expected given their economic growth in the past 25 years. It looks like things are getting bad enough that movement is slowly being made on that as well.

greg

[tie]

Uncle Skeleton might be right in the very short term, but peeb is clearly right in the short, medium and long terms. I have no idea what "the law of supply and demand for one. and I have know idea if there are emission control in India and China" has to do with anything, but I'll mark it as an extra point in peeb's column.

[Chongo]

Originally Posted by tie 

"I have no idea if the emission controls in India and China are like they are in the US.
" has to do with anything

Ever fly in to LA on a bad day?

keep in mind China is exempt from Kyoto
courtesy of:Maureen Fan
When I first arrived in Beijing in 2005, the view from my apartment window towards Pacific Century Place in Sanlitun, on an ordinary day, often looked like this:

That same view on a bad day looked like this:

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by Buckaroo 

Typical response from a cult follower. I'll bet you also belong to Scientology and you use to belong to the Hare Krishna. What's wrong, you didn't get enough?

The fact is. THERE IS NO PROOF. It is 100% assumptions. EVERY SINGLE WORD by the fake scientists are assumptions. Nothing has been proven.

You're wrong again, and no doubt in a great feat of irony. You see, my convictions are based on evidence and direct observation; ergo, so is my stance regarding global climate change and how humans may (or possibly may not) have an effect on it.

Your problem is that you just simply don't understand how this whole process works, or more likely, refuse to try and understand. I'm not talking about global warming, I'm talking about why there's support for it.

You, like many others, also don't understand what is involved when these "assumptions" are made. Scientific theory requires testing and observation. Sometimes the theory turns out to be wrong, but that's precisely what makes a theory: if it is wrong, can it be shown as such through testing and observation? These aren't educated guesses, it requires testing, re-testing, analyzing, deduction, collating data, then making sense of the data. After all that hard work is done, everything has to be reviewed by peers, then the whole thing has to be reproduced again to make sure that it was done right the first time.

You bury your head in the sand, or stick your fingers in your ears and scream at the top of your lungs whenever direct evidence is provided; most likely because the evidence -- no matter how abundant and/or clear -- is at ends with your moral, religious, and/or political beliefs.

Despite the evidence, I have no problems with people disagreeing, asking questions, and getting answers provided they support their claims with reasonable evidence and sources. You have not done that. No one who is claiming to the contrary has done that. There are zero, and I'll repeat myself as I do so damn often, zero peer review studies to the contrary. None.

You are arguing nothing. You are only repeating what other religious and political hounds have been barking. You are asking the same questions that have been asked a hundred times before in this forum, all of which have been answered empirically.

[Buckaroo]

I know exactly why there is support for it. It's a cult, and you are a main supporter of it.

[BadKosh]

Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin leads the pack in this year’s contest for biased climate journalism.

Eilperin’s March 10 article entitled "Carbon Output Must Near Zero to Avert Danger, New Studies Say" has the same sort of journalistic objectivity one might expect from totalitarian state-controlled media.

With nary a critical word about the computer models used to project increases in global temperature, Eilperin touted two new model-dependent studies that "suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide."

And "Using advanced computer models to factor deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide, the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further."

But none of the models in the studies — nor for that matter any other mathematical model of global climate — has proven to be particularly useful. No model has been validated against historical climate data.

So why would any rational person assume that they can be used to predict future climate or serve as a basis for developing national energy policy? As reported in this column last December, global climate models uniformly predict significantly warmer atmospheric temperatures than have actually occurred.

Such model failure should come as no surprise since they have many built-in biases, including the unproven assumption that atmospheric carbon dioxide drives global climate. But all the available real-life data — including 20th century records and ice-core samples stretching back 650,000 years — fail to support such a cause-and-effect relationship.

The ice core samples show, in fact, an opposite relationship. Eilperin, who has long reported on climate for the Washington Post, must know about the models’ problems, but she apparently chooses not to report it. In her March 4 Post article, Eilperin mentioned a report by a number of climate experts from around the world entitled "Nature Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate." She even interviewed one of the experts for her story.

A section of that report, entitled "Climate Models Are Not Reliable" discusses in plain language how climate models don’t consider solar dimming and brightening, don’t accurately control for clouds, don’t simulate the potential feedback effects of water vapor, don’t explain many features of the Earth’s observed climate, and don’t produce reliable predictions of regional (let alone global) climate change.

At JunkScience.com, we label climate modeling as Playstation® Climatology, with no disrespect intended toward Sony since its Playstation games are, in fact, what they purport to be — just games.

Not content with ignoring viewpoints she doesn’t like, Eilperin goes on to diminish, if not ridicule, critics of her apparent point of view. Eilperin’s March 4 article featured four ad hominem attacks from three environmental activists, abusing those who question global warming orthodoxy as members of a "flat Earth society" and participants in the "climate equivalent of Custer’s last stand."

If Eilperin wants to poke fun at those who disagree with her on public policy issues, she ought to write an opinion, rather than a news column. Another disturbing aspect of Eilperin’s article was the accompanying photo of downtown Beijing. The photo was captioned, "A heavy haze could be seen in Beijing in August 2007. Two recent reports call for a heightened global effort to reduce carbon emissions."

The juxtaposition of the article and photo clearly implied that unless we cut carbon dioxide emissions, U.S. cities would soon look like Beijing. But as virtually anyone who breathes knows, carbon dioxide is an invisible gas. Not only can you not see it, there’s no possible way for carbon dioxide emissions to cause smog, haze or whatever was fouling Beijing’s air in the photo.

The irrelevant and misleading nature of the photo has been pointed out to Eilperin, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell and the paper’s editors. As of the writing of this column, none have responded and it remains to be seen whether the Washington Post has the journalistic integrity to remove the photo from its Web site and publish a correction in its print edition.

It’s quite possible that if Eilperin and the many other members of the mainstream media who so far have been in the tank for global warming started reporting on the very real debate about climate model validity rather than simply regurgitating what the agenda-driven modelers tell them, then we could avert the looming national economic disaster that Congress is preparing for the next president to sign into law.


===========================
Telling us, based on a few decades of sloppy data, that we MUST DO SOMETHING, is just plain stupid. Weather is NOT CLIMATE, and the amount of time to verify CLIMATE change and not WEATHER changes has not occured. Come back and tell us what you KNOW, AFTER you have done your research, not before. I give you 3000 years to verify climate change. Of course you'll want that funding too, right??

[Uncle Skeleton]

source?