http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS6-5M93FIA&feature=related

Here is a brief video, sorry its hard to condense information in this format (comments), but may enable you to further searches to gardener expanded perspectives.

@downsouth,

You do like getting to the root of things, what are the evangelical puritans up to you ask.

In this limited forum I would say simply to see their self fulfilling prophecy. It's the Lynch pin in the in the 3 tribes of Abraham, second coming for two of them and first for one. To achieve this goal requires power and they will always gravitate to any form of power which enables them to achieve it.

Your references to the club of "I" is really the key to many of our problems confronting us today. I have spent endless hours going down the same road as you to find these answers, since I was born of its world, but fell out at a young age, did not pass the smell test.

I would be happy to carry on this conversation with you if means could be established to your liking.

skippy…bloody fertile crescent hatched many a bad egg or are they fragments of each other.

We had to switch over from using CFC's that were depleting the ozone layer.

CO2 is not pollution per se. What it has is an absorption spectum that is transparent to visible light, but opaque to infrared energy.

The earth has to re-radiate the same amount of energy that it receives, and it does a great deal of this in the IR band. You can tell because rocks heat up in the day and cool at night.

Water vapor is even more opaque to IR, but water vapor participates in evaporation/precipitation. CO2 does not precipitate and hence, holds heat more than the gasses it displaced as a percentage of the atmosphere.

A few percent may not sound like a lot, but it is sustained. The earth will reach a new equalibrium with the additional CO2, but the question is if it does so by generally heating up.

I'm not willing to stop there. There may be other higher-frequency escape routes for the additional energy. One way that I thought of was if the extra energy produced more frequent, massive, and violent storms, then the additional lightning would indeed be a high energy escape, but I don't know how much makes it to space.

Denying science is not a good way to assess real risk. You should take a look at the mechanisms involved.

"Yves provides us with an example of how libertarian fundamentalism and one of its canons–anti-tax dogmatism–bears indirect fruit for the energy sector (coal, oil and natural gas producers)."

What is libertarian fundamentalism you speak of?

The republican party is not libertarians, and the coal, oil and natural gas producers are certainly not fans of libertarians (at least the majority austro-libertarians).

Libertarian fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism and Militarism, these are the ideologies promoted by America's ruling coalition which is formed by the security-industrial complex (which includes the energy and military sectors), the financial-industrial complex and the evangelical Christian-industrial complex.

Yves provides us with an example of how libertarian fundamentalism and one of its canons–anti-tax dogmatism–bears indirect fruit for the energy sector (coal, oil and natural gas producers). But besides libertarian fundamentalism the energy sector is also an indirect beneficiary of Christian fundamentalism and one of its core tenets, that of anti-science.

What continues to puzzle me, however, is what does the Christian-industrial complex receive from this coalition? This is an extremely important question, because evangelical Christians, being the most populous part, are by far the most powerful part of this ruling triumvirate.

While the preachers that promote Christian fundamentalism have become extremely wealthy, I don't think this explains it all. And if money doesn't explain it, that begs the question: What is the idological thread that runs through libertarian fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism and militarism that tie them them all together? Andrew Bacevich and Kevin Phillips identified the triumvirate, but don't delve much into the doctrinal affinities that bind them together. Greg Grandin does a much better job of looking at the theology of the Christian fundamentalists, identifying some of the leading lights and citing specific examples of their theology. But alas, he's no theologian.

I think it may be Reinhold Niebuhr that can provide the insight to pull it all together. I have noted before that he was loath to cast aspersions upon his fellow religionists. However, last night I began reading his book The Nature and Destiny of Man. And in it he indeed does talk about how "Christian individuality may become the source of anarchy."

I must admit that Niebuhr shoots over my head. I don't have a background in classical or Western philosophy, nor Jewish or Christian theology, to fully appreciate or understand his writings. However the gist of it is this: It is the worship of the individual, and the development of the doctrine of the "autonomous individual," that threatens to be our undoing. The "autonomous individual" is the result of a malignant synthesis of elements deriving from (a) post-Renaissance(modern) Occidental thought and (b) ancient Judeo-
Christian thought.

The thing that libertarian fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism therefore have in common, the thread that binds them together in the current coalition, is this worship of the self: the celebration of the "autonomous individual."

The impulse towards militarism (nationalism) happens when the credo of self-worship breaks down, as Niebuhr argues it always must:

An individual cannot bear to make himself the centre of meaning without qualification. Inevitably he must seek support from something greater and more inclusive than himself…

Sooner or later [he] must…recoil from the pretension of this purely individual self-deification; and all but Nietzsche do recoil. They seek to increase the plausibility and reduce the prentension of this self-glorification by looking for the "larger individual"; which they find in the unique nation. This collective individual then supplants the single individual as the centre of existence and the source of meaning.

If you want a good laugh, read the "explanations" of why carbon is a lagging indicator, but still responsible for warming. Also useful if your AC breaks down, as the handwaving results in substantial dermal evaporative cooling.

The central premise of AGW is false on it's face.

Congrats on an important post. The final thought is tres importante.

And love the Yiddish!

From the New Scientist article: About 40% of the extra CO2 entering the atmosphere due to human activity is being absorbed by natural carbon sinks, mostly by the oceans. The rest is boosting levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

How can we be sure that human emissions are responsible for the rising CO2 in the atmosphere? There are several lines of evidence. Fossil fuels were formed millions of years ago. They therefore contain virtually no carbon-14, because this unstable carbon isotope, formed when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, has a half-life of around 6000 years. So a dropping concentration of carbon-14 can be explained by the burning of fossil fuels.

More on carbon isotopes here.

I'm all in favor of regulating pollution. There are limits to what the planet can detoxify. However, CO2 is not pollution, and mankind emits only a small fraction of the CO2 put into the atmosphere annually. Most of it is of natural origin. I can't recall the exact percentage of human contribution. I believe it was not more than 3%. In other words, if all humans stopped all carbon emissions, nature would still supply new atmospheric CO2 about thirty times greater than human-caused emissions. Unfortunately, we cannot tax nature. It would be nice, though.

james hansen (NASA) has been advocating a carbon tax and 100% dividend (he says cap and trade won't work). from his short and very informative statement before the house ways and means committee february:

"For example, a carbon price equivalent to $1/gallon of gasoline (about $115 per ton of CO2), for 2007 rates of fossil fuel use in the United States, generates $670B. If we give one share to each legal resident age 22 and over, one half-share to college age youth (18-21), one half-share to the parents of each child up to two children per family, that yields about 224 million shares in 2007 (this could be off by ~10%; I could not find optimum census data). So the 100% Dividend for a $1/gallon tax rate ($115 per ton of CO2) is:

This tax, and the knowledge that it would continue to increase in the future, would spur innovations in energy efficiency and carbon-free energy sources. The dividend would put money in the hands of the public, allowing them to purchase vehicles and other products that reduce their carbon footprint and thus their taxes."

this might be palatable to the public, but not i expect to the fossil fuel industries or those who would like to make money trading pollution rights, carbon credits, etc.