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Thursday, February 08, 2007
Larry Elder :: Townhall.com Columnist
Global Warming Turns People Gay
by Larry Elder
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What did you think of Gov. Sarah Palin's acceptance speech Wednesday night?




Global warming alarmists -- despite their best efforts -- seem incapable of convincing the Bush administration. So here's my suggestion. Make the scientists tell the president that global warming turns people gay.

The idea came to me after seeing a Super Bowl Snickers commercial, and learning of the "controversy" that followed it. In the ad, two guys chewing on either end of the candy bar inadvertently touch lips. Shocked, they decide to do something "manly" and demonstrate their heterosexuality. How? They pull down their shirts and rip off their chest hairs. A pro-gay-rights group called the ad homophobic and demanded the Snickers people stop showing it. Clearly America runs rampant with gay-haters.

So, imagine if scientists simply told Bush that global warming made people gay.

Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," scared more people than the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho." The former vice president tells us the debate within the scientific community concerning the consequences of global warming is over. But the Bush administration yawned. And just last week, something called the IPCC -- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- a group sponsored by the United Nations, also sounded the alarm. But, again, the Bush administration remains unconvinced.

But the gay thing might work. That is, assuming you can get everybody on board. Unfortunately, some pesky, politically incorrect scientists are telling the global-warming alarmists, "Calm down." Who are these wing-nuts?

A professor of meteorology at MIT, Richard Lindzen, for example, says, "I think it's mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves. And there's a lot of confusion in this and, you know, at the heart of it, we're talking of a few tenths of a degree change in temperature. None of it in the last eight years, by the way. . . . [I]f there's anything that there is a consensus on, [it is that we] will do very little to affect climate. . . . And I think future generations are not going to blame us for anything except for being silly, for letting a few tenths of a degree panic us. And I think nobody is arguing about whether our climate is changing. It's always changing. Sea level has been rising since the end of the last ice age. The experts on it in the IPCC have freely acknowledged there's no strong evidence it's accelerating."

Then there's Chris Landsea, the scientist who resigned from the IPCC last year, accusing the organization of being "subverted, its neutrality lost." "It is beyond me why my [IPCC] colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming," wrote Landsea. "My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy."

What to do about the author of "The Andromeda Strain," Dr. Michael Crichton? No climatology specialist, Crichton recently wrote a book of fiction called "State of Fear." The protagonist challenges the "conventional wisdom" of the global warming alarmists. In preparation for his book, Crichton researched scientific literature on global warming. His conclusion? A lot of it is hype. "I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed," writes Crichton. "Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions on the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression. . . . [T]he intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history."

The alarmists want the United States to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol. This requires spending gobs of money to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But during the Clinton administration, the Senate voted 95-0 to refuse to ratify the Kyoto accord if it excluded emissions from countries like China and India. It does.

Sixty Canadian scientists wrote a letter to their country's prime minister, urging an "independent climate-science review," because "billions of dollars earmarked for implementation of the [Kyoto] protocol in Canada will be squandered without a proper assessment of recent developments in climate science."

Others, like economist Julian Morris, suggest that spending all this money on Kyoto impoverishes the planet with very little gain. "But the same people who predict massive climate changes," says Morris, "also predict that in order for those climate changes to occur, we would have had enormous amounts of economic growth. So, the poorest people in the world will no longer be poor. . . . The reality is that in the future, people will be wealthy enough to adapt to pretty much any change that is likely to happen."

Confused? Me, too. So let's put all this uncertainty and speculation to rest, and get moving: Global warming turns people gay.

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About The Author
Larry Elder is host of the Larry Elder Show on talk radio and author of Showdown : Confronting Bias, Lies, and the Special Interests That Divide America .
 
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Subject: to fletch/uncaalby
"This ad hominem assertion actually undermines your case."

No, I don't think it does. If it did, then this website really doesn't have a leg to stand on. I mean, you DID read the above article, right?

"The level of exposure necessary to be harmful to humans is so much higher than even usage in the 1950s (when little attention was paid to saturation usage) that it represents no real threat to people. In fact, in one study, people ATE regular quantities of concentrated DDT without ill effect."

Well, for one thing, DDT builds up in your system like mercury and cholesterol. For another, releasing a lot of carbon dioxide into the environment would have caused the problem in the first place in this scenario, to release a lot of another chemical we DO suspect as a carcinogen, with it's own special damaging effects, isn't really learning from mistakes.

I didn't think this needed to be said, but massive amounts of DDT won't solve the problems of global warming.

And costs can't be established, but those two problems I mentioned alone would outweigh capping CO2 emmissions.

Fletch
"This is EXACTLY what the data from Wikipedia shows. That DATA flatly DOES NOT show a rate of sea level rise increasing beyond the historic norm. There is every reason to believe that this will continue. The data, however, does not support the projected INCREASE in sea level rise attributed to global warming."

You say that, and yet at the website you provided (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png), there, right above the bold heading "Data," and the last line in the "Description" your evidence that you cited as saying the oceans are not rising that fast says

"Much of recent sea level rise has been attributed to global warming."

It says it. Right there.

At any rate, what the graph shows is sea levels rising up to the year 2000.

There is NOTHING in that graph that predicts the rate the ocean will rise in the future. What you have is proof the oceans have risen, and an explanation that it's due to global warming, not an assurance, in any way, that the oceans are going to continue to rise nice and slow. Maybe the sea level rise is increasing. Given an increase in temperature, it's not hard to imagine that not all the ice is going to melt at a nice steady rate, and the oceans are not going to obey a speed limit. That's why the graph doesn't extend itself into the future. If there is a feedback loop anywhere in the process of the icecaps melting, that rate isn't going to hold up.

"It cannot be reasonably argued that the data supports any increase in the rate of sea level rise. In other words, it says EXACTLY what I said it did."

... but it doesn't, is the thing. Again, it's on the page. And the lines go up. What the graph itself says is that all the readings are in agreement: the oceans had risen.

"This is why I do not engage in a quoting match and go directly to the research (there are links to some of the research on Antarctica on my blog if you are interested)"

A linking match is better? If you're not going to critically examine both sides, why not leave the sorting of climate models to the experts, and just follow the majority opinion? They're the ones who went to school for a long time on these subjects. If you need a doctor, you don't shop around until you find one that gives you a diagnosis with the lowest price tag for treatment. Singer is a minority voice on global warming, you've got to wonder why.

"Absolutely not. I have been paying attention to the temperature increase data - negligible in 2006 - and the sea level rise data and the CO2 data directly - not just the spun comments of either side of the debate. It's specifically WHY I didn't link to an article, but chose a graph collecting the sata itself, which, again, does not support global warming related sea level rise."

You have much training as a climatologist? What is your training? Not that you have to be educated in something to have an opinion on it, but that graph you cite that you say means the oceans will rise at a nice slow rate forever and ever doesn't say that, doesn't extend itself even to the present, doesn't have trendlines, and provides no context. You can't really take bits and pieces and graphs and claim to be equal to the experts on this. Those might not be spun comments, they might well be interpretation of the data given a more complete picture of the story. That's one way creationists make themselves sound so convincing, is by taking bits of data, and not understanding the context. If the experts are saying one thing, and their chart doesn't seem to match what they're saying, it might be that they're full of hot air, but it also might be that they're just skipping some of the technical or boring, but essential details. You can skim through the data and find bits you like the best and seem to fit your views, but that's a waste of time.

The IPCC report is made by experts, and is the foremost voice in the debate of global warming. They say global warming is happening. You want to completely ignore them all because you think they're too political. I don't think that invalidates what they're saying, and at any rate, what are they supposed to do? Bike more and hope that we do to? Suggest non-binding agreements to burn less coal? Write letters telling us they would really appreciate if we hurt our industry so they don't get flooded? Conservative optimism really knows no bounds.

And what about those other scientists I cited? The case for global warming doesn't just rely on IPCC. I can understand not wanting to get into a technical discussion of the shortcomings of different research projects, but if you don't want to, then you don't get to pick and choose which experts you listen to based off which ones have less painful messages.
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