Questions we should be asking about global warming
Hatchet
By Lucas Roebuck
SILOAM SPRINGS, Ark. -- There is a delicious - albeit meaningless - irony that as Gov. Mike Beebe begins to implement the plans of his global warming commission, state offices have to close because of cold weather.
Baby, it's cold outside. It's black ice season for travelers on I-540 and U.S. 412 and all those twisty roads in the hills. Slow down when driving, get a fire going at home, and be sure to wear a heavy coat and gloves when you are going to be outside for a long time.
No sign of global warming here in Arkansas, and across the world we are having some record cold temperatures this winter. So this means that global warming is a myth, right?
Of course, to draw a conclusion from such limited data would be myopic at best, stupid at worst. In a way, those who believe "man-made" greenhouse gases are the cause of global warming are, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor, skating on almost equally thin ice.
Obviously, man-made global warming theories have been politicized, most prominently by the efforts of former Vice President Al Gore, a successful politician but nothing more than an amateur scientist at best. Has Gore published any peer-reviewed research he has supervised himself?
Also, another problem with analyzing global warming data is that a lot of people stand to gain a lot of wealth (and another group stands to lose a lot of wealth) should certain policies be put in place regulating the production of carbon. Because of the politicization of global warming science, many professional scientists themselves feel they must tow the "consensus" and succumb to groupthink lest they lose a grant, their jobs or even their reputation.
In order for our global society to determine the validity of man-made global warming theories, the Chicken Littles - global warming alarmists like Gore - need to relax. We've heard the warning bell. We know they think the sky is falling. Now, let us do the sort of theory testing the scientific method was made for. Don't worry. We'll keep an eye on the sky in the meantime.
People who have faith in man-made global warming need to stop with the "the debate is over" and those who disagree are the same as Holocaust deniers rhetoric. Open any high school history book, and you'll find plenty of examples through human history when the consensus of science turned out to be wrong.
Politicians who are concerned about global warming should have Congress create a special global warming research fund to be managed by six scientists: three who believe man-made global warming is likely happening and three who are skeptical of the validity of the prevailing theories. This would be different than Kyoto and other U.N.-commissioned gatherings of scientists where the meeting's position is pre-determined. Give the new fund five or 10 years to back research designed specifically to answer these critical questions about global warming and then report back to Congress.
1. Is global warming even happening? Some data suggest the Earth has been cooling over the last decade. Why?
2. If global warming is happening, how sure are we that greenhouse gases are the cause? Are there other natural cycles that could be involved? What about solar trends? It's not like the Earth hasn't gone through ice ages and hot cycles before.
3. If indeed greenhouse gasses are the cause, how sure are we that carbon dioxide, a gas that generally promotes the health of green plants, makes up a significant portion of the offending gases? "Man-made" and naturally occurring CO 2 constitute about 0.03 percent of the atmosphere. Why the focus on CO 2 ?
Writes blogger Jay Currie, "[The reason] I find the CO 2 argument hard to swallow is that only 0.03 percent of the atmosphere is composed of this gas ... manmade or otherwise. If man is responsible for 30 percent of that, then we are responsible for 0.01 percent, or 0.0001 of the total atmosphere. Which means that we are emitting the one ten thousandth of the atmosphere (which) is reflecting back the long wave radiation you are claiming is responsible for global warming. Those are busy little molecules."
4. Even if global warming is happening, man-caused or not, is this a bad thing? I've heard some interesting theories that by burning fossil fuels we are just releasing carbon back into the atmosphere that used to be there. Would the world be a better place if it were more tropical? Or are we sure the place would become a desert wasteland?
These questions need to be answered conclusively by scientists in a politics-free zone before we take drastic steps that will hurt our economy and have little-to-no effect on global warming.
We need to listen to the Chicken Littles and the deniers very carefully before making hasty decisions.
Policy needs to wait for the science.
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Obama's blindness
Journalists must ask Barack tough questions about Chicago
Hatchet
By Lucas Roebuck
The media and U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald both hold a unique, important public trust as the not-so-shocking Illinois pay-for-play corruption scandal unfolds.
Fitzgerald must not turn the case against Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, into a witch hunt, where Fitzgerald is determined to get a conviction on something — anything — to save face. This wouldn't be unprecedented for the high profile lawman. Fitzgerald, a hero of many liberals for his dog and pony show in the Valerie Plame CIA "leak" case, must make sure he gets the governor for a relevant crime.
In the Valerie Plame case, Fitzgerald knew who the leaker was (Richard Armitage) before the grand jury testimony began and never charged anyone with leaking the name of a covert CIA agent. Instead, he tagged the vice president's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for having a bad memory. Ken Starr did the same thing to President Clinton, setting him up to lie under oath about something totally unrelated to the Whitewater land deal. Both Libby and Clinton were decent lawyers in their own right, so it must have taken a special blend of prosecutorial abuse to trip them up.
While public opinion on the Libby/Plame case was split mostly along partisan lines, Fitzgerald has the advantage that Blagojevich has already been tried in the court of public opinion. Even if a court exonerates Blagojevich of wrong doing, his political career is over. The tapes are hard to argue with. Even Nixon knew that.
Fitzgerald's public trust then is to convict Blagojevich on a corruption charge and not a technicality.
The news media also have a public trust. They should not take President-Elect Barack Obama at his word that he had no idea of what was going on.
"I had no contact with the governor or his office and so I was not aware of what was happening," Obama told reporters, which was dutifully noted and repeated in papers from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times. Fine for the official statement. But this generation of journalists, weaned on stories of Woodward and Bernstien taking down Nixon, should turn over every pizza in Chicago verifying Obama's story.
They already have a few leads. First was that fact senior Obama adviser David Axelrod said on Nov. 23, "I know he's talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them."
Axelrod said he misspoke, which means he was ill informed, incompetent or a liar. We have no idea of knowing which it is, which is why a healthy, fair news corps will have reporters digging around to find out. Plenty of Nixon aides covered for their boss.
Another lead: Illinois-based KHQA news director Carol Sowers filed a report on the station's Web site on Nov. 5 that Obama was going to meet with Blagojevich to discuss who would succeed Obama in the Senate. The article that reported this was removed from the Web site this afternoon. I sent an e-mail to Sowers asking why the article was down and if she stood by her story, but I haven't heard back from her. Did Sowers have the story wrong? Or did they meet? Journalists should be finding the answer to these questions.
I am not trying to say that Obama is lying, or that somehow he is corrupt. But good journalists should always question the powers that be, even politicians they voted for and idolize — especially those people. That is their public trust.
I wonder if Woodword and Bernstien (and the editors at the Washington Post who supported them) would have worked so hard to take down Nixon if he were a Democrat? The idealist in me would like to think so. What if those scrappy reporters worked hard and came up with nothing on Nixon? They certainly wouldn't enjoy the celebrity status they do today.
The journalist's public trust isn't to assume that corruption exists, but its job is to check anyway, even if everything looks good on the surface. Hundreds, if not thousands of reporters, have done the sort of work that Woodword and Bernstien did — and came up with nothing. They are heroes, albeit unsung, of journalism, too.
If Obama is innocent of this affair — and I have no reason to believe that he is not — the one thing the stench from Chicago has proven is that Obama is blind. Only an idiot could have served in the statehouse and not known about the sort of corruption that has made the Windy City and Springfield famous. Obama was deep into the machine, and if he didn't know about the dirty game, he was incredibly naive. If he did know about it, then he did nothing to stop it.
I have called Obama many things over the 2008 election cycle, but a naive idiot is not one of them.
##30##
Hatchet
By Lucas Roebuck
The media and U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald both hold a unique, important public trust as the not-so-shocking Illinois pay-for-play corruption scandal unfolds.
Fitzgerald must not turn the case against Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, into a witch hunt, where Fitzgerald is determined to get a conviction on something — anything — to save face. This wouldn't be unprecedented for the high profile lawman. Fitzgerald, a hero of many liberals for his dog and pony show in the Valerie Plame CIA "leak" case, must make sure he gets the governor for a relevant crime.
In the Valerie Plame case, Fitzgerald knew who the leaker was (Richard Armitage) before the grand jury testimony began and never charged anyone with leaking the name of a covert CIA agent. Instead, he tagged the vice president's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for having a bad memory. Ken Starr did the same thing to President Clinton, setting him up to lie under oath about something totally unrelated to the Whitewater land deal. Both Libby and Clinton were decent lawyers in their own right, so it must have taken a special blend of prosecutorial abuse to trip them up.
While public opinion on the Libby/Plame case was split mostly along partisan lines, Fitzgerald has the advantage that Blagojevich has already been tried in the court of public opinion. Even if a court exonerates Blagojevich of wrong doing, his political career is over. The tapes are hard to argue with. Even Nixon knew that.
Fitzgerald's public trust then is to convict Blagojevich on a corruption charge and not a technicality.
The news media also have a public trust. They should not take President-Elect Barack Obama at his word that he had no idea of what was going on.
"I had no contact with the governor or his office and so I was not aware of what was happening," Obama told reporters, which was dutifully noted and repeated in papers from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times. Fine for the official statement. But this generation of journalists, weaned on stories of Woodward and Bernstien taking down Nixon, should turn over every pizza in Chicago verifying Obama's story.
They already have a few leads. First was that fact senior Obama adviser David Axelrod said on Nov. 23, "I know he's talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them."
Axelrod said he misspoke, which means he was ill informed, incompetent or a liar. We have no idea of knowing which it is, which is why a healthy, fair news corps will have reporters digging around to find out. Plenty of Nixon aides covered for their boss.
Another lead: Illinois-based KHQA news director Carol Sowers filed a report on the station's Web site on Nov. 5 that Obama was going to meet with Blagojevich to discuss who would succeed Obama in the Senate. The article that reported this was removed from the Web site this afternoon. I sent an e-mail to Sowers asking why the article was down and if she stood by her story, but I haven't heard back from her. Did Sowers have the story wrong? Or did they meet? Journalists should be finding the answer to these questions.
I am not trying to say that Obama is lying, or that somehow he is corrupt. But good journalists should always question the powers that be, even politicians they voted for and idolize — especially those people. That is their public trust.
I wonder if Woodword and Bernstien (and the editors at the Washington Post who supported them) would have worked so hard to take down Nixon if he were a Democrat? The idealist in me would like to think so. What if those scrappy reporters worked hard and came up with nothing on Nixon? They certainly wouldn't enjoy the celebrity status they do today.
The journalist's public trust isn't to assume that corruption exists, but its job is to check anyway, even if everything looks good on the surface. Hundreds, if not thousands of reporters, have done the sort of work that Woodword and Bernstien did — and came up with nothing. They are heroes, albeit unsung, of journalism, too.
If Obama is innocent of this affair — and I have no reason to believe that he is not — the one thing the stench from Chicago has proven is that Obama is blind. Only an idiot could have served in the statehouse and not known about the sort of corruption that has made the Windy City and Springfield famous. Obama was deep into the machine, and if he didn't know about the dirty game, he was incredibly naive. If he did know about it, then he did nothing to stop it.
I have called Obama many things over the 2008 election cycle, but a naive idiot is not one of them.
##30##
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