Please tell me we have not been arguing about a different perspective. I have already admitted we all could do better, but the US is leading the pack as far as I’m concerned with emission controls on autos, scrubbers on power plants, and most large manufacturing plants.

We have a large population living a lifestyle the rest of the planet envies. Most people care deeply about the environment, me included by the way, as an avid outdoorsman myself.

I am just a little sick of the US getting blamed for everything, and the present administration being the worst of the bunch which is simply just not true.

After Hurricane Katrina, a lot of power plants were taken out of commission, literally taken out, so to make up for lost power, President Bush had to make a hard decision. Let people go without power or increase the amount of pollutants from a few old plants to make up the difference for a while.

For this, he is labeled as a president in bed with ” Big Power, Big Oil,Big Business” , and the almighty dollar is the bottom line, all the time, every time, which is just not the case.

Now I have no idea where you live, but Hurricane Ivan stomped on my town and we went without power for a while. Some people went without for weeks. It is not exactly a pleasant situation, except at night No light pollution, setting a scope up was great. It took everyone’s mind off the carnage that surrounded us during the daylight hours.

Sorry, got off the point. Anyway, I hope that answers your question.

First I must apologize; my posts asking you for “your” list of big polluters should have been directed to JL. Mea Culpa. We now resume our regularly scheduled post….

And my numbers prove you right how? My figures showed that the US is the country with the largest amount of CO2 emissions and one of the highest rates of emission per capita. These are not good numbers. None of my figures dealt with pollution control. Please explain.

Guess what? CO2 does it gets converted back to C and O2 for the most part what happen to SO2 one of the nastiest gasses from volcanic action add water vapor and sunlight and you get H2SO4 add a little CLO and N2 and O3 guess what happens? O3 rapidly diminishes. That would be ozone getting removed.
I happen to think this is possibly just a little more important in regulating than most people. I just can’t guess “why” is my problem .

Do you remember when the Kuwaiti oil fields were on fire back in GW1? How many million barrels of oil went up in smoke in a very short time? Must have pumped several million tons of CO2 in the atmosphere all at once.

It didn’t even cause a blip in the world’s temperature, yet one volcano can. Admittedly, the temperature goes down to begin with sulfuric acid tends to reflect quite a lot of light before it reacts with chlorine nitrogen and ozone to become well increased skin cancer to begin with.

Sunlight can be a bit harsh without proper shielding, don’t you think.

Nice numbers by the way. Just proved me right. The USA is really in the front when it comes to polution control. All the resources we use (still not feeling guilty) for our quality of life.

Lastly, just for you Mr Bad, nothing has changed. I still don’t think you know much about greenhouse gasses. My original statement was, I think, yes, just re read it: Man producing 50% of all the greenhouse gasses was a load of crap. Nothing has changed in that department.

Do have a nice day, won’t you gentlemen?

http://earthtrends.wri.org

Data is for 2002, the most recent year they had listed. The top four countries in terms of total CO2 emissions are:

#1 United States 5.773 million metric tons
#2 China 3.783 ” ” ”
#3 Russian Fed 1.533 ” ” ”
#4 Japan 1.201 ” ” ”

Per capita CO2 emissions for the United States is 19.92 metric tonnes per person. There are five countries with per capita emission levels higher than the US but their populations are low, making their total emissions comparitively low. They are Qatar (36.52 tonnes), Kuwait (25.33), United Arab Emirates (23.62), Bahrain (21.80), and Luxembourg (?!) (21.60).

But at this point, to quote Allen Lipscomb “by the way any numbers at this point would be meaningless. I hope you agree.” Well, I don’t agree. These numbers show your assertions regarding the “big polluter” status of the United States were incorrect. The validty or invalidity of my statements should depend on the proof I submit, not any “political” stance I may have. Same with yours.

You have also assumed I don’t know anything about greenhouse gases, which is a strawman argument at best.

Frankly, trying to get you to back up your claim is tiresome and pointless.

This is from Fox news.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,188176,00.html

This is well ..just read
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Kyoto_Count_Up.htm

This tells about Kyoto and then gives links to everything on both sides of the argument
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol

I would ask that people delve past their political viewpoints I have tried and admit to being really confused. Nobody says the same thing.

The points I was originally trying to bring up ie aerosols, in the stratosphere cooling the planet then thinning the ozone layer leading to increased temp, was actually discussed, but not to the depth I would have liked.\
Still I am big enough to admit I have some more studying to do.

I will end by saying I am still a fan of George Bush and think he was right in not signing for the reason he gave. (”This is a challenge that requires a 100 percent effort; ours, and the rest of the world’s. The world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. India and Germany are among the top emitters. Yet, India was also exempt from Kyoto. . . . America’s unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change. . . . . Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.” Whitehouse.gov President Bush Discusses Global Climate Change.) That was from the third link.

Now, as I am dog tired, I will bid you good night.

For my soliloquy I would like to define a few terms:
1) Greenhouse gases – gases that trap the heat (in the form of infrared radiation) within the Earth’s atmosphere.
2) Climate Change – Global warming is a misnomer because we don’t know what is going to happen if anything at all…it could be warm some places…but my money is that Europe freezes.

Now I was just at a talk yesterday where a scientist was talking about a few confirmed pieces of evidence that scare the pants of me…points not generally embraced by the media since they aren’t as gut-wrenching to think about as 4 polar bears, which were found by Inuit hunters above the arctic circle, that drowned after they attempted to swim 400 from the arctic icepack to land (a polar bear can swim 100 miles apparently) since the is so little remaining sea ice.

No, this scientific talk was far more mundane. We talked about ice cores and carbonaceous sea critter remains…the point of the talk was that multiple lines of evidence point to the fact that present CO2 levels are way above the global average of the last 3 million years and about what they were 5 million years ago when it was 4 degrees Celsius warmer on average (now the reason why 4 degrees is a big deal is because the average Earth temperature is only 15 degrees Celsius – 15 degrees above freezing. So the amount of energy required to heat the entire global air mass and the ground in direct contact with it as well as the top few hundred meters by is immense). And the CO2 levels could double in the next century if we continue to maintain current global trends in economic growth, which would be outside of the scope of anything seen since the Permian extinction 11 million years ago…when it was so hot that the bottom of the ocean was the warmer than it’s currently at than the surface of our ocean today.

Now I agree that CO2 is not solely responsible for the greenhouse effect. Water vapor has a huge effect (but it also makes clouds which reflect light as well which cools the Earth); methane gas burped out by cows and termites and released by the melting permafrost is even worse than CO2; and so are CFCs, which also conveniently defile the Earth’s ozone layer and therefore destroys the Earth’s natural sunscreen. But of that list CO2 is something that we as humans are having a particularly heavy-handed effect on right now, which is obvious due to its outrageous concentration.

And because of that CO2 increase, we have the potential to indirectly affect some of those other more powerful greenhouse gases. When the CO2 traps heat it could warm the ocean to the point that so much water evaporates that even more heat is trapped in the atmosphere – more moisture could also mean more storms. And this new round of heating could melt the permafrost above the arctic circle, which contains enough methane gas to potential destabilize the entire global climate control process.

Now there are a great deal of mights, coulds and potentials that I purposely scattered throughout that whole last paragraph simply because none of us are omnipotent and science is, and will admit to being, an imperfect art. Therefore we will never know what will result from this massive atmospheric experiment until it actually happens. But what we do know is that the US is the biggest producer of CO2 of any nation on Earth. To be sure the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act have improved the state of certain aspects of the environment, but CO2 is not classified as a pollutant and is not therefore unregulated. So it can come from coal…gas…wood…natural gas…heating oil…corn pellets…whatever. And the US is the single biggest consumer of energy on the Earth.

We need to accept that fact and not whine that the other country’s are included in the Kyoto protocol. The rest of the world looks to us for leadership…less and less as we seem to anger more and more people…But to be a real leader you need to actually be innovative and visionary rather than stubborn and close-minded. To do this the US needs to recognize that we don’t know all the details to be sure…but the evidence is alarming enough that we might want to reconsider our position. For instance, if it’s dark out and raining I don’t drive faster! I slow down and take it easy until it becomes clear that I am safe.

But the Bush administration has stifled the debate that might lead to the very innovation that created planes, the telephone, put us on the moon, etc. Bush didn’t cause climate change…it’s been brewing for 150 years since the Industrial Revolution first began to change our global atmosphere at a detectable level…but he has crushed the very element that a democracy requires to thrive, grow and lead…transparency.

I apologize for any incoherency…I’ve been summoned to dinner for 3rd time and that’s a warning sing I won’t ignore.