Time Magazine Compares Iwo Jima to Global Warming

[JeffXD]

Time Magazine has decided that the United States needs to make an effort comparable that in World War II to combat Global Warming. Not to mention that they think thier opinion matters and just reporting is not necesary.

“I think since I’ve been back at the magazine, I have felt that one of the things that’s needed in journalism is that you have to have a point of view about things,” Stengel said. “You can’t always just say ‘on the one hand, on the other’ and you decide. People trust us to make decisions. We’re experts in what we do. So I thought, you know what, if we really feel strongly about something let's just say so.”

Iwo Jima Veterans Blast Time's 'Special Environmental Issue' Cover

[DanTheEldest]

Originally Posted by JeffXD

Time Magazine has decided....

Who?

Maybe it's a generational thing (or just me), but I think that magazine ceased to be relevant about ten years ago.

[Etta Place]

Originally Posted by JeffXD

Time Magazine has decided that the United States needs to make an effort comparable that in World War II to combat Global Warming.

Time magazine is right. I have heard comparisons to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space program. That's what it's going to take.

I went to the eye doctor yesterday, and my doctor is a conservative. He even said we need to clean things up. But his point of view is based on how we are "fouling our own fishbowl," as Frenchy has stated. We are putting things into the air and into the water and into ourselves that are killing us.

[FrankRizzoXD40]

Originally Posted by Etta Place

We are putting things into the air and into the water and into ourselves that are killing us.

Anyone die from abnormally high C02 in the air yet?

Frank

[DanTheEldest]

I'm wondering why, if this issue means so much to Time, they haven't started by pointing fingers directly at the Chinese. That country produces more raw black smoke pollution, carcinogenic nastiness, and environmental abuse in its mad dash to modernize than America has in decades, and yet the leftist mainstream outlets seem loath to criticize them. Why is this (he asked semi-rhetorically)?

I'm not saying America is perfect, but we're a far cleaner place than we were even thirty years ago thanks to existing anti-pollution laws. How is this all our fault (again), and why do we need to dump even more money into more bottomless bureaucracy to fight what is by definition a global problem (if one even accepts the dubious notion of human causation)?

From my own perspective, a better image to use for this whole thing would have been old Don Quixote putting terrific amounts of effort into solving largely imaginary problems.

[FrankRizzoXD40]

lol! That's laughable...

Yep...we should declare war on global warming without any proof that it is caused by man, says the greenies, leftists, and etta place...

but wait!!! Aren't they the same people who said that we invaded Iraq without proper evidence of WMD??? That we shouldn't start wars without concrete evidence???

Frank

[Etta Place]

Originally Posted by FrankRizzoXD40

lol! That's laughable...

Yep...we should declare war on global warming without any proof that it is caused by man, says the greenies, leftists, and etta place...

but wait!!! Aren't they the same people who said that we invaded Iraq without proper evidence of WMD??? That we shouldn't start wars without concrete evidence???

Frank

I don't like the idea of a "war" on global warming. But I think the nation's resources should be devoted to finding alternative sources of energy, similar to the resources devoted to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space program. That's the effort it's going to take.

It doesn't make strategic sense for the U.S. to be so dependent on fossil fuels. We're hurting ourselves when we could become the leader in green technology. Are we going to let Japan beat us on that too?

It's the way the world is headed, so we might as well make the best of it.

[DanTheEldest]

Originally Posted by Etta Place

It doesn't make strategic sense for the U.S. to be so dependent on fossil fuels. We're hurting ourselves when we could become the leader in green technology. Are we going to let Japan beat us on that too?

Yes. We'll do what worked so well for them in their struggle to modernize--let somebody else do all the difficult and costly development work, then just take what they did, reverse-engineer it, improve it a bit, and make it our own.

No disagreement on fossil-fuel dependence here, Etta, just the route to take to wean that dependence.

[jmichna]

Originally Posted by Etta Place

I don't like the idea of a "war" on global warming. But I think the nation's resources should be devoted to finding alternative sources of energy, similar to the resources devoted to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space program. That's the effort it's going to take.

It doesn't make strategic sense for the U.S. to be so dependent on fossil fuels. We're hurting ourselves when we could become the leader in green technology. Are we going to let Japan beat us on that too?....

With the exception - I expect - of our respective positions on AGW, I am in complete agreement with Etta in this statement. There is no reason we should not, as a nation, undertake a Manhattan Project- or Apollo Project-level approach to energy self-sufficiency.

There is so much we can do, even with existing technology. We have the safest nuclear energy technology, which we choose not to deploy beyond existing nuclear power plants; we have the technology to derive petroleum from oil shales and oil sands - both deposits of which we have in abundance; we have (I believe) the largest natural gas reserves on Earth and some of the largest, if not the largest, coal deposits; we have a great deal of traditional oil deposits off-shore and on land.

I do not think this energy self-sufficiency effort should be driven by some unproven fear of Anthropogenic Global Warming. There is plenty of merit in such a program without the AGW bogey-man.

[JeffXD]

There is a big difference in cleaning up our act a little bit when it comes to emissions and things released into water sources and engaging in an active campaign to combat global warming. The planet has been steadily warming since the end of the Little Ice Age. I would really like to know which Chicken Little decided on the proper temperature that the planet should be. In the past 4.6 Billion years, Earth has been ALOT hotter than it is now and it has been ALOT colder than it is now. Due to solar activity, the wobble of the Earth upon its axis coupled with the position of the planet in its orbit, volcanic activity, etc, etc, etc... the temperature of Earth is going to fluctuate, sometimes significantly. Whats more, there is a recent data set from a NASA satellite that has new global temperature numbers that indicate the global warming crowd has over-estimated things just a wee bit. I don't have the link to data in front of me, but I will get it. The wonderful "Hockey Stick" graph that is supposed to represent a rise in temperature that Al Gore loves to use as proof has recently been shown to be fatally flawed. The originally researchers failed to follow basic rules in the analysis they did and thier stats were off a wee bit too. I see no point in spending money on Manhattan Project or Apollo Program style programs on something that has yet to be determined if there is even a problem to be solved. Its all a bunch of political feel good mumbo jumbo.

Should we strive to clean up the air and water? Of course. Its a bad thing for everyone when the air is brown and nasty. Its a bad thing when aquatic creatures die because of crap in the water. Those are a societal problems we have because people have stopped caring. But I don't think for one minute that it requires billions of dollars to fix under the guise of a notion that the planet is dying and/or humanity is going to die. That is fear-mongouring at its best. For the record, I am pretty irritated tht Bush has jumped on the global warming band wagon this week. He no more than any other politican has the knowledge to take position on this issue other than to gain some politcal currency. I see his recent proclamation as nothing more than that.

EDIT: Climate facts to warm to | The Australian