As a liberal I am glad the libertarians and conservatives are the ones opposing global warming, as it will badly weaken their movement when it occurs. It will be bleak enough, might as well have some silver lining here. Nothing will be done about it while Bush is president, that is sure.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnews/20060...rninguptheheat

If it occurs, it won't matter whose fault it is. Liberals like you won't be able to do anything about it... much like now. "Their movement" won't mean anything, but the silver lining is... neither will yours. The article tilts toward a 10 year time limit when the "tipping point" will be passed, and nothing can be done to stop it. By then it won't matter who is in power since everyone will be powerless. Some scientists cited in the article believe we've already passed the tipping point now. My next question would be, "Then why publish the article in the first place if we're all going to start to die in 10 years?"
Yep. Good thing he won't be president then. Whoever is will most assuredly get the blame if it happens.

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problem with your reasoning is that true conservatives do take global warming seriously. The Republican party, which is no longer conservative ,as well as some in the Democratic party are so addicted to corporate underwriting that while they DO admit that global warming is occurring, they WON"T admit that human activity has anything to do with it. And they certainly haven't the intestinal fortitude to change public policy and do anything about it. Ask Barney- if he can dig up a scientist who will claim its all a natural cycle, thats good enough for him.

zoe. I meant the modern conservative/libertarian movement which is simply an extention of corporate America and little else. Its fiercely anti-environmental, this is just one of many examples. Bush's effort, which lost in court recently, to gut the clean air act and his refusal to take mercury poisoning from power plants seriously are but two other of many examples of this. No president in modern times has been more opposed to protecting the environment, he makes Reagan and Watts look like a saint.

The people who get the blame for crisis tend to be those who could have taken action and don't. Not those who have no options. Given the stark difference between Bush and liberals on global warming, conservatives have not only opposed efforts to do something about it, they have been very vocal about such, I think the conservative movement and the idea of market based alternatives to government action on the environment will take the hit when global warming becomes critical.

We shall see. If the democratic party was not utterly clueless they would go out of their way to air the President and other conservatives views on global warming now. So they can't weasel out in the future and pretend they were not opposed to doing something about it.

Hmm.. Certainly people just don't start to die when the temperatures raise.. Intead what will happen, is that we will face great - great challenges in the form of moving climate zones, raising sealevels and more extreme weather phenomenons..

The global warming will certainly cost like hell, also in humans lives, but certainly it is not any end of the world.. The change will be great, but I would say that of all the animals upon the earth - humans are most adaptive and flexible.. We will face the change, and we will live through it..

Still, I imagine that the global warming with the future energy crisis are some of those things, which will make the next 50 years much more interesting.. Still - many of us younger people would see it positive, if there weren't so much sh*t - built up by the older generations - to deal with..

- BtD

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"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
[George Orwell, 1984]

Maybe the reason they won't admit it, is because no one has been able to prove that human beings have had an effect on the earth's temperature.

Before we spend trillions of dollars on something like the Kyoto Protocol, shouldn't we at least make sure it is going to have an effect? Seems like simple common sense to me...

Common sense to me too. Additionally, the Kyoto Protocol completely exempts Russia and China. Why? If it's such a great idea, why not implement it worldwide?

I know why. (It's clearly aimed at the United States...exclusively.)

__________________
"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left."
Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NIV)

Check out: www.indepolitics.com

overwhelmingly agree it has been proven now. But conservatives will delay action waiting for proof that already exists until the damage is to catastrophic to ignore such as rapidly rising oceans and more powerful storms. By then any easy solution will be long gone. Many scientist think we have at most ten years to take signficant action, than he window will close and it will be to late.

I have little doubt nothing will be done. Thus my largely philisophical observation that at least we need to make it clear why nothing was done, conservatives blocking action against it.

As a conservative and a resident of northern New England, I am one who doesn't 'oppose' global warming in the slightest. In fact, I want all the global warming I can get. In other words: "Bring it on, baby!"

All seriousness aside, noetsi, you seem to be under the misapprehension that there is some sort of 'movement' afoot among evil corporate America and the evil conservatives to downplay the impact of human activity upon the environment so they can go ahead and trash our planet for monetary gain. That seems to be the mantra of today's anticapitalist left wing, these days. In fact, the opposite is true. For every scientific study that purports to show that recent global warming trends are the result of human activity, there is equally plausible, and hard-won, scientific evidence that climatic changes are the result of natural oceanographic and aerological cycles that have always occurred on our planet, and will continue to happen until the sun burns itself out as a 'super nova'.

It all boils down to: which story do you want to believe. The corporate 'movers and shakers' and the conservative politicians you obviously hate so much, noetsi, are as eager to get to the bottom of it as you are.

Whenever I find myself getting uptight about the environmental issue, I just open my copy of Jurassic Park to the chapter on page 637, entitled "Destroying the World", in which Michael Crichton's character reminds us that Earth did okay before the advent of us humans, and will do just fine after we humans are long gone.

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When religion ruled the world...wasn't that the Dark Ages?

about this

But wrong about why I believe it. It comes from a quarter of a century of watching conservative politicians, corporations and philisophical conservatives fight each and every effort to fight polution, from mercury from power plants, to TCE, to global warming, from preventing overgrazing, overlogging, and oil drilling in vulnerable public lands, to the Endangered Species act, to getting rid of DDT, to trying to restore salmon wiped out by dams in the West, to protecting the national parks from snow mobiles, protecting wetlands from destruction, and on and on and on and on. If I posted all such behavior it would fill a couple of hundred pages and end with the final gutting of the EPA which after Reagan and Bush is a shell of its former self.

In twenty five years you can count the handful of pro-environmental action by conservatives on one hand and you could be missing a couple of fingers on it. Bush has yet to take a single pro-environmental action at all, and has rolled back signficant achievements from the past, for instance on mercury and the grandfather requirements for power plants.

I spend my life reading, including conservative publications like CATO and National Review, and most of my adult life to working or studying government organizations. When you do that, you dont have to be a nutcase lefty to realize just how fiercely anti-environmental people like Reagan and Bush have been.

If you like I can send you some of the recent links showing these policies. I have quite a list.