COP15: House Republicans Deny Validity of Climate Science

Amazing that people still believe the AGW hype. That's okay, hang in there long enough and another bandwagon will come along for you to jump on.

Time and again, research has been shown (even from IPCC authors) that demonstrate how CO2 is not driving our warming, that the current warming is not unusual, that sea level rise is only a few millimeters per year if at all, that storms are not increasing in severity or occurrence, the Himalayan glaciers are fine, and the ice sheet of east Antarctica is steadily increasing. Just to name a few things.

It might also interest you all to read the Air Quality Report that is produced annually in the USA by the Environmental Protection Agency. Basically, air quality in the USA has been steadily improving since at least 1970, and especially a dramatic reduction in criteria pollutants generated by emissions. To claim that fossil fuel burning is "bad for living things" is to demonstrate complete ignorance of what is actually occurring.

Copenhagen was a farce and it's unfortunate that only Republicans had the spine to stand up and challenge the conventional wisdom.

The additional water level doesn't match up with the time frame, unless we're talking about icebergs- they would have to be gone NOW in order for ocean levels to 'rise' at this unbelievable rate purported by advocates of your position.

Misguided vantage, indeed.

@Ephisus: You'd be absolutely correct if all the ice in the world was floating around in the Earth's oceans and not frozen on LAND. I've heard a lot of ridiculous claims, but your misguided vantage wins the most ludicrous award. Sheesh.

"If the ice melts, the ocean levels will rise. LOL...Even a Republican can understand that!!!"

This is a myth, created by people who are grasping at scientific observation.

Ice has more volume than liquid water, not the other way around- the ocean levels would be basically at nominal levels if all the ice in the world melted.

You can observe this at home by leaving out a glass of water filled to the brim with ice for a day.

Nonsense!

The IPCC report is fraudlent, as it seems that each day more deception, more cover up and more of this conspiracy comes to light. I am a conservationist, but I am not willing to give up my individual liberty in economic terms or otherwise to fight this bogus "crisis." The UN is throughly corrupt and anti-American and ought to focus on problems within its charter's scope and stay out of global economics. How about doing something about the situation in Darfur? Supporting the just aspirations of the Iranian people as they struggle for liberty?

Denmark is having one of its coldest Januaries in many years. This anecdotal evidence does not a pattern make, but the original joke I made about the temperature in Copenhagen made a simple point - the IPCC and Al Gore and all of the catastrophic global warming types are incorrect at best and lying at worst.

I also do not buy the arguement that, "Hey whether you buy the global warming thing or not, we should still move ahead and follow the prescription of the IPCC and the environmentalists." Individual Liberty is at stake here. Humans can adapt to a theoretical 1 degree celsius increase in global temperature over the next 100 years, but we cannot adapt to tyranny. Who said that the climate we all live in is the ideal one? These people at COP 15 and the IPCC are attempting one of the biggest transfers of wealth through government coercion that has ever een attempted and people are actually sitting by and watching it happen. Once again, I am proud of the members of congress here. They are doing exactly what they are paid to do. I am not very often pleased with the actions of our elected representatives, but in this case, I say Bravo!

Contrary to a comment above, wind and solar will never be more than a tiny part of our total energy picture. In fact, these technologies would not even be the tiny part that they are if they had not been subsidized. The result is that people all over the world pay twice and pay too much for their energy produced by wind and solar. We pay through taxes to subsidize these innefficent, expensive, marginal technologies and we pay again high rates for the power generated by them. Until oil gets and stays above $100+ per barrel, wind and solar will never be adopted in large quantities. They are used now because governments both mandate and pay for them as a pay off to the well funded "environmental" lobby, who has been feeding at the public trough greedily for decades. It's simple economics. Solar takes up enormous land resources. Wind mills supply no spinning resrve and will never be sufficient to supply power. Electric vehicles will need to be charged - by an outlet - supplying electricity that is generated somehow. Solar and wind will never be a large enough percentage of generation to mean a thing. Nuclear is the answer, but the "environmental" movement will not allow it. Natural gas is also an efficient resource. Unless these technologies improve dramatically in terms of both operational capability as well as economic viability without government subsidy, they will never be more than the barely measurable part of the world's energy they are now.

Even the ultra fuel efficient vehicles available today are a tiny fraction of the cars on the road. Why? They are too expensive, even with the government subsidy as well as the financial incentives purchasers receive. as long as we are a free people with a market economy, our resources will go where they are treated the best and are used the most efficiently. As we sit today, fossil fuels are the most efficient, in terms of potential energy as well as affordability.

Excellent - as congresswoman Blackburn says in this clip, we all want clean energy; and who could disagree with the value of incentivizing businesses to develop a new economy. Everyone wins, and the myth that reducing fossil fuel use will hurt us economically can be retired.

And there's a lot more we can agree on that you didn't mention; what's possible is not merely avoiding disaster but creating a greater prosperity. To just point to a single exciting possibility: solar and wind technologies have tremendous potential for homeowners; given a smart grid and plug-in vehicles, we could be a nation where millions of individuals are net producers of energy. Let's get to work on building consensus and working together for the unprecedented prosperity and freedom that is possible (and by the way, solving the problem of anthropogenic climate change).

I also wouldn't mind being able to eat some of the fish that I love, that is now contaminated with mercury from burning coal.


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People, this is a hot-button issue, but come on. Everyone needs to realize it is not about whether or humans are causing warming or if there is actual warming happening. We can all agree that burning fossil fuel is bad for living things. We can all agree that the fossil fuel supply is running out and the acquisition of the remaining supply is by and large more difficult to get to ergo costs are rising. Hey, how about we need alternative energy sources to support the world economy. Any way you look at it, the needs end up in the same place.

Time to take a turn off of the ad hominem road, the road of adversarial discourse that is avoiding the real conversation.

It takes no bravery to hurl insults back and forth in an otherwise protected environment (the chat). It does take guts for opponents to meet at the table, shake hands, put aside differences and come together on the important stuff.

I don't think too badly of Mr. Barton; the question is not whether he really believes the nonsense that he repeats, it is whether he can believe anything else, given that his salary depends on his believing it - since he represents Big Oil (but what can Mr. Sensenbrenner's excuse be?).

More interesting is the situation Ms. Capito finds herself in. Being from a coal state, you'd think that she'd have more invested in the opinions of coal company executives, but she shows a surprising amount of ambivalence and hedging in this clip. Big Coal is actually not a very big employer, and in fact the trend in that industry is away from the labor-intensive practices of the past and toward high-tech methods (like mountaintop removal) that don't require a lot of manpower. Perhaps that influences her, or perhaps the ugly and toxic results of those methods do.

That's good news going forward, because the problem from coal is the most serious.


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I predict an early death from stroke or heart attack.


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Mr. Sullivan seems to be claiming that -1 C (that's 30 F) is cold for Copenhagen in January (the city is at 55 degrees north latitude). His amusing quip won't get many laughs from the residents there, where the average in January is 0 C, and the average maximum is 2 C. Or does Mr. Sullivan want to claim that three degrees Celsius is the amount of Global Cooling?


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