Climate Change

[steven lloyd]

... , but more importantly they do not want you to know,
either/or they are being paid/bought off..

Damn !!! Busted by a Nibs !


You are right though Nibs – it’s a secret

[Gilchy]

... , but more importantly they do not want you to know,
either/or they are being paid/bought off..

My cheque must have lost in the mail. As someone who has worked in oil and gas, trust me: the government(s) do not give O&G companies a free ride.

[The Green Barbarian]

The only reason we are stuck using fossil fuels is because big oil and big coal have bought your politicians.
And twits like sl and greenbarbie just keep on putting their heads in the sand, they just do not want to know, but more importantly they do not want you to know, either/or they are being paid/bought off..

and yet twits like Nibs somehow seem to think that we can live without oil and gas, yet refuse to tell us how we could do it. It would be my greatest pleasure if I didn't have to fill up my car every two weeks with gas, but instead had a different energy source I could utilize. What is it? Twit boy? Any ideas? Or are you still hurling out insults instead? If we could power our cars on arrogance and sanctimony, Nibs and his pals could supply the entire earth, no problem.

[The Green Barbarian]

The IPCC Sinks to a New Low

Back in May, Chris Field, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II emailed me with a request:

As per your request, the IPCC is prepared to take another look at the AR4 text on disaster trends. The spirit of these "second looks" is to evaluate whether the assessment should have said something else, based on the literature cited and on the information that was available within the window for AR4 literature. The error protocol does not allow a new assessment based on literature published since the AR4 literature cutoff, and it is not intended as a broad reinterpretation of the information assessed by the authors.

To clarify your request, can you send a specific statement of the alleged error or errors that you would like to see addressed?
As my request to Field was informal, and not one I ever expected to see action on, this initiation of contact with me seemed to me like the IPCC was turning a corner, and taking seriously scientific accuracy on disasters and climate change. So I prepared a concise and specific reply to Field's request. Today I heard back from the IPCC. The response is laughable, and indicates that the IPCC is more interested in playing games than in scientific accuracy. Nothing below is complicated or nuanced.

Here are the details from the response that the IPCC sent to me today, annotated with my comments. In the material below the four passages under "Text from Roger Pielke, Jr." is that which I provided to Chris Field in May in response to his email request. Under each of those I have blockqouted the IPCC response to my claims, which is titled "CLA Finding." Below that I highlight my comments today in response to each of the four responses.

With that, let's have a look . . .

Alleged errors in the treatment of disaster trends in Chapter 1, WGII, AR4
CLA response from Cynthia Rosenzweig and Gino Casassa
August 23, 2012

Alleged Error #1

Text from Roger Pielke, Jr.

Error #1: IPCC p. 110: “These previous national U.S. assessments, as well as those for normalised Cuban hurricane losses (Pielke et al., 2003), did not show any significant upward trend in losses over time, but this was before the remarkable hurricane losses of 2004 and 2005.”

FACTUALLY INCORRECT: Figure 5 in the following paper, in press prior to the IPCC AR4 WGII publication deadline, clearly shows that the addition of 2004 and 2005 losses do not alter the long-term trend in hurricane losses:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. (2006), Disasters, Death, and Destruction: Making Sense of Recent
Calamities. Oceanography 19 138-147.
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin ... 006.02.pdf

This same information was also in the report of the 2006 Hohenkammer Workshop on Climate Change and Disaster Losses, which was cited by the AR4 WGII: http://cstpr.colorado.edu/sparc/researc ... pielke.pdf

RECOMMENDED CORRECTION: ““These previous national U.S. assessments, as well as those for normalised Cuban hurricane losses (Pielke et al., 2003), did not show any significant upward trend in losses over time, and this remains the case following the remarkable hurricane losses of 2004 and 2005.”

CLA Finding

There is no error in the statement. No correction is needed and the text can stand as is.

Rationale
The clause about the published analyses being before the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons is a statement of fact about the time line, and it is not a statement that the results were different after including 2004 and 2005. The statement does not infer that the overall pattern of losses would be different; instead it suggests that 2004 and 2005 were remarkable years in terms of hurricane losses, which they were.
PIELKE RESPONSE SEPTEMBER 13: This boggles the mind. The time line was such that published analyses (I provided 2!) that were available to the IPCC when drafting the AR4 included 2004 and 2005. The IPCC is say that up is down, and with a straight face. Did they not even read what I wrote?

Alleged Error #2

Text from Roger Pielke, Jr.

Error #2: IPCC pp. 110-111: “Global losses reveal rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s. One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend.”

That “one study” is Muir-Wood et al. (2006), a white paper prepared as input to a workshop that I organized.

FACTUALLY INCORRECT: (a) The first sentence should say “1950s” not “1970s,” which is the starting point of the Munich Re dataset being referred to. (b) Several normalization studies (not “one study”) available at the time of the AR4 had noted that a dataset that begins in 1970 and ends in 2005 will show an annual rate of increase, including papers parallel to the Muir-Wood et al. (2006) presented at the Hohenkammer workshop as well as the IPCC TAR (2001) and Munich Re (2000). All such studies find no evidence of “an underlying rising trend” over longer time periods.

RECOMMENDED CORRECTION: ““Global losses reveal rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since at least the 1950s. Multiple analyses have found an increase in normalized losses since 1970, due entirely to US hurricanes, but such studies are in agreement that no such trend can be found over longer time periods (dating to 1950 globally and 1900 for US hurricanes).” In addition, the full text of this section should be clarified along these lines.

CLA Finding

There is no error in the statement. No correction is needed and the text can stand as is.

Rationale
The year 1970 was used in the analysis of Muir-Wood 2006. They used a data set with information going back to 1950, but they decided to omit the period prior to 1970 because they are limited in completeness. The “correction” proposed by Pielke acknowledges that analyses for the period starting in 1970 observe an increasing trend, which is all that is reported in the text. The qualifier about “one study” documenting a trend indicates the limited foundation for the conclusion, in the context of other studies showing the large importance of trends in exposure.
PIELKE RESPONSE SEPTEMBER 13: Again, the IPCC is saying that up is down. Multiple studies showed disaster losses increasing from 1970 (I point them to several, including IPCC TAR). The reason for this was simple -- low hurricane damages in the 1970s and 1980s. Not new or interesting. To highlight one study and then now suggest that this was done to suggest that the conclusion is tenuous makes the IPCC look utterly clueless. The IPCC cherry picked a date to make a suggestive claim, and ignored contrary data. Not good. The cover-up is worse than the crime.

Alleged Error #3

Text from Roger Pielke, Jr.

Error #3: IPCC p. SM.1-4: Figure SM-1.1 and caption: “An example from the literature of one study analysing rising costs of normalised weather-related catastrophes compared with global temperatures. Data smoothed over ±4 years = 9 years until 2001 (Muir Wood et al., 2006).”

FACTUALLY INCORRECT: Neither the figure nor the underlying data appear in the scientific literature (peer reviewed or grey) at any time. The figure was created by Robert Muir-Wood and included in the report with an intentional mis-citation to circumvent the IPCC publication deadline, according to Muir-Wood himself (an audio recording of his admission is available on the website of the Royal Institution in London, and linked from my blog here:
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/ ... olved.html ).
He apparently believed that the figure would appear in a future paper – it did not, and that future paper, eventually published in 2008, found no relationship between temperatures and disaster losses.

RECOMMENDED CORRECTION: The figure and caption should be removed as well
as reference to it in the text.

CLA Finding

Post erratum to the caption of figure SM-1.1 clarifying the source of the data in the figure.

Rationale

The figure is a replotting of the data used for the analysis of Muir Wood et al. (2006). These data combined temperature data from CRU (Climatic Research Unit 2006),(University of East Anglia, Norwich) with the disaster loss database compiled by and described in Muir Wood et al. (2006). Since Muir Wood et al. (2006) did not cite CRU, the figure caption would be more accurate if modified to read:
Figure SM-1.1 Costs over time of normalized weather-related catastrophes compared with global temperatures. Data smoothed over ±4 years = 9 years until 2001. Based on the dataset used in Muir Wood et al.(2006) and temperature data from CRU, 2006*.
*ADD CRU TO THE REFERENCES FOR THE SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL.
(Climatic Research Unit (CRU) (2006).University of East Anglia, Norwich.
www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/#sciref .)
Pielke Response September 13: This one takes the cake. Utterly remarkable. The graph was conjured up by Robert Muir-Wood based on data in his possession, he intentionally miscited the analysis and there is no scientific basis for plotting damages against temperature. None. The IPCC response on this issue is that their falsified graph was not fully cited, but otherwise OK is an insult to scientists everywhere and a mockery of the IPCC process. I cannot express this strongly enough. The IPCC has demonstrated that it is utterly incapable of correcting even the most egregious violation of its standards.

Alleged Error #4

Text from Roger Pielke, Jr.

Error #4: Erroneous IPCC Press release of 25 January 2010 (a) “one study detected an increase in economic losses, corrected for values at risk, but that other studies have not detected such a trend,” and (b) “In writing, reviewing, and editing this section, IPCC procedures were carefully followed to produce the policy-relevant assessment that is the IPCC mandate.”

FACTUALLY INCORRECT: (a) as documented above in Error #2, multiple studies had identified an increase in economic losses since 1970 (but not from earlier starting points), and (b) as documented above in Error #3, IPCC procedures were not carefully followed, but violated.

RECOMMENDED CORRECTION: The IPCC should withdraw its 25 January 2010 press release and issue a press release noting the inaccuracies in both the report and the release.

CLA Finding and Rationale

The January 25, 2010 IPCC statement is not part of an IPCC report, and the error correction protocol is therefore not relevant
PIELKE RESPONSE SEPTEMBER 13: Not that the IPCC has shown a commitment to accuracy, but here it relies on a bureaucratic dodge to ignore the false information it put out via press reslease. Not good.

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.ca/2012/0 ... w-low.html

[The Green Barbarian]

Climate Alarmism: Our sanity and wallets need a break
Posted on September 17, 2012 by Anthony Watts
Billions of taxpayer dollars are disrupting our politics, science, energy policies and economy

Guest post by Paul Driessen

Pick up any 40-year-old science textbook – on chemistry, biology, geology, physics, astronomy or medicine – and you’ll find a slew of “facts” and theories that have been proven wrong or are no longer the “consensus” view. Climatology is no exception.

Back in the 1970s, many scientists warned of global cooling – and fretted that a new ice age brought on by fossil fuel use would cause glaciers to expand, wreaking havoc. They predicted every conceivable disaster, short of roving herds of wooly mammoths stampeding through ice-covered streets. (The possibility of cloning a well-preserved mammoth could buttress the next scary ice age scenario.)


Newsweek’s 1975 cover story “The Cooling World” breathlessly reported that, “after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.” Meteorologists are “almost unanimous” that the trend will “reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” it intoned, and “the resulting famines could be catastrophic.”

The CIA, NASA, National Academy of Sciences and many news organizations issued similar alarums. Dr. John Holdren, now President Obama’s science adviser, joined Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich in penning an essay that warned: “The effects of a new ice age on agriculture and the supportability of large human populations scarcely need elaboration here. Even more dramatic results are possible, however; for instance, a sudden outward slumping in the Antarctic ice cap, induced by added weight, could generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history.”

The Chicken Little ice age never arrived. Instead, the new “consensus” view is that our planet now faces fossil-fuel-induced catastrophic global warming. A 2006 Newsweek story conceded that its ice age theme had been “spectacularly wrong.” But the admission came amid decades of Newsweek, Time and even BusinessWeek and National Geographic stories about an imminent global warming “apocalypse.”

The tales of doom remain standard media fare, even as the science continues to evolve – and even as Climategate and other revelations of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shenanigans and duplicity join the dissection of Michael Mann’s hockey stick in reducing climate alarmism and public anxiety over it. New theories about solar cycles, cosmic rays and the dominant role of solar activity in determining Earth’s climate are becoming far more common in books and peer-reviewed research compendia of science-based climate realism.

Cataclysmic cooling? Dangerous warming? Is there something in between that can help initiate real debate, improve our understanding of how our climate works, and let us get on with our lives?

Manmade global warming, climate change and “weird” weather remain the foundation of environmentalist and leftist political agendas for ending our “addiction” to oil, ushering in a new era of “eco-friendly” renewable energy, and “fundamentally transforming” our economy and society. Their power, prestige, control and access to billions of dollars a year for biased research and crony-corporatist energy schemes super-glue their dependency to this issue. With fracking and other new petroleum discovery and extraction technologies proving beyond doubt that we will not run out of oil or gas anytime soon, climate change is really all they are left with. Those realities are driving an extreme policy agenda.

The Democratic Party platform stated: “We know global climate change is one of the biggest threats of this generation – an economic, environmental, and national security catastrophe in the making … The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of vital ecosystems across the globe.”

Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) recently told Politico that Democrats would again seek cap-tax-and-trade legislation if they ever control both Congress and the White House. Because Congress rejected regressive climate legislation, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency, under Lisa Jackson, has issued thousands of pages of regulations designed to shut down coal-based electricity generation and impose a true-believer view that carbon dioxide controls the climate and must be drastically reduced to prevent a global warming Armageddon. Meanwhile, legions of subsidized researchers are trying desperately to tie every conceivable phenomenon and event to global warming – even rape and murder!

By making fossil fuels scarcer and more expensive, while spending billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize wind, solar and biofuel energy, EPA’s war on fossil fuels is designed to force Americans to abandon the energy sources that power our economy. The goal is to force Americans to turn to inefficient, unreliable, impractical, expensive, job-killing energy sources that emit less CO2.

The hysterical and spectacularly wrong predictions would be hysterically funny, except for one thing. Too many global cooling/warming/weird weather scientists, activists and politicians are using the issue to justify policies that are trashing our economy. Congress and the Obama administration are already implementing draconian laws and regulations that make energy less reliable and affordable, destroy jobs, weaken our national security, make us more dependent on foreign energy supplies, raise consumer prices, and slow America’s economic growth.

The needless regulations are prolonging the recession, keeping unemployment high, impairing civil rights progress, and hurting poor, minority and elderly families most of all. Any conflicts and refugees will result far less from future weather and climate events, than from ill-advised US, EU, UN and other policies that make energy, minerals, food, water, healthcare, and opportunities out of reach for millions or even billions of people.

Our weather has hardly become any “weirder” than what Earth and humanity have faced countless times before. However, the “new normal” in political discourse, scientific research, democratic institutions, laws, regulations and sanity has definitely gotten both weirder and more pernicious.

Contrary to President Obama’s intent, we don’t need to “fundamentally transform” our energy, economy or society. We need to fundamentally transform the system that diverts our attention and resources from real challenges, analyses and solutions.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/17/c ... d-a-break/

[5VP]

Your points are moot...

[The Green Barbarian]

Your points are moot...

right...because "oil and gas are rapidly diminishing resources"....right....and if we aren't running around like panicky idiots waving our arms like Kermit the Frog about how the sky is falling, then we just don't "care about the earth"...blah blah blah...look I get it - we should get off of fossil fuels. So how do we do it? What's another cheap fuel source we can use, such that we can get the rest of the world out of poverty?

[5VP]

1. It has to start by agreeing to disagree on forums such as this which plants the seeds of awareness of the greed motivations of our current economic structures. These acknowledgements can be largely "fueled" by your own common sense intelligence.

What is your gut instinct saying?

2. Awaken the sheeple to the grand ruse being played on us and foster the newfound awareness that the current petroleum based paradigm is a sinister false economy driver which has hidden costs that are causing widespread global enviro-socio-economic ruination and is unsustainable.

IE. NO MORE PARKADES IN THE FORMER DOWNTOWN KELOWNA PARADISE!!!

3. Spend more on the R&D required to develop existing alternate energy technologies (yes, hydrogen, solar, wind, tidal, zero point energy technologies etc. can be viable alternatives) that can break the bonds of Big Oil rather than continue cowtowing to their grandly destructive, polluting, mega pipeline, mega toll road/bridge, road clogging, lung choking planning schemes and use our god given humanity, creativity and innovative thought processes to develop these new alternatives.

We've been able to think out of the box before but our ancestors were not as inundated by international scale corporate brainwashing as the sheeple are today. So much for progress....

"Zoom, zoom..."

So yeah; any hauling out here, of extravagant point/counterpoint studies and theories and exclamations of Chicken Little "the economy will fall", are essentially moot considering the larger picture that our future ancestors will be faced with if we don't start changing the current paradigm now and considering no other alternatives being offered by you and your cadre of evil doers.

Changes will be necessary and many things and personal freedom activities that people take for granted now will no longer be tolerated or allowed due to their overall destructiveness.

Ie. Riding ATV's through water sources and fish bearing streams...

Now that I think of it...

I've not seen one post, among the thousands posted by you or your evil-doing supporters on what you are doing on the small personal scale to mitigate the problems we all face. All I've seen from you is a formulaic plaster job of ipso-factoids and attempts at knocking down those here who are actually putting their money where their mouths are in order to make a difference in the size of their footprints here on earth.

THINK GLOBALLY ACT LOCALLY! ring any bells for you??

But, you know, as well as anyone here, that we've already gone through all this on many previous topics and that it comes down to some corporate supporting droids (you) of society thinking and maintaining that humans are incapable of making these changes and who would rather keeping fearfully plodding along the status quo fencelines to imminent destruction, and those (like me) who think we CAN and must, and are willing to, and already have, started to make these changes in their personal lives for the greater good so that there will eventually be no poverty and we can all live in abundance instead of a few living luxuriously.

VOTE GREEN!!!

Savvy??


PS...

Here's an example of what R&D can do for us. Imagine if more were being spent on other alternatives to the current paradigms of pollution...

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article ... eakthrough

[The Green Barbarian]

try again without a personal attack - Jennylives

[5VP]

I'm certain the insults were moot...

[steven lloyd]

Your points are moot...

I'm curious. Which of these points are moot, and why ?

The hysterical and spectacularly wrong predictions would be hysterically funny, except for one thing. Too many global cooling/warming/weird weather scientists, activists and politicians are using the issue to justify policies that are trashing our economy. Congress and the Obama administration are already implementing draconian laws and regulations that make energy less reliable and affordable, destroy jobs, weaken our national security, make us more dependent on foreign energy supplies, raise consumer prices, and slow America’s economic growth.

The needless regulations are prolonging the recession, keeping unemployment high, impairing civil rights progress, and hurting poor, minority and elderly families most of all. Any conflicts and refugees will result far less from future weather and climate events, than from ill-advised US, EU, UN and other policies that make energy, minerals, food, water, healthcare, and opportunities out of reach for millions or even billions of people.

Our weather has hardly become any “weirder” than what Earth and humanity have faced countless times before. However, the “new normal” in political discourse, scientific research, democratic institutions, laws, regulations and sanity has definitely gotten both weirder and more pernicious.

Contrary to President Obama’s intent, we don’t need to “fundamentally transform” our energy, economy or society. We need to fundamentally transform the system that diverts our attention and resources from real challenges, analyses and solutions.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/17/c ... d-a-break/

[5VP]

All of it is moot. All of that can be argued and is thus moot...

The last line of opinion in particular.

Why??

For starters, this is obviously all anti Obama political rhetoric.

The "system" that "diverts our attention and resources from real challenges, analyses and solutions" is based on corporate growth and is the problem (aka. grand ruse) and has existed and operated this way long before Obama or most of us here were even born.

Corporations are like communism, who grow only by conquest of the hearts and minds of the ones consuming their products and it is not in their interest to have attention drawn to their machinations.

Corporations create the demands for products by telling us that we we want them and spend billion$$ on advertising showing us how these things will make life better. If their products were what we really needed there would be little need for advertising.

Ie. Why, after living with menses for millennia do modern women need to have advertising for Kotex or tampons? Are today's women that clued out that the poor old corporations have to spend their hard earned profits on advertising to them?

Corporations pillage the environment in search of resources to build those products that we didn't know we wanted.They brainwash us (advertising)into buying the products made from OUR resources at inflated prices and then try to claim innocence when faced with the enviro-socio-economic damages caused by their industries.

We get a few jobs and boom and bust economic conditions while they take million$$ and build palaces in honor of themselves while at the same time waving fingers of blame at the sheeple for making the poor hard done by corporatoids cause the damage to the environment in the name of public good.

All they ever offer is "Victory Gin" and unfortunately for us, all the damage caused by previous decades of unchecked corporate follies are only now catching up with us and our generations are the ones being expected to pay for and take the blame for all the "problems" caused by those unchecked corporate follies.

Their desires for economic growth are not based on the greater needs of humanity but based on the bottom line of the shareholders. It's illegal for corporations to lose money so how else can they $urvive but by continuing on "busine$$ as u$ual" and hoping that we the sheeple don't catch on.

Our energy, economy or society is the system and it is our system so we need to "fundamentally transform" how we perceive our roles within that system and reassess how these roles either contribute to and become the problems at hand and reassess how we can make the system better by taking a hard look at why we individually act as we do.

To see struggling working class people posting here in support of multi billion $$ corporations is a testament to the success of the grand corporate brainwashing ruse...

"Zoom, zoom...". I'll see you at Canadian Tire...

[The Green Barbarian]

I'm certain the insults were moot...

yet somehow this insult "I've not seen one post, among the thousands posted by you or your evil-doing supporters" stayed in. What a surprise. I didn't even insult you - I just said that you destroyed your whole post with this silly comment - you were making points, not good ones, but you were making them, and I was actually reading them - and then you couldn't help it and your sanctimony crept through. Jenny did you a large disservice deleting my comment - and I hope you take it to heart. This is where you can go with some snide "I know you are but what am I" or you can listen to what I am saying. Your call.

[empath]

I clicked the link you posted GB and read (paraphrasing) most people aren't interested in the science...

at which point I stopped reading.

It seems more often than not your objection is financial in nature.
Consider then the following and see if spewing your nostrum here is worth your energy, or discussion of a few billion is really relevant. There are obviously other areas, like war on drugs, where equal amounts are spent for potentially less ubiquitous gain.

FROM "Cost of War ( Iraq etc in pursuit of oil) at Least $3.7 Trillion and Counting

"Costs of War" brought together more than 20 academics to uncover the expense of war in lives and dollars, a daunting task given the inconsistent recording of lives lost (224,000 to 258,000) and what the report called opaque and sloppy accounting by the U.S. Congress and the Pentagon.

(for SL) The report underlines the extent to which war will continue to stretch the U.S. federal budget, which is already on an unsustainable due to an aging American population and skyrocketing healthcare costs."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/ ... 5320110629

I argue the costs of pursuing fossil fuels far outweigh those spent on climate science, a tiny band aid drawing attention to the wound the former has inflicted on the poor parasitized planet.

further: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2 ... -view=true
Climate gate is old and washed up anti-news.

Perhaps you are not interested in the science but if you've ever had to replace a car battery, you are at least subconsciously aware equilibrium reactions can only shift so far to one side before they cannot be made to shift back. I'm going to assume you know where I'm going with that.

Alternatives? What happened to the Ballard fuel cell? Solar power can be used to hydrolyze water. We could all be driving around in cars fueled this way if production could reach some kind of economies of scale. A better place to invest trillions of dollars.

[The Green Barbarian]

I clicked the link you posted GB and read (paraphrasing) most people aren't interested in the science...

at which point I stopped reading.

It seems more often than not your objection is financial in nature.

Yes - financial in nature. How silly of me to consider who is supposed to pay for things, and also to consider the $68 billion that the Obama administration has already poured down the black hole of the AGW fraud in the last four years alone. It sure is nice not to let the concept of blowing taxpayer cash on absolutely NOTHING not bother you. Good grief - you guys really just take the cake here - no one is ever supposed to ever worry about how things are paid for, we should just shut off our brains and pay for them. And when questioned, we can reply with silly idioms like "Can we afford not to?? What about our grandchildren???"" Blah blah blah. So in pursuit of solving some problem that doesn't even exist in the name of our grandkids, we are willingly saddling them with trillions of dollars of bills they'll never be able to afford to pay. Instead of drowning in Al Gore's non-existent ocean rise, they'll drown in debt. But at least all of you who don't concern yourselves with petty issues like spending money on useless made up causes can keep that warm feeling in your liberal tummies - the one that shows what a great person you are, because you are beyond issues like money and debt, because you "care". Oh barf.