Re: Prime Minister John Howard, climate change announcement

My response to John Howard's first video on YouTube, outlining his policies to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• climate
• change
• John
• Howard
• Prime
• Minister
• Australia

[itsadeadmansparty]

Europe mild winters save hundreds of thousands of lives each year, also parts of ice caps are melting yet other parts are thickening but this isn't reported as much. Data from ice core samples shows that in the past, temperatures have risen by ten times the current rise,and fallen again,in the space of a human lifetime.Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, currently only 350 parts per million have been over 18 times higher in the past at a time when cars, factories and power stations did not exist

[planetnerd]

@itsadeadmansparty You're just absolutely wrong about temperatures changing that much, unless you're talking about a past so different that the Earth couldn't support complex mammalian life at the time.

The climate is a non-linear system - overall warming causes cooling in some places, warming in others, but the average temperature is higher.

But it's not the heat that's the problem. It's instability: desertification, the loss of fresh water systems (e..g glaciers in Nepal), flooding, etc.

[planetnerd]

@itsadeadmansparty 380ppm is completely unheard of. Google for "historical co2 level" and check out the graph on wikipedia. Or any other graph of CO2, ever. They all agree, 380ppm hasn't been reached in at least the last million years or more. It is way outside the Earth's natural levels.

Vehicle fuel is currently highly taxed in order to pay for roads and government insurance, not to offset carbon emissions.

[planetnerd]

@itsadeadmansparty What? How is gold more real than money? It only has value because we agree it has value.

Furthermore, without appropriate economic incentives it's hard to raise the capital needed to restructure to a low-carbon economy.

If money isn't real, how am I buying food with it?

[planetnerd]

@itsadeadmansparty Putting a price on carbon isn't the same as having a tax. The market mechanisms they're putting on CO2 emissions are very similar to other trade-based mechanisms that have been used in the past to reduce other emissions.

Yes, the sun heats the earth, but normally the earth is able to reflect a lot of that heat into space. With more CO2 in the atmosphere, more of the heat is trapped, warming the earth.

[JonThm]

Plants ahve taken in all man's CO2 fro the last 200 years.

[JonThm]

Green plants have ensured that free CO2 in the air has not increased for 200 years

[itsadeadmansparty]

@planetnerd Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, currently only 350 parts per million have been over 18 times higher in the past at a time when cars, factories and power stations did not exist