Posts Made By: Jason Cosford

Outgoing president Clinton warned Bush that Bin Laden presented a very real threat to American security. The CIA warned that Al Qaida was planning attacks within the United States. They also warned that planes could be hijacked and possibly used to hit strategic targets.

He may not have known when or where, but Bush was made aware of who, how, and why. In this sense, he did have prior knowledge. Regardless, I don't think anything would have prevented the attacks.

Jason

Why does this come as a surprise to anyone? Bush and Cheney misrepresented facts and mislead the public? Shocking

Floyd Blue said:

Are we a bad country because we lifted much of the world into the 21st century? Do all of the problems that prevail around the world fall on our shoulders? Did we cause the world to change in a terrible way or did we bring it out of the darkness and into the future?

Much of what is considered wonderful about the last 200 years has sprung from our hands. We have given so much to the world in medicine and technology as well as renewed faith in humanity, but we receive only criticism and threats for our troubles.

Floyd,

America is a great country and has indeed given much to the world. For this, America should be commended. To answer the questions you pose, however, requires a more humble approach and more self-reflection. It is not enough to simply say that the world hates us because they are jealous of how awesome we are.

Floyd Blue said:

If you are going to talk Global Warming, you must state compared to what period of Earth's history?
There has been much greater periods of warming than we see today, as well as much greater cooling. So, do you compare the last 100 years or the last 100,000 years when you decide what constitutes warming.

From a paleoclimatic perspective, yes, the time-scale is important, but one must remember that the forcing mechanisms differ at various time-scales. For example, over millions of years, the paleogeography of continents and tectonic forces influence global climate, but these processes are far too slow to account for the current warming. Similarly, on 10^5 to 10^4 yr time-scales, orbital dynamics, particularly the celebrated Milankovitch Cycles, dominate the climate record. Moving to shorter and shorter time-scales, the influence of the sun becomes ever more important with the well-known multidecadal Schwabe, Hale, Gleissberg, etc. cycles of solar variability being well expressed in numerous paleoclimatic records.

Now, with respect to the current warming. When all of the natural forcing mechanisms are summed, the predicted temperature is less than what is observed by the instrumental records of today. By adding the temperature forcing of anthropogenic CO2, the predicted and observed temperatures match within the range of error. This is a key finding of the IPCC report and is consistent with NASAs GISS climate model. So from a mechanistic perspective, the time-scale is important only in determining the relative contribution of forcing mechanisms. Discussion about the Last Glaciation or the Carboniferous has little bearing on cause of the current warming trend except to refine our understanding of the natural forcing mechanisms. Perhaps our understanding will change...Perhaps we do not have a complete list of climatic drivers...Perhaps we have misinterpreted the magnitude of the climatic drivers that we do know....These are all possibilities as science progresses not with proof but the failure to disprove. Given our current knowledge of the climatic system, anthropogenic contributions are consistent with the current warming trend. So, we keep the hypothesis.

I was just about to post with a sarcastic subject "IPCC is wrong."
Several studies have shown that the "alarmist" IPCC report is wrong in that it has underestimated global sea level rise over the next century. What is interesting about this study is that it uses a different methodology and comes up with a similar result to others that predict a much greater rise in sea level.

"Those natural climate variations could be stronger than the global-warming trend over the next 10-year period,'' Wood said in an interview. ``Without knowing that, you might erroneously think there's no global warming going on."

"If we don't experience warming over the next 10 years, it doesn't mean that greenhouse-gas warming is not with us,'' Keenlyside said in an interview. ``There can be natural fluctuations that may mask climate change in the short term."

I can see the fair and balanced FOX news headline now "New study shows global warming over and Al Gore wrong again."

Yes, but history will vindicate him. It is too early to pass judgment.

(Now where is the LMFAO graemlin?)

Doug Peterson said:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/05/18/31-000-scientists-rejecting-global-warming-theory-be-named-monday

Despite the Oregon petition being a fraudulent piece of propaganda, I love that the Newsbusters website "exposing liberal media bias" carries the story to perpetuate the ignorance of it's readers. I wonder how many of them wear the "powered by capitalism" t-shirts? With all the vitriol spewed at Al Gore and James Hansen by the right, I wonder how many of them are sweating their candidate John McCain's acceptance of the science. Maybe McCain needs to start reading Newsbusters to get the "truth" and better represent his base.

At this point, Hillary knows she is beat but needs to keep in the race to legally continue accepting donations to recuperate some of the millions of her personal finances that she has blown on the campaign.

Rod Kaufman said:

Check out the comments under the Bush was misunderstood article:
http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2008/06/11/was-bush-misunderstood-on-iraq/

Makes me wonder about the 28% of people who approve of Bush's performance. On what basis would anyone say this boob is doing a good job?