Better four years late than never, . . . The White House finally issued a comprehensive climate report, confirming the man-made origin of global warming, and validating earlier U.S. specific predictions from the IPCC.
Nothing that we did not know already, but still, it is a step towards more transparency from the top. Bad news have never sounded so good.
La Marguerite 
Yup, wrote about it on my blog. As you say, better late than never.
Hope the next administration will act upon this report and do their utmost to mitigate climate change before it’s too late…
Enjoy your weekend ! 🙂
I have not read the report but I can tell you from my travels America is way ahead of most parts of the world in how we handle the environment. Don’t get me wrong, you can’t do too much for the environment but we must be careful not to stifle the economy to the point of implosion. I read in Conservative Outcomes by Freiman that he believes the next great climate change to threaten man will be a cooling trend not a warming trend. I guess you have to decide which scientist to believe. It can’t hurt to be good stewards of the environment, remember the Native American with the tear in his eye in the 70’s comercials? I still remember that PSA.
If anything, I see this report as a sign that the reality of global warming really has become mainstream. If ‘they’, out of all people, give in and finally say yes, this is happening, that means a lot, at least in terms of superficial awareness.
Interestingly, the climate changes are occuring on every single planet in our solar system.
It’s hard to imagine humans had any effect of what goes on elsewhere, on those distant planets.
Man-made global warming?
We probably need to take a better look at this…
I think it can help a lot of ALL official sources admit to the reality of AGW and its associated risks (that is, the very high probability, I think we must be stressing that we can’t be 100% sure). Then skeptics can’t cite any official source any more. It will help in conversations and birthday parties.
People who want to be deviant will have to resort to an all-out conspiracy theory.
I think the reason that replublicans in average believe much less in AGW is for a big part the result that Gore is a democrat, environmentalists generally have been democrats, that they don’t really know the IPCC (same is true for the democrats, but they have Gore and a lot of environmentalists in their “camp”), and that the republican party and Bush government had not admitted to AGW until now.
Actually, I read an interesting comment today – someone said that the reason “conservatives” (in the US sense of the word, meaning economic liberals and social conservatives, with a thin gloss of pseudo-Christianity painted over them) can’t believe in global warming and peak fossil fuels is that they don’t like the kind of world the solutions would create.
The more localised life, fresh seasonal food, lots of mass transit, lower consumption of energy and resources, more social activities and less passive entertainment, all of which leads to a people more involved in public affairs – that’s a nightmare to these guys.
No more powerful cars roaring down highways, less highways, no more cherries from Chile in New York’s winter, McDs falls over and dies and a million locals open their own restaurants in the shells, not much clothing fashion and certainly slower changes in it, no more airconditioning roaring away while you’re not even home, smaller or no tvs, less anonymity – horrible stuff, they reckon.
If you don’t like where something leads you, you try not to believe in that something.
I think many conservatives are really social people… They’re in churches and such. Wait till the churches really start to spread the green message, to preserve Gods holy creation. I don’t think destruction of earth is compatible with the common forms of Christianity.
The green conservative dream might look different from the green democrat dream, but they both will be green.
Meryn, Kyle, you may be interested in this earlier post:
https://lamarguerite.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/they-are-trying-to-preserve-gods-creation/
I should be interested, since as the article says, I gave you the link 😉
I think you can certainly take conservative social values and turn them into something friendly to the environment – the Amish are not exactly socially liberal, it’s not like there’s an Amish gay gay mardis gras. And you can take economic liberalism and make it environmentally friendly, simply by saying – as Adam Smith, father of modern capitalism did – that the ideal market is one without interference and one in which everyone is fully informed of all the costs and benefits of various products.
So if you think about it, you can take almost any two sets of political philosophies and find places where they fit together. It’s as I said here, we can look at how our values and ideas clash, or at how they complement. Focusing on the complementary areas brings us together productively; focusing on the clashing areas helps establish our identity more clearly in our minds and hearts.
The thing is that the sort of people who are likely to call themselves “conservative” – as distinct from those who have genuinely conservative opinions and are content to just hold them and work in society as best they can – the self-described “conservatives” tend to be the sort who don’t want to find bits that fit together, bits that complement. Commonly they’re white middle-classed males of a Christian background, a group who in the West feels an emptiness, a lack of culture and identity. So they have to try hard to define some more concrete identity.
That’s why you get angry young British or even Russian men defining themselves as “Aryans” and joining Nazi gangs – feeling empty, they have to steal a bit of German culture. It’s why you get New Zealand Maoris or Australian Sudanese, cut off from their own cultures, wearing the clothing and affecting the manner of black American hip hop stars.
They want to clash, to emphasise how different they are. In the case of the self-described “conservatives”, the only way they can think of to emphasise difference and clashing is to make a big noise about gun control, abortion, climate change or whatever. So they hold extreme and noisy and angry opinions. Essentially, they begin and end every conversation by telling you to fuck off – like the climate change denialists you’ve had on this blog.