NPR DISCUSSES THE GLOBAL WARMING SCARE

Below is the NPR program summary. Predictably it is two for and one against. Though having even one against is probably a sign of major doubt from them. The first guy discovers that climate change has happened very rapidly in the past from natural causes so concludes from that that human activity is changing the climate now? GREAT logic! The third guy advocates what even NPR calls a "far-out" scheme. This is the best they could get to defend global warming? I guess it is.

Part 1: Richard Alley, Penn State University Glaciologist

Richard Alley discovered something 10 years ago that made him worry the Earth's climate could suddenly shift, and it changed his life. It was a two-mile long ice core, pulled up from the center of Greenland. It contained bubbles of air that reveal what the Earth's atmosphere was like over a period of 100,000 years. The ice core showed that at one point, in as little as 10 years, the global climate had drastically changed. Soon after that discovery, climate change became a personal crusade for Alley.

Part 2: John Christy, University of Alabama Climatologist

Last fall, the Senate debated a bill that would have created regulations to combat global warming. Sen. James Inhofe [R-OK] led the opposition, and went so far as to call global warming a hoax. He based that statement, in part, on the work of John Christy, a professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Christy is a respected climatologist, but he's also a maverick who argues that global warming isn't a problem worth worrying about. His major contribution has been to analyze millions of measurements from weather satellites, looking for a global temperature trend. He's found almost no sign of global warming in the satellite data, and is confident that forecasts of warming up to 10 degrees in the next century are wrong.

Part 3: Wallace Broecker, Columbia University Oceanographer

When Wallace Broecker started his career in science more than 50 years ago, no one was worried that humans could change the climate. Broecker, now an oceanographer with Columbia University, has helped to reverse that. And he's using his considerable stature to advocate a far-out scheme to slow global warming: giant machines would absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the concentrated gas could be either pumped deep underground or turned into carbon-rich rocks. This certainly wouldn't be cheap, but he says it would be easier than social engineering.

MOSQUITOES VERSUS PEOPLE

No prizes for guessing which side the Greenies are on

Sympathy for the mosquito? "Save Our Mosquitoes," isn't a plea one expects to see these days with the mosquito-borne West Nile Virus killing hundreds and making thousands of people sick. But someone posted that very appeal on a sign in Chargin Falls, Ohio. These "poor bugs" were indeed at risk as the town was debating whether to spray pesticides that year. Residents decided to show their mercy; they gave the mosquitoes a stay of execution. No spraying in 2002....

Radical environmental activists have been leading the pack, making a host of unsupported claims about the risks associated with pesticides. While some might sympathize with plight of the mosquito, the anti-pesticide crowd has shown little concern for those humans suffering from the sometimes deadly, and often debilitating, virus transmitted by the bugs.

In the past, these groups have downplayed the risks by pointing out that the illness only kills the elderly, the sick, and children—as if that offered any comfort! However, it isn't even true. In 2003, the median age of those who died from the virus was 47 years with a range of 1 month to 99 years old.

Radical environmentalist comments on this topic may have played better before 2002, when the death toll remained relatively low. Starting in 2002, West Nile took a disturbing turn. The CDC reported that more than 4,000 people became ill and 300 died. The CDC's tally for cases in 2003 is nearly 10,000 and more than 250 deaths. Almost 3,000 of these were reported to be West Nile meningitis or encephalitis, which is a particularly painful and potentially debilitating form of the disease.

As a point of comparison, consider the CDC data on the cases of health problems related to pesticide exposures from spraying during 1999-2002. According to the CDC report, there were a total of 133 "potential" cases of temporary illness over four years among a population that CDC estimates was 118 million in 2000. CDC concluded: "The findings in this report indicate that serious adverse outcomes potentially related to public health insecticide application were uncommon. When administered properly, in a mosquito-control program, insecticides pose a low risk for acute, temporary health effects."

Environmental activists have also claimed that application of chemical insect repellants— particularly those that contain DEET—can increase risks of seizures among children. Researchers recently published a review of the literature on this topic in Canadian Medical Association Journal. They report that none of these studies were conclusive that DEET was in fact the cause of seizures...."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else.

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