A Solution to Man-Made Global Warming
Good Commentary by Pat Sajak
Al Gore, Mountain Man. Living by the seashore eating sashimi and raw shellfish. Big old beard, and dressed in sealskins. Yeah, that’ll happen.
Way to go Pat, good essay.
To really reduce your “carbon footprint” you have to reduce your heat signature, from the beginning to the end. That not only means a much smaller home, and a very tiny car or no car at all, it also means eliminating processed things from your life as much as possible, because just about any kind of processing uses energy and produces waste heat. Pat’s point, that few other people would join in at first, means that the “coolers” would have to really really reduce their consumption at first to make up for the rest of us. So go back to the land and live like an indian, or at least like a 17th century farmer. Except you have to get used to the weather, because using fire for cooking or warmth is too big a contribution to MMGW. Plastics, artificial fibers, and new containers are also no-nos. They should probably make all their own clothing and furniture by hand, or at least never buy any of it new. Stop consuming, start reusing.
Reducing your heat signature doesn’t mean you have to live totally primitive. There is this expanded foam insulation material called Icynene that can double the insulative ability of a home. In new construction, use thicker walls, and you can more than triple it; your old house was R13 and your new house is R45. So you can heat it and cool it with about 75% less energy. Triple glazed windows with super high-E glass will help a lot, as will double or triple door entryways (they work like airlocks). Push the idea a little further and demand energy saving architecture designs. Yes, it will cost quite a bit more up front (just like buying a Prius) but saves you money in the long run, and it’s “for the planet”.
“For the planet”? Does that trump “for the children”? Hey I may have hit on a good slogan idea for this whole thing ... “Do it for your mother” (as in Mother Earth).
Err one hitch in this is that in the unlikely event of Gore living in a styrofoam box heated by small candle, and tens of millions following suit , what if the drop in solar emissions lessens the earths temp and the world believes?? he will be god!!!!
Posted by Chris Edwards
01/10/2008 at 04:08 PM
While we ar talking about All Gore I looked up Allegory and the dictionary on my computer gives:-a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one. That is too near to be a coincidence, especially as the Gore is on the board of this computer company??????
Posted by Chris Edwards
01/10/2008 at 04:14 PM
I want to see Algore and his followers living in mud huts and hollow logs, grubbing for worms..... PETA says worms have rights too....; oh, sorry, make that browsing for low hanging fruit.
And of course the MSM will pretend this never existed. It makes too much sense to qualify as “news”. If it surfaces anyway and they HAVE to deal with it, they’ll pooh-pooh the whole thing because it’s not like Pat Sajak is an expert or anything. I mean, he’s not a climatologist, is he?
Of course, if it comes to that they’ll already be worried, cos you just KNOW sooner or later someone will bring up ‘an inconvenient fact’: Al Gore isn’t a climatologist either.There’s no cops or traffic lights
Livin in an Ahmish Paradise
But you’d probably think it bites
Livin in an Ahmish Paradise
I am collecting poo for them as we speak....
There’s not much to debate here. Pat Sajak states the obvious, he calls Al Gore out for being a hypocrite.
I can’t add much to the comments, but I am curious about the reference from today’s Day By Day. I tried to look it up, but couldn’t find it. Any leads?
Doc ... come on ... really??
Ok, Gore shows up in today’s strip. If you read it daily you’ll know that Sam and Zed are rather conservative and don’t buy into MMGW. Naturally Sam’s little sister Skye does. Sam explains things to her, and she starts to see the light. M’kay? In the last panel we have Al Gore as Emporer Palpatine from Star Wars (the evil empire, get it?) who can tell when things are starting to turn against him - “I sense a disturbance in the Force” but of course MMGW is a crock, so Muir uses “Farce” instead of force.
This will be the one and only time I will explain the funnies to the readers.
No got problem with Day by Day - I’m trying to find the New York Times article they’re referring to. I’m amazed the NYT would print something so far from their usual doctrine.
I’m not sure how the Global Warming issue became so partisan and divisive but, here we are. I for one am unconvinced that the sky’s falling but I don’t think Mother Earth is begging for more fossil fuels either. I’d be willing to make sacrifices in order for the country to change its practices but it has to start with the corporate world. Until our government can free itself the financial ball and chain of the oil companies et al., for me, Gore, or anyone else to change their lifestyle would be asinine, painful, and meaningless. It does sound good however.
Posted by andy42302
01/11/2008 at 09:12 AM
I like that someone (in)famous got into print what I’ve been saying all along - You First.
I think that the Nobel was probably tooo over the line for a lot of people (especially since Al god just bought a third home and used his jet to fly to the ‘honor’).
Children should have been standing up and saying to Mr. Al’inconvienenttruth’Gore - hey why aren’t you living like you are telling us to live? Since it always seemed that all four of my kids could remember every promise I ever made to them, every time I smoked after telling them not to smoke and every time I ‘lied’ to a telamarketer - they had no problem what-so-ever pointing out each and every one of my ‘hipocrisies’.
I am shocked that the kids of today can’t even bother to do that. . .Not even the college kids - what has America come to that they have indoctrinated the bullsh** meter out of our children?!?
I don’t claim to be a climatologist, and there appears to be legitimate science on both sides of the issue. What I’m CERTAIN of is that I’m not going to advocate changing not only my entire lifestyle but the character of the entire world’s economy, based on the fears of someone whose “vision” *demonstrably* extends no farther than the next election and whose concern for “the people” and “the planet” is *demonstrably* subject to change in the presence of money in capital amounts.
In all honesty, I haven’t the tiniest bit of concern about “the planet”. Our ability to survive on it is one thing, but the planet itself, the ecosystem? Against the backdrop of the planet, humanity is no more than a particularly bad infestation of fleas. The worst we can do to earth is irritate her to the point where she starts scratching, and I can’t help feeling that the hype about “endangering the planet” shows a truly amazing degree of arrogance.
Stop and think for a moment. Remember the stories of dinosaurs you grew up on as a child. Remember the stories about the cataclysm that wiped them out. Now think about the fact that the same “cataclysm” that wiped out the dinosaurs, along with the vast majority of earth’s species at the time, was neither the first of such changes nor will it be the last. From the point of view of “the planet”, that was business as usual.
And let’s see… as I sit here near the edge of the Big Thicket, looking out at forest that verges on *jungle*, smelling the stink from the paper mill 15 miles away, knowing I’m within 100 miles of a city of several million… well again, I’m no climatologist, nor a biologist, and yet to my eyes it appears that life managed to survive all that, and even flourish afterward.
And we have the unmitigated gall and conceit to think we can ACCIDENTLY screw up the ecosystem worse than that? Yeah, right. Pull the other one.P.S. Recommended reading: “Fallen Angels” by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn
Dr. Jeff
Sorry.
Ok the article you want is here. Its called “In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm”.
If you can’t get there directly, Google up “New York Times Al Gore availability entrepreneur” and click the link.
The 1st key point the author talks about is “availability heuristics”; things seem more important if we hear about them more often. (sounds like a blogswarm to me). The 2nd point is an extension of the 1st; the “availability cascade” in which strong images and examples are used to either push or prove the meme driven by the heuristics. And it’s Al Gore who is the point salesman for those cascades.
And yeah, it’s an unusual article for the Times. But it’s not knocking MMGW, it’s talking at the meta level, discussing how the idea is being sold to us.
“Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.”
I’m still chuckling about the self-evident fact that Al Gore, the self-appointed world’s leading expert on Climate Change(tm), can’t outthink a game show host. Kinda says it all, doesn’t it?
Ditto Grumpy.
While I like the proposed solution, I don’t like the reason or the method.
People should reduce their consumption voluntarily. Why? If I consume less, I spend less, save more for retirement. Simple. That’s in my interest, not in some cloudy ‘gorebull warming’ interest. Save now, spend later.
I’m personally working on that for selfish reasons. I want to save money. I’ll do it my way. I won’t tell others to do it because it might ‘save the planet’. No matter what I, or you, do, the planet will be here for the next 5 billion years, give or take a million.
‘Course, if everybody followed my advice, the economy would tank, my investments would lose money, sigh…
Consume! Go on, Consume! Your consumption now will finance my retirement.
(I feel like such a whore...)
01/10/2008 at 05:28 PM
