rThe Europeans and "Greenies" (Wrong color, no?) are jealous of our economic success while they freeze their (deleted)s off in Montréal crying "Global warming!" (To me, this would be better put as "Global Whining.") They don't like our SUV's, either. Yhey ought to deop this Kyoto claptrap and improve their economies so they could afford them.

If one cannot enjoy Mr. Bullrohr's oh-so-Ugly-American comments as the satire they must surely be, then I would at least hope readers enjoy the delicious irony that this particular blog entry is at this very moment framed, on my monitor at least, by three ads for BP.

This reports that "The Bush administration has rejected the Kyoto protocol saying it would hinder economic growth..."

It would be more accurate to tell readers that the Treaty was defeated 98-0 by the US Senate - during the Clinton Administration...

It also might be appropriate to tell readers that emerging market economies were NOT held to enforceable environmental targets - just "best efforts".... no wonder the entire Senate rejected a bad treaty....

The blame lies squarely on Al Gore - the man who brought back a treaty that he knew would not get ratified. What a waste of trees....

This reports that "The Bush administration has rejected the Kyoto protocol saying it would hinder economic growth..."

It would be more accurate to tell readers that the Treaty was defeated 98-0 by the US Senate - during the Clinton Administration...

It also might be appropriate to tell readers that emerging market economies were NOT held to enforceable environmental targets - just "best efforts".... no wonder the entire Senate rejected a bad treaty....

The blame lies squarely on Al Gore - the man who brought back a treaty that he knew would not get ratified. What a waste of trees....

...Speaking of hindering economic growth from reducing carbon emissions. Has anybody thought of looking at emission reduction from the opposite point of view taking these reduction efforts being a source of progress and economic growth for society? Some of the largest US-based corporations (DuPont and IBM, for example) have understood this fact and it actually shows on the last line of their balance sheets!* Likewise, what about the 200 plus state and municipal governments in the US which are pushing not just to stop climate change, but also to improve the health of their citizens by curbing emissions and their energy consumption? The city of Seattle has decreased its carbon emissions by 60% through a variety of measures and is far from doing badly.

If Washington does not act on climate change, probably (and hopefully) the two most brilliant assets of this country, its entrepreneurs and its citizens, will end up doing the job for those short-sighted politicians.

* A must read: A. B. Lovins "More Profit with Less Carbon," in Scientific American, pp. 74-82, Sept. 2005.

I want to "Byoolin" and assure her/him that the regrettable typos in my earlier submission weren't part of any irony. Also, I agree completely with Ms./Mr. N. Pappous. Bill Clinton and Al Bore sent things to the Hill that couldn't be approved even when the Democrats were in control. The exception is their tax hike; that got through (Mr. Bore breaking the tie in the Senate) even though the Congress then would nix the Bill & Hillary spending programs. That, incidentally, is why Mr. Clinton scored surpluses, a complete accident. Congress works in strange ways....

I want to thank "Byoolin" and assure her/him that the regrettable typos in my earlier submission weren't part of any irony. Also, I agree completely with Ms./Mr. N. Pappous. Bill Clinton and Al Bore sent things to the Hill that couldn't be approved even when the Democrats were in control. The exception is their tax hike; that got through (Mr. Bore breaking the tie in the Senate) even though the Congress then would nix the Bill & Hillary spending programs. That, incidentally, is why Mr. Clinton scored surpluses, a complete accident. Congress works in strange ways....

Here's a proposed plan of action:

1. All European and other industrialized countries actually meet the binding targets they have ALREADY agreed to (half of Europe is on track to miss their targets - some countries, such as Spain, by massive amounts).

2. Get other big contributors like India and China to also agree to binding targets.

3. THEN Europe may come back to the USA and talk about additional targets. Before then, Europe can kiss our American *sses.

I was watching the Geographer Harm de Blig on C-Span and talking about his book "Why Geography Matters". Naturally global warming came up in the course of his remarks. While de Blig thought Global warming had some influence, he also thought we were in an interglacial period, and the earth will be "naturally" getting much warmer for sometime. Certainly greenhouse gases do not help, and the polluted air, ground, and water is going to kill the rich as well as the poor.
But, all that aside, I think Hurricane Katrina was a wakeup call for us all as far as global warming is concerned. All the Gulf of Mexico has to do is warm up enough and you have possibility of a Catagory 5 Hurricane. Warm water is fuel for hurricanes. The Gulf has always been warm in summer, but, over the past few years, it has been getting warm enough to fuel a lot of hurricanes. We may see longer and longer hurricane seasons. Because of the warm water, Catagory 5 hurricanes and other extreme weather may be may be "normal" for the Gulf Coast and other parts of the earth.
Every Country needs to start planning for global warning, and where to put their building and cities. There may be a lot of high water in their future.

Enjoy next year's hurricanes then guys.

I look forward before I die to my first scuba-diving tour of Manhattan.

Golllll-ly-goober! Mr. Bill's done talk' to the Mesmerized frozen-in sycophants at Montreal! Don' suppose he bothered to remin' 'em he never presented the Kyoto Treaty to the Senate for ratification. Too much profile an' not enough courage. Gollll-ly!

Am I wrong or New York is at sea level?
What will New Yorkers will do with all their brand new SUV when the city will be covered by water?
Is your SUV (6 Liters cubic capacity!) very useful when you are stuck in the middle of traffic jam?
Do you want to see something clever? Well have a trip in a North European city (Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oxford, Berlin, Munich and so on ) and see that there are true alternatives to your polluting SUV!

'The conference, largely uncovered in the U.S. media (...)'

There's not too many people buying newspapers in New Orleans anyway, I guess

Another day, another piece of duplicity by this Administration:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120902037.html
At one point Bush's deputies threatened to boycott the meetings if Clinton, who was invited by Montreal's mayor and the Canadian Sierra Club, spoke. Clinton offered not to come, said sources close to the former president, but the Canadians stood by the invitation.
Publicly, however, Paula Dobriansky, the U.S. undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, welcomed Clinton, saying in a statement that "public events in connection with the U.N. climate change conference, such as the one involving former President Clinton, are useful opportunities to hear a wide range of views on global climate change."

...It must burn Bush so bad to think that five years into his presidency, the world has stopped listening to him and prefers to deal with the last competent president, Bill Clinton. Poor GW expected to have us all under his iron heel by now.

More from the same article:

The United States, which generates a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, had questioned the need to engage in even nonbinding talks on the subject. When the Europeans and Canadians proposed such talks Thursday, chief American climate negotiator Harlan Watson rejected it on the grounds that it would be tantamount to formal negotiations.
"If it walks like a duck and talks like duck, it's a duck," Watson told the other delegates, according to several participants in the closed midnight session.
As Watson walked out, one of the other delegates, baffled, responded: "I don't understand your reference to a duck. What about this document is like a duck?"

Ha ha. And more:

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin told reporters Wednesday, "To the recalcitrant nations, including the United States, I would say this: There is such a thing as a global conscience, and now is the time to listen to it."

I've lived in Canada, and I've never heard a stronger criticism of the US from a Canadian PM.

And here's my favourite bit:

The Kyoto participants' agreement to pursue a new round of emission limits amounted to a bet that the United States will change its position once President Bush leaves office, participants said.

"We can't have an effective global regime without the U.S., but we can move ahead with the discussion about what the regime will be with everyone else at the table, leaving a seat for the U.S. and hoping the U.S. will fill its empty seat," said Michael Zammit Cutajar, Malta's ambassador for international environmental affairs, who helped oversee the initial Kyoto negotiations. "After all, things will change in the U.S. in a few years. There will be a new constellation of forces, and maybe there will be a greater readiness to engage."

Now THAT sounds like a duck...a lame duck president.

Basically, the world is listening to speeches from his predecessor, while making deals with his as-yet-unknown successor.

Bush himself is already in the dustbin of history.

Martin just got himself re-elected by sharply criticizing Bush, who is horrifically unpopular here. The more Martin bashes Bush and the U.S., the higher his poll numbers will go. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and all the other crooks and frauds now running Washington are viewed here in Canada as below criminal. Newscasts here in Montreal were reporting that Cheney was furious with PM Martin for having the temerity to criticize Washington for its violation of international treaty law on global warming.
That's just what Paul Martin and the Liberals need: Dick Cheney mad at them. The madder he gets, the higher the Liberals' poll numbers will rise here in Canada.
Your president's administration is totally and completely discredited here, as virtually everywhere else in the world.
Vive le Canada! Les États-unis sont maintenant nos enemis.

Is Kyoto dead, ask the pundits. "Kyoto is alive and kicking," says Stavros Dimas, the European Union's commissioner for the environment, following the 11th hour agreement.

The media naturally assumed that no agreement was coming, because they knew the US was dead against it, even though everyone else wanted one. And indeed the US did turn up determined to scupper an agreement on climate change.

But the pundits failed to reckon with the 21st century collapse in America's standing. The world simply ignored them and proceeded without them.

Even the poodle gave an irritated little yelp at its master. Margaret Beckett, the UK environment secretary, said: "President Bush personally agreed at Gleneagles that the Americans would be part of discussions here. It would be a great pity if the US thought for whatever reason that it could not be part of a move forward."

NOBODY likes the poor guy anymore. All he wanted was to start a few wars and lord it over humanity. And attack science and trash the environment. And rob his countrymen blind to stuff the wallets of his fat-cat buddies. Apart from that and a few other minor foibles, like the lying and the stupidity and the torture and the corruption and the incompetence, he'd be a great guy to have a beer with. Except he's an alcoholic.

...and the hubris, the attacks on personal freedoms, the nationalism, the endless trite repetition, the draftdodging, the voterigging, the smearing, the voices from God, the fear of public appearances...

Yep, remove all those minor character defects, and he'd make a pretty good fratboy cheerleader.

Sorry, forgot the cronyism, the fearmongering, the war crimes, the double standards and hypocrisy, the worship of ignorance...

Wanna call me a Bush-hater? Be my guest.

America, your president - half your government - belongs at the end of a rope.

Every time I need a reminder as to why I fled the States in horror after 6 years in DC, I just need to check out the Wash Post.

I just hope all of us other countries pull through and show the US the big middle finger it deserves.

The sad thing is, while most Americans still don't know the difference between carbon dioxide and sodium chloride, they can't understand that the reason we're all harping on US compliance to Kyoto is due to the public good nature of pollution, not because we're jealous or care about the US.

Sorry, maybe that was too many big words in one paragraph. I'll try and provide Wikipedia links to all these terms next time. Until then, how about one American try and find me a peer-reviewed article that shows that there has NOT been a significant rise in global temperatures and/or alterations in our climate in the last century due to industrialization. Hint: don't waste your time - there is not a single one.

So not are we only pro-torture, pro-secret-prisons, pro-illegal-abductions, but we are also against the Kyoto Accord, the world's best hope to reduce global warming.
I have never felt so ashamed to be an American.

To Robert E. Lefkowitz, Clay Bullrohr and similar myopic types. I always expected people like yourselves to deny climate change for as long as you possibly could. But I also assumed that when the consequences finally arrived, you would wake up.

Instead, here you all are, making snide jokes about your giant SUVs and trying to score partisan points against a retired president.

We've just lost a city to a Cat 5 hurricane. Research in the journal Nature and elsewhere has shown that Gulf Coast hurricanes are getting steadily bigger. We know this is an inevitable consequence of higher water temperature in the Gulf and Caribbean. We know the water is getting warmer. We know why.

What part of this don't you people get? Do I need to repeat myself? We've just lost a whole f***ing city.

I sometimes wonder if a species that contains such blind fools even deserves to survive. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns.

You see what happens when a nation puts so little into their education system. You end up with a people who generally have no awareness of the world around them, and who are completely susceptable to propaganda. Very little will wake up the American people from their self induced anti intellegence. As America sinks into the sea as a result of their carelessness and greed, you will hear the sound of their denials over the waves...it's not us, it's everyone else..we are the greatest nation...we have God's direct line..where's my flag? I bet if I wave it I will feel better. Aren't we great? Look at us we're great.

Well, we lost the Florida Keys in 1935 to a Cat 5 hurricane - what was the reason then? Galveston in 1902 - what was it then?

I'd be more convinced about global warming if I hadn't lived through the 70s and the coming of "global coolin."

Which is it to be, Chicken Littles?

Would the anonymous poster from Exxon, above, please get real? Your anecdotes count for more than the peer-reviewed data and research of the international scientific community?
Play the ostrich all you want, but global warming is a scientifically accepted fact.

Would the anonymous poster from Exxon, above, please get real? Do you truly believe your anecdotes count for more than the peer-reviewed data and research of the international scientific community?
Go ahead and play the ostrich all you want, but global warming is a scientifically accepted fact.
Please let's keep such silliness out of respectable forums like this and confined to the airwaves of Fox News, the N.Y. Post and other already-discredited Bush mouthpieces.

Fact or not, how do you account for the 95-0 vote in the Senate, and the fact that nearly none of the signatories will meet their Kyoto targets? All this forum does is gripe about the Bush administration, which is fine, but you simply fail to consider that the Earth has been as warm if not warmer in other times.

Politically, any environmental agreement in which China and India are not covered is a non-starter in the US. Period. Which is why Wellstone, Kennedy and Mikulski (to name 3) voted against the treaty in the trial run in the Senate.

Do you deny the spate of books and articles in the 70s about global cooling? Were they wrong then, or are you wrong now?

What's it to be, Chicken Littles?

To the anonymous poster from Exxon: Global warming is a fact. I repeat: your name-calling ("chicken little"), your anecdotes and your references to a "spate" of books from the 70s hardly outweigh the considered, peer-reviewed evidence amassed by the international scientific community to the effect that global warming is real and that human activity is to blame. If humanity is to survive on this planet, we need to act. As for the Senate vote, yes, sadly, U.S. senators are deeply influenced by the powerful Big Oil lobby. But awareness has progressed a great deal since that vote; I suspect if there were a new vote now, the treaty would enjoy substantially more support. The U.S. stands to gain nothing by isolating itself from international law and from its responsibilities as the world's biggest polluter.

Well, Sam, I suspect you're wrong, because China and India still won't play, and no Senator, even those not influenced by Big Oil, is going to stick his neck out like that. Kyoto has very little to do with combating global warming, because few countries will meet their targets in any case. If the world could agree on a global carbon emissions trading scheme, then we'd be getting somewhere. Yes, we're #1, but China is #2 with a bullet, and Europe taken as a whole is a significant polluter.

It's easy to carp and moan about teh Bushies, but reality is more complex than that. And, oh, what do the studies say about how much the planet is warming? No consensus at all. Until that happens, political leaders won't be keen to take action. Hell, we've known for 20 years about the coming demise of Social Security and Medicare, and have done nothing.

I'm puzzled by the "shot" aimed at Mr. Robert Lefkowitz and myself on Dec. 11 by Mr/Ms/Other B. Kaufmann. Lefkowitz was right that after all his greenish hoopla, Pres. Clinton didn't present the Kyoto Treaty to the Senate. (Perhaps he was otherwise engaged.) Mr/Ms/Other Kaufmann can't dispute this.

As for New Orleans, geologically it was tragedy waiting to happen. I emphasize "geologically." I'll leave the "politically" to Mr/Ms/Other Kaufmann and others.