President 'has four years to save Earth'

...Jim Thompson

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Scarcely. You and James Arthur have both been avoiding the point I was trying to make, which might well be seen as weaseling.

You may not have noticed, but you are still consuming a lot of oil and still need to import some 40% of your consumption. To pay for it you need foreign currency, which you have to borrow, since you've got nothing worthwhile left to sell.

That would be fine if you didn't need to steal or borrow more of their savings.

Yes, isn't it. It looks as if you are going to have to go cold turkey to kick your oil habit, which isn't going to be fun for you or the rest of the world. The invasion of Irak can be seen as a desperation move by a junkie craving just one more fix, and you now have to hope that Obama can persuade the rest of the world that you are joining a program and deserve enough credit to let you taper off your consumption, rather than havng to suffer through the agonies of abrupt withdrawal.

Thomas L. Friedmans's "Hot, Flat and Crowded" makes this point rather more diplomatically, but since he doesn't seem to be interested in letting Republicans feel good about themselves you probably aren't going to read it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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=A0 =A0...Jim Thompson

The weather is not all that predictable, and neither is the rate of exchange. If I were you, I'd think in terms of May - Cornwall tends to fill up with U.K. holiday-makers in summer, to the extent that the roads are full full of traffic jams and the hotels and restaurants (such as they are) are booked out. The current blip in the exchange rates may well last that long, but I wouldn't like to bet on it. I could ask my nephew (the foreign exchange trader in London) but I doubt if his crystal ball is all that much better than anybody else's.

-- Bill Skoman, Nijmegen

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Citing a National Geographic article seems to be an odd way of absolving the BBC, and the article does make the distinction between anatomically and behaviourly modern human beings which you seem to be missing.

Right. That describes the creation of an isolated population that contained the particular genetic variations that - under tolerably high selection pressure - evolved into the news species that seems to be us.

As yet, no-one seems to have worked out which genetic changes are associated with our language skills - which do seem likely to have been crucial - but there's a lot of work going on in the area. There doesn't seem to be any good reason to suppose that this particular evolutionary step will be reflected in the anatomy. People who study music and language seem to think that the capacity to perceive "nested heirachies" was the crucial ability that identifies behaviourly modern human beings, and so far there's no suggestion that this might be detectable in the anatomy.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I quote:

Sloman says:

To summarise:

Bill: no near extinction event for us

Quote says: our species ... near extinction

Bill: ... evolved into the news species that seems to be us.

So you disagree that "us", h*mo sapiens, went through a near extinction event? On what evidence do you claim Chris Stringer is wrong?

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Western civilisation could survive the kind of economic adjustment required to move us over to carbon-neutral energy sources. Energy gets to be more expensive, but the price hike is less than the one we survived during the 1973 oil crisis

Since then the oil suppliers have been careful to avoid pushing up the price of oil enough to motivate any significant investment in energy efficiency and alternative enrgy sources.

It's less obvious that western civilisation could survive the consequences of un-restrained anthropogenic global warming. Our agriculture is finely tuned to exploit the current climate, and any significant warming is going to impair its productivity.

The US has got the additional problem that it can't afford to keep on consuming and importing oil at the the current rate. Other examples of "western civilisation" get by while burning half as much fossil carbon per head, and doing no more that raising your game to the current European performance would solve your balance of payments problem.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

For the sake of this argument I'll accept that positive feedback is happening.

So we agree that if positive feedback is occuring then it is triggered by a rise in temperature not by CO2 directly.

So anything that causes a temperature rise will invoke the positive feedback not just CO2.

So how much temperature rise has an increase from 280ppmv to 380ppmv CO2 caused directly without the positive feedback? Of the approx 0.5C claimed rise how much is CO2 directly and how much is caused by positive feedback?

Now you'rs playing with words rather than admitting you were wrong.

If it's not contrversial it's settled. I won't know if AGW is true or false by looking at the areas where there is no debate.

We Americans aren't that stupid after all!

Sno-o-o-o-ort!

...Jim Thompson

Sounds like Europe re: Russian natural gas and Arab oil.

John

Preach to the Chinese. They make more CO2 than we do now, and are accelerating a lot faster. And every gallon of oil we conserve, they will be more than happy to consume.

John

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They won't be much concerned with what else they put into the=20 atmosphere/ground/water, either. ...or how much of our economy=20 they take.

Jim,

Why do you keep making posts with no content?

John

He's trying to avoid Bill by re-tagging the subject lines. Makes his filtering easier.

He won't see your question.

Cheers, James Arthur