OK, first let me make an admission. I didn’t watch the debate last night. I wake up at 0350 every morning so I can do the 90 mile commute to work and be there by 0630. That schedule is my choice in an effort to ensure that I’m home for my kids in the afternoons to help with homework, drive them to practices, etc. In any case, I fell asleep shortly after 2100 last night. By the end of the week, sleep usually ranks in importance right below my children, so I slept. Luckily, Real Clear Politics has the transcript of the debate, and I did see bits and pieces of it on Fox News this morning as I was getting ready for work.
First thing that struck me: THE WORD IS NUCLEAR – NOO CLEER. IT’S NOT NOO CUE LAR! There were times when Palin pronounced the word correctly, other times she did not! It drives me crazy! In the short replay that I saw this morning, she pronounced it wrong at least twice. If you’re going to be a heartbeat (or in McCain’s case a melanoma) away from having your finger on the friggin’ nuclear button, you should at least learn how to pronounce it!
OK, petty shit out of the way.
Now. Biden is a liar. Misha has the story of the 14 lies Biden spewed at the debate. I won’t repeat the obvious other than to advise you to go check it out and do some independent fact checking of your own.
Me? I did some after I heard the portion about fact vice fiction in the causes of climate change, which literally made me jump at my television set and punch the screen.
IFILL: Governor, I’m happy to talk to you in this next section about energy issues. Let’s talk about climate change. What is true and what is false about what we have heard, read, discussed, debated about the causes of climate change?
PALIN: Yes. Well, as the nation’s only Arctic state and being the governor of that state, Alaska feels and sees impacts of climate change more so than any other state. And we know that it’s real.
I’m not one to attribute every man — activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet.
[...]
IFILL: Senator, what is true and what is false about the causes?
BIDEN: Well, I think it is manmade. I think it’s clearly manmade. And, look, this probably explains the biggest fundamental difference between John McCain and Barack Obama and Sarah Palin and Joe Biden — Gov. Palin and Joe Biden.
If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is manmade. That’s the cause. That’s why the polar icecap is melting.
OK, you bloviating, hair-plugged, ignorant, humanity-hating imbecile! Let’s examine the words of some experts. First, there’s this from the British Met Office, which is actually touting the Al Gore party line when it comes to climate change.
Over the several hundred thousand years covered by the ice core record… the temperature changes were primarily driven by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Over this period, changes in temperature did drive changes in CO2. Since the Industrial Revolution (over the last 100 years), CO2 concentrations have increased by 30% due to human-induced emissions from fossil fuels. These people LOVE Al Gore! They LOVE to tout climate change as the fault of human beings! Hell, I’m surprised that they removed their lips from Gore’s anus long enough to actually write a report, and I’m fairly sure there was a loud sucking sound like a plunger clearing a toilet bowl when they did. But while they love to blame man for environmental “crises,” they also acknowledge that temperature changes do drive changes in CO2. That’s an important acknowledgement.
And then there’s this from Bruce West and Nicola Scafetta. West is chief scientist in the mathematical and information science directorate at the US Army Research Office. Scafetta is a research associate in the Duke University physics department.
The causes
of global warming—the increase of approximately 0.8±0.1 °C in Earth’s surface since 1900—are not as apparent as some recent scientific publications and the popular media indicate. We contend that the changes in Earth’s average surface temperature are directly linked to two distinctly different aspects of the Sun’s dynamics: the short-term statistical fluctuations in the Sun’s irradiance and the longer-term solar cycles. This argument for directly linking the Sun’s dynamics to the response of Earth’s climate is based on our research and augments the interpretation of the causes of global warming presented in the United Nations 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.Did the research indicate that humans were not at least partially responsible for climate change? No. What he did say, and what gave envirowackos a stupendous wedgie, is that climate change is at least partially caused by natural phenomena.
A technical paper from the Journal of the South African Institution of Civil engineering says:
This study is based on the numerical analysis of the properties of routinely observed hydrometeorological data which in South Africa alone is collected at a rate of more than half a million station days per year, with some records approaching 100 continuous years in length. The analysis of this data demonstrates an unequivocal synchronous linkage between these processes in South Africa and elsewhere, and solar activity. This confirmsobservations and reports by others in many countries during the past 150 years. It is also shown with a high degree of assurance that there is a synchronous linkage between the statistically significant, 21-year periodicity in these processes and the acceleration and deceleration of the sun as it moves through galactic space. Despite a diligent search, no evidence could be found of trends in the data that could be attributed to human activities.
The idea, Senator Biden, you condescending prick, is that there is no consensus to what degree human activities are contributing to climate change. For you to state that it’s “clearly manmade” is to superciliously contradict some pretty astute scientific minds! In other words, you’re speaking out of your ass!
Douchebag.
From the transcript I’ve read, Palin did better than I expected, and I think Biden was a little taken aback by that.
