Tuesday, December 29, 2009

YouTube-sday™: w/ bonus climate change rant

I have a text file on my computer with thoughts and links in there, titled "blog ideas". As it is named is it's purpose - crap I have found or have thought of that I may want to think more about and maybe type about. It's needs a bit of a cleaning, so I was going through it and came about these two links. Scarily, they have to deal with the fact that it's ok to tell your kids global warming isn't happening, and even asks the kids to put together some cutesy videos to back up these "claims". Now, I can't prove all the facts came from Fox News, but it sure seems that way. I would use the word "inaccurate", but that word is not strong enough to describe all this. I love the book in the first link, written by a Professor Holly Fretwell, an "expert in the filed of global warming". And her expertise? She's has a degree in economics. She has no schooling dealing with the study of temperature trends - just how money is spent. She even says it herself: "I have spent most of my adult life evaluating environmental policies..." That's not the science of studying global warming. That's the science of watching money.

What a good expert.

Look - the climate is changing at an alarming rate. Years will get warmer and warmer. Glacier National Park will need a new name in about 25 years. We cannot continue to burn fossil fuels at the rate we are now and think we are not causing harm. And no, Glenn Beck, exhaling is NOT pollution, ya fricking jackass. The fact can be found about the middle of this page. I quote...er...cut and paste:

Q. Should we be concerned with human breathing as a source of CO2?

A. No. While people do exhale carbon dioxide (the rate is approximately 1 kg per day, and it depends strongly on the person's activity level), this carbon dioxide includes carbon that was originally taken out of the carbon dioxide in the air by plants through photosynthesis - whether you eat the plants directly or animals that eat the plants. Thus, there is a closed loop, with no net addition to the atmosphere. Of course, the agriculture, food processing, and marketing industries use energy (in many cases based on the combustion of fossil fuels), but their emissions of carbon dioxide are captured in our estimates as emissions from solid, liquid, or gaseous fuels.

I am sure it's all crazy hard to understand. You hear so much from one side, then 180 info from the other side. Let me try and boil it down into something simple and personal:

"Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" is on tour in Milwaukee (hey, it's possible). You are in the hot seat and just cranking thru question after question. You had to use your phone a friend lifeline early because you just couldn't remember who sang "Fly, Robin, Fly", but here you are - one question away from 1,000,000 bucks and 2 lifelines remaining. Final question has to do with cheese. Oh no....you are lactose intolerant, so this will not be easy. You have a hunch, though. But instead of a guess, you use your 50/50 lifeline. TRAGEDY! The one you had a hunch on disappeared. You are about to bail with 500 grand when you remember you are in Milwaukee - cheese capital of the US. The audience is filled with cheese-heads. How about using your last lifeline and see what the crowd says before you drop out? They are cheese experts. So you ask the audience and 90% choose answer A, while 10% choose answer D. That's some heck of a range. All those experts choosing A over D. What is your final answer?

So let me ask all your global warming deniers: why would you choose answer D when it comes to global warming when more than 90% of the scientists that study the environment on a daily basis say that the climate is changing? You are willing to bet a million dollars on a 9:1 majority, but you will risk the lives of your friends, loved ones, children, children's children and the very existence of the human race on a 10% minority. Sad.

And with that......

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

YouTube-sday™:Day late two for one

Been far too long since I have done a YouTube-sday™, and these two videos are just too good not to share. First, Autotune is the devil, but at least the devil is put to good use in this one:



And now we have Lego Keanu Reeves, who is a far better actor than regular Keanu Reeves: