The long view

Where's Myron? Is he still serving the Oil aristocracy in order to cash his salary and irreparably damage the fate of his children's grandchildren?

In the meantime, there's always some light relief from clever people who call it GOREBAL Warming, because of their visceral hatred of Al Gore, the man who was elected to be President of the United States in 2000, and could not possibly have made a worse job of it than the guy who stole it instead.

Honestly, the reasoning in some of his posts is insane. On reading predictions that Global Warming could contribute to a mass extinction on the scale of what which killed off the dinosaurs (which was probably due to a meteorite), he quips:

So the article readily admits that the temperature of the earth has in fact change dramatically over the "520 million years" to the point of mass extinction? Interesting. And all this time I thought dinosaurs roamed the earth on their feet, not SUV's.

You know, just because you can die of one thing, doesn't mean that something entirely different can't also kill you.

Via deltoid, there's this bizarre observation about the new tack the US delegation is applying, with their literal interpretation the word "irreversible".

They argued, for example, that the melting of glaciers or ice sheets -- which could raise ocean levels by several meters (a dozen feet) -- was not "irreversible" as ice could eventually reform.

I guess it's always a matter of time-scales. What's a few million years here and there when you're dead for almost all of it? The businesses and family lines of the super-rich are far more important to preserve. The correspondent comments:

I remember when I first became familiar with environmentalism as a political and philosophical system. It was often criticized for treating nature as sacred and humans as irrelevant.

But here we have an ostensibly conservative representative of the Bush administration trying to frame the climate debate in geological time -- and it's environmentalists who argue that we ought to think about this in human terms.