Well actually in Tibet’s case, the Dalai Lama,

(Tibet’s spiritual leader) has said that he

doesn’t want Tibet to become independent, only more autonomous. And as for Sudan perhaps the main reason that major governments don’t want to involve themselves in too deeply is because there is nothing to be gained from it (There’s no oil or resources for example).     

Good Question.

What is liberation, anyway, particularly to an Iraqi?  Is it the right to practice their religion as they see fit?  Is it the right to listen to music or watch movies from around the world without censure?  Is it the right to not have soldiers standing on every corner or maniacs blowing themselves up in market places regularly? 

I'm not anti-military.  I spend 10 years in the Australian Airforce.  But I am anti-involvement in campaigns that seem to be obtusely reasoned, as this Iraq campaign has been.  And you're right about the media too.  It does have a particularly short memory.

I've probably got a rather simplistic answer for you and that is China, at the moment, is the world's main manufacturing centre and that is everything from modern technology to shoes and clothes.  If the rest of the world were to protest with trade embargos, for instance, we'd all be worse off.  China probably would suffer for a short while but they'd quickly turn themselves around.  I'm only saying this from a very layman logic point of view.  Heck, I could be completely wrong.

As for what America (and my home, Australia) is doing in Iraq, well there are probably many different political points of view, none of which I profess to know much about, not being even slightly politically motivated.  It probably has a lot to do with oil and controlling oil wells.  I don't think it has very much to do with terrorism or even with the supposed 'threat' to the Western world.  Personally, I think George W wanted to distract the nation and the rest of the world away from his internal social and economic incompetencies.

The first step environmentalists have to take is convince everyone that global warming is happening. They haven't made that case yet (I'm not convinced -- I do agree the temperature went up 1 degree in the past century). I'm not some yokel or some SUV owner. I am just not convinced.

The second step they have to take is convince people that humans are the cause of global warming which I don't think they're even close to. I don't care if some poll of politically motivated group of scientists thinks something.  I've looked at the data. I have a scientific degree so have a background in looking at raw technical data and I'm unconvinced and so are millions fo others. You're convinced. Yippee for you. But millions of others aren't yet.

The third and final step is to convince people that a raise in temperature would be bad. As someone whose summer vacation was screwed a bit becasuse it was too cold, I would love to see the temperatures increased by a degree or two. We don't know if another degree or two would affect the coast lines or not btw. There are lots of things that could happen. We just don't know.

The point really is, the environemntalists have a pretty awful track record on their predictions. So I find it pretty smug for someone to say "Bush vs. Science".  Psychix, feel free to post YOUR scientific credentials.

I don't take global warming seriously. The environmentalists are the boy who cried wolf.  Ever read Silent Spring? Or the predictions that by 1990 we would have exhausted the supplies of copper, zinc, and other metals? Or the claims of global cooling in the 80s? Or the claims that by 2000 we would have exhausted the world's oil supplies? People's memory in debates like these tend to be short. In each of the previous debate, the "scientific community (whatever that is) had concluded that these things were true." And they weren't.

I just spent my vacation up at the cabin where the temperature in August was 10 degrees cooler.  Perhaps the soot China is cranking into the air is causing global cooling.

The problem I have with environmentalists is that they're not serious people in general. They just want a political issue. Not a solution.  Look at the Kyoto accords. They excluded China and India from any sort of requirements. How idiotic is that? China is the world's largest polluter in terms of REAL pollution.  The brown haze they crank out now can be seen in satellite imagery.   But Kyoto would have left them totally untouched.  These aren't serious proposals.

And while some people here are in favor of nuclear power,  try getting one built, the protesters (the same ones who object to fossil fuels) would line up to stop it.  If you build wind farms, they complain about the bird deaths or how they're an eye sore (And wind farms are a joke anyway, the amount of energy it takes to bulid them takes years to be made up by the wind farm).

You're basically looking at either a fossil fuel or nuclear energy. And both of them have problems. Poison the earth or allegedly heat up the atmosphere. Take your pick. I don't care either way. I just want cheap energy and clean air and water. And we seem to have that pretty well right now.

Also, there are no current viable alternatives to fossil fuel. It's a matter of scope.  The amount of gigjoules of energy we consume isn't ging to be even remotely touched on by wind power or solar power or biodiesel or whatever.  The ONLY technology presently we have is nuclear poewr and like someone else pointed out, it has its own issues. But it wouldn't have CO2 issues.

The rate of temperature increase is not unusually high. 1 degree in the 20th century isn't that massive.  Sure, there are predictions of higher temp changes but during the 80s it was "global cooling" that we were told to be afraid of.

Blaming Bush, either way, seems silly to me.

So I guess we can assume you guys are all big supporters of nuclear power right?

What we do know is that the earth's mean temperature probably increased around 1 degree in the 20th century.  We also know that C02 is a green house gas.  But we do not know to any degree of real certainty whether the amount of CO2 put into the air by humans is anywhere near enough to contribute noticeably to the warming of the planet.

The earth is currently COOLER than it has averaged in the past 10,000 years. Many scientists and those like me who follow this stuff from a non-political perspective consider it quite likely that the earth is moving towards its equilibrium point again.

But for me, the global warming zealots just don't seem very serious. If they were, they would be pushing for the widespread adoption of technology sources today that could reduce CO2 emmissions such as nuclear energy (there are no other "alternative" energy sources even remotely capable of generating the kinds of energy that fossil fuels can). 

If the sky is indeed falling, then by all means, let's move to safe nuclear power.  But oh, no, can't have that. The same people who rail against Bush are almost always against nuclear power. So how seriously are they really taking global warming? Not very apparently.

But yes, you can always trot out some group of scientists to back virtually any opinion.  Sure, they can't predict the weather even 2 days ahead of schedule with a reasonable degree of accuracy let alone get the mean summer temperature of a region right but they can magically "model" what the temperature will be in 50 years.