Jed Rothwell wrote: > The newspapers say this is still at the rumor stage and Chu has not yet > been definitely selected. > > Chu is quoted regarding Mills' and BLP : "It is extremely unlikely that > this is real, and I feel sorry for the people who are backing this." > Actually, I tend to agree but not for his reasons. I pity anyone who has > to deal with Randy Mills. > > I am not disappointed or surprised that this is the sort of person Obama > has selected.
Me neither. Let's keep in mind what the standard of comparison should be here. We've just gone through 8 years with the Bush/Cheney team, the ones who killed the solar observatory so they wouldn't have to find out whether solar changes are really related to global warming, the ones who really just didn't want to hear anything about global warming. Now here's Dr. Chu on global warming [NB -- need to check this quote, looks to me like there's a typo in there, or maybe several typos; it's apparently from an oral presentation, not a written statement]: > Consider this. There's about a 50 percent chance, the climate experts > tell us, that in this century we will go up in temperature by three > degrees Centigrade. Now, three degrees Centigrade doesn't seem a lot > to you, that's 11° F. Chicago changes by 30° F in half a day. But 5° > C means that … it's the difference between where we are today and > where we were in the last ice age. What did that mean? Canada, the > United States down to Ohio and Pennsylvania, was covered in ice year > round. > > Five degrees Centigrade. > > So think about what 5° C will mean going the other way. A very > different world. So if you'd want that for your kids and grandkids, > we can continue what we're doing. Climate change of that scale will > cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive > population displacements. We're not talking about ten thousand > people. We're not talking about ten million people, we're talking > about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, > permanently. Just a little different from the Bush/Cheney/Exxon Inc party line, eh? Sounds to me like he's got a pretty good grasp of at least some of the fundamentals of the world we live in. (Of course, the "It's all because of God's finger, we should just roll over and live with it" crowd will disagree that this is a good thing. You can't please everybody.)
