We already know that Fox News’ telepundit Bill O’Reilly believes anthropogenic global warming is real and that it shouldn’t be ignored. Now we also know he’s not a huge fan of a cap-and-trade policy because it would fatten the wallets of Goldman Sachs and Al Gore.
O’Reilly borrows from Matt Taibbi’s piece at Rolling Stone, “Inside the Great American Bubble Machine”, that examines the politics of climate change and the investment houses that stand to gain with the move to carbon markets. But O’Reilly should have quit while he was ahead because Taibbi put together a decent case against Goldman Sachs. By pulling Republican whipping-boy Al Gore into his soapbox, O’Reilly softens the blow of Taibbi’s pointed critique — never mind that Al Gore’s has actually said his first choice for a policy mechanism to address climate change is a carbon tax. Watch it:
About Timothy B. Hurst
While I appreciate Mr. O'Reilly for bringing many important issues to the forefront, he is dead wrong about Global Warming. He has stated – like everyone else – that he coesn't want to discuss it any further. This I find to be counter-productive. How can any serious question be solved without rigorous debate? From what I read, there is very little proof of any Global Warming and even less proof that it could be caused by CO2. CO2 simply does not have to ability to retain massive amounts of heat reflecting back into our solar system. This is the only way that warming can occur and if it were not for a certain amount of greenhouse gases holding in some heat, we'd be a barren planet. Water vapor, which makes up 95% of the earth's so-called greenhouse effect, is what holds in heat. So maybe we should Cap and Trade water vapor.
Barbara, much of that water vapour is located in clouds that actually reflect sunlight back into space. The greenhouse effect relies on clear gases that let in sunlight and lock in thermal energy from the ground, hence why a greenhouse is made of glass. CO2 does both those things as it transmits visible light but absorbs infrared, which is why it is a greenhouse gas and why Venus (the second closest planet to the sun) with its atmosphere (96.5% CO2) is 270% hotter than Mercury (the closest planet to the sun).
Water vapour when not condensed into clouds does function like a greenhouse gas as well though. A lot of gases are involved, and our climate system is complex enough that the heat energy that is being retained isn't just staying in one place. This is why climate change is a more useful term than global warming. While it is warming in an overall average sense, the distribution is potentially highly unequal, with some places getting much hotter and others getting colder due to any number of climate dynamics. Looking at one spot and saying it's not getting warmer here isn't sufficient to disprove this.