"The Wrong Button to Push, No Friend of Bush..."

University of Penn professor of geology and climate change studies, Bob Giegengack, is no Republican and certainly no friend of Bush. He voted for Al Gore in 2000 and says "he'd probably vote for him again if he ran." He's a typical left-wing, Ivy League professor in seemingly all aspects save one --he's actually studied the environment for the last 50 years and scoffs at the idea of man-made Global Warming.

Apparently this UofP Professor is not part of the 100% consensus of scientists out there that we are told elitists-and certainly not working for the oil companies as is normally said of the naysayers.

Though Giegengack may have pulled the lever for Gore, he is not shy about dismissing Gore's activism and says that his movie, An Inconvenient Truth is nothing more than "a political statement timed to present him as a presidential candidate in 2008. The glossy production is replete with inaccuracies and misrepresentations and appeals to public fears as shamelessly as any other political statement that hopes to unite the public behind a certain ideology. What he's doing is no less than the scare tactics used by people like Karl Rove."

Some other quotes of interest from Philadelphia Magazine's piece on Giegengack entitled, "Al Gore is a Greenhouse Gasbag":

"We don't know that polar bears haven't drowned in every interglacial period. Nobody was watching back then."

"Sea level is rising, but it's been rising ever since warming set in 18,000 years ago...the Earth's global ocean is only going up 1.8 millimeters per year. That's less than the thickness of one nickel. At the present rate pf sea level rise it's going to take 3,500 years to get up there. So if for some reason this warming process that melts ice is cutting loose and accelerating, sea level doesn't know it. And sea level, we think, is the best indicator of global warming."

"The thing [Gore] doesn't mention is that there are 2.4 billion people in India and China who have launched a campaign that will increase their energy consumption by a factor of 10. No matter what we do. If we somehow cut our CO2 emissions in half, you wouldn't be able to measure the difference because of the role played by India and China. It's over. If CO2 is the problem, we've already lost."

There's all this stuff about saving the planet. The Earth is fine. The Earth was fine before we got here and it'll be fine long after we're gone."

At the University of Penn, Giegengack’s "Environmental Analysis" course often attracts "students who want to be environmental activists and carry picket signs outside the offices of the bad guys in the military-industrial complex" --I'd love to see their looks of disappointment after the first lecture...

I’ve been posting about this issue a lot because it’s all we will be hearing in the run-up to the ‘08 election. Republican candidates will feel the pressure and jump right into the fray. I have never been firmly in one camp or another, but the latest batch of articles has helped shed some light -especially this one.