Rant, Rant, Rant (copied from MySpace blog)

Rant, rant, rant

Wow, so for the past couple days, I have completely been obsessing over Four Winds by Bright Eyes. I think I've mentioned before but they are totally hit or miss for me, but I actually think this (Cassadega) might be the first album that I actually buy from them/him. Oh my god, though, best song ever, at least for this week!

Also, I was involved in a question and answer with Bob Watson, who has worked at APL (NASA-affiliated-ish), was a science advisor to Clinton/Gore, and currently works at the World Bank for their environmental/sustainability group (plus he did a post-doc at Maryland) but he also worked on a couple of the IPCC reports and other big climate change groups. (Also, am I the only one who uses Google for a spell-check instead of actual spell-checks?) But this man was amazing. We were there with the purpose of discussing going from academia to policy, but we talked about a lot also related to global warming and the current political climate (ha!).
Anyway, he brought up a point that was just so fucking brilliant I feel like I need to share it in my semi-coherent, post-free-beer-for-graduate-student haze. Basically, this administration will be super-preemptive in many military and economic instances. I mean, we had no real evidence about Iraq being a threat, and you see where that lead us! We had some evidence for Afghanistan, and we totally took the action there. So in a lot of these venues, the government assumes worst case scenario in terms of actions against the US, and we act on that. Well, we've been told over and over worst case scenario about climate change, but the certain politicians keep crying "not enough evidence" and use that as a reason to act. Whereas, not enough evidence is reason to act (if not more reason to act) in the case of "homeland security." And this is completely bull-shit because climate change will likely be as devastating as any war.
At least industry is finally acting on this. You know, it isn't even a partisan issue. Bush senior had some great legislation passed limiting NOx and other ozone depleting chemicals. But he was fiscally conservative, but we're now right smack dab in this ideologically conservative (my term) regime, and any reliance against good science had gone to crap. This talk was almost enough to make me want to go into policy, but I have to say I like my ivory tower.
Well, one more time listening to Four Winds and maybe my ranting will be over.