08/27/08 Bend
"Hot air" is what the 'Americans for Prosperity' group is trying to tackle in the energy and global warming debate as their hot air balloon tour stopped in Bend Wednesday morning along Highway 97. They are spreading a message of global warming alarmism : lost jobs, higher taxes, less freedom.
"We just think as they look at the environment they are not taking into account that while they are trying to protect the environment they are hurting average Americans and they are hurting average Americans with higher gas prices, higher home energy prices, higher food prices, and its not a good balance," says Tim Phillips, President of Americans for Prosperity.
Central Oregonians listened to Bend City Councilor Chris Telfer and State Representative Gene Whisnant as they addressed the issue.
"Gene Whisnant hit it right on the head he didn't tell me what to think he said go home and do the research, and I think that's the common sense approach that everybody whether you are a red state person or a blue state person you should do find out for yourself not what's popular," says Bill Schertzinger of Bend.
The group handed out $8 Al Gore bills to represent high gas prices along with information on what they say are unaffordable solutions to fighting global warming.
While many at the event enjoyed taking a ride in the 70 ft balloon some at the event were not in agreement with what was being said.
"What they are saying today is that they don't know if climate change is real and even if it is real, it's going to cost us a lot of money to solve it and it's going to hurt the economy and hurt jobs and every study I have seen says that is not true and we can solve climate change at very low costs," says Chris Shultz, consultant for the Environmental Defense Action Fund.
While many enjoyed the hot air balloon rides Wednesday in Bend, not everyone was convinced the issue is full of hot air.
Global Warming Cost Debate
National News
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Natural emissions will soon overwhelm any cuts we make
While man's greenhouse gas emissions have warmed us up, soon enormous natural emissions will overwhelm any cuts we make:
"...Researchers were investigating "alarming" reports in the last few days of the release of methane from long frozen Arctic waters, possibly from the warming of the sea, said Greenpeace climate scientist Bill Hare, who was attending a climate conference in Ghana. Giant burps of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, is a long feared effect of warming in the Arctic that would accelerate warming even more, according to scientists." --"Arctic sea ice drops to 2nd lowest level on record," AP, 27 Aug '08
"In the permafrost bottom of the 200-meter-deep sea, enormous stores of gas hydrates lie dormant in mighty frozen layers of sediment. The carbon content of the ice-and-methane mixture here is estimated at 540 billion tons. "This submarine hydrate was considered stable until now," says the Russian biogeochemist Natalia Shakhova, currently a guest scientist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who is also a member of the Pacific Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok.
The permafrost has grown porous, says Shakhova, and already the shelf sea has become "a source of methane passing into the atmosphere." The Russian scientists have estimated what might happen when this Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely and all the stored gas escapes. They believe the methane content of the planet's atmosphere would increase twelvefold. "The result would be catastrophic global warming," say the scientists." --"A Storehouse of Greenhouse Gases Is Opening in Siberia," Spiegle, 17 April '08
Methane is 70 times more powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2 over 20 years, and 10 billion tons of methane would be like doubling the CO2 in the air.