My view on climate change

In a completely unrelated blog, I posted the following comment, describing my opinion on climate change, the politics thereof, and citing two books that I think summarize my opinion better than any other source has. (I've cleaned up the grammar a little, so it doesn't read like a reply to someone else's blog post, but the content is otherwise unchanged..)

I realize that my opinion is far from the majority opinion (at least according to the news media), and I am aware of the fact that most of my friends disagree. If you'd like to comment, please don't use this message as a soapbox to present opinions I've had shoved in my face a zillion times over. Such replies will be deleted. If you want to convince someone of your political opinions, there are dozens of forums where such discussions are welcome.

That being said, my message:....

Global Warming Panic explained

Unsafe water or just not enough taxes?

The New York Times writes a very interesting article about water safety. It starts out with the attention-grabbing headline that millions of Americans are drinking dirty water. It then goes on to point out that only 6% of water-safety violations have resulted in fines or other government punishments.

What it does not say, however, is how many of these municipalities, after learning of the violation, went on to repair their system and later become compliant. After all, as far as public health is concerned, the important issue is that the water is cleaned up, not that somebody is forced to pay a large fine.

Unfortunately, the only references to this in the article are vague handwaving terms like "hundreds of other systems" (out of how many? A thousand? A million?) and "many". What percentage of systems were fixed quickly? What percentage were fixed after a long delay? What percentage have not been fixed after a long time? That, we don't know. It could be 0.01%, 5% or 95% without affecting the text as-written.

So what is really going on here? Do we really have a crisis of people drinking contaminated water? Or do we just have some Congresscritters looking for another scare tactic to blame the Bush Administration for (which the article explicitly does)? Do they think cleanup is lacking or do they just want to impose more fines?

Unfortunately, the New York Times will be of no help answering these questions.