BSC at-large

Looking at the remaining schedules of the 3 possible BCS at-large bids, Boise St., BYU, and Utah:

Boise: @ So. Miss, Hawaii, @ San Jose St, @ NM State, Utah State, @ Idaho, @Nevada, Fresno St.

BYU: New Mexico, @ TCU, UNLV, @ Colorado St., San Diego St., @ Air Force, @ Utah

Utah: @Wyoming, Colorado St., @ New Mexico, TCU, @ San Diego State, BYU

Of the three, Boise has the easiest road to 12-0. The only possible hiccup is Fresno St. If thisgame were being played anywhere but the "smurf turf", Fresno might have a shot. Boise is the most likely to go 12-0 based on schedule.

Utah has the next easiest road to 12-0. The Utes cannot overlook next week's matchup vs. Wyoming. With the events of last year in SLC, the cowboys are looking for revenge! Will the Utes faulter this week?....doubtful. TCU will be a tough game...probably the toughest test the Utes will see until Nov. 22.

BYU has looked unstopable this season and will rest of the year come as easily for the Cougars? Not likely. Playing @ TCU, @ Air Force, and @ Utah will truly test the highly touted BYU offense.

The BYU-Utah rivalry is unlike any other in the nation. Regardless of national rankings, the Utes and Cougars always play close and competitive games. The outcome of this Nov. 22 contest will mean the difference between either the Fiesta Bowl or the Las Vegas Bowl for the Mountain West champion.

Although Boise has the easier road, the winner of the BYU-Utah game will determine the BCS at-large bid in 2008 if the Utes and Cougars can avoid any hiccups to Mountain West Conference opponents.

GO UTES!!!

Bail outs

Sarah Palin

Although I am die-hard Mitt Romney fan, John McCain hit a home run with the selection of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate. She is an unapologetic conservative with a strong record of reform, ethics, and leadership. One of her more impressive moments came in 2004. As head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, Palin resigned and filed formal complaints in protest of unethical fellow Republicans. Governor Palin is also a staunch conservative with respect to wasteful government spending. When congress approved funding for the infamous "bridge to nowhere", Governor Palin said "thanks but no thanks to the bridge to nowhere". She later explained that if Alaskans wanted to build a bridge, they would do it themselves.

As quickly as Governor Palin was ending her announcement speech, liberals began chiding John McCain for selecting a running mate with such lack of experience. Liberals actually believe that the community organizer and junior senator is more experienced that a 16-year elected official? How can Barry H. Obama have more experience for the oval office when Governor Palin was in her 5th year as an elected official when Barry began running for State Senate??

Roy Spencer

Roy W. Spencer, former Senior Scientist for climate studies at NASA explained that "...about 38 out of every 100,000 molecules of air are CO2. It takes us about five years to add one more molecule to those 100,000 molecules of air. There is very little of it in the atmosphere and it is increasing very, very slowly". Another fact you will also never hear from the Al Gore crowd is that the planet naturally regulates CO2 levels. Agricultural productivity has increased by about 20% just because of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere.

CO2 is not a pollutant!! Spencer also explained that "It is necessary for life. The more we emit, the faster the vegetation grows and the faster the it is removed from the atmosphere".

How egotistical and self important are these environazis? They believe that everything revolves around them and actually think that humans can adversely effect something as complex as the climate of planet Earth.....

Global Warming Hoax

As a result of industrial growth since the mid 18th Century, humans have added greatly to the amount of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The burning of fossil fuels, loss of vegetation as well as the considerable increase in cattle populations have acted as the primary means of greenhouse gas production. The emission of aerosols, such as CFC’s, has also contributed to atmospheric changes (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2008).

The basic science of global warming is quite simple. The suns radiation comes into the Earth’s atmosphere and some of that energy is reflected back into space while some of the same energy is trapped by the earth’s atmosphere, keeping the climate relatively constant and mild. The problem posed by greenhouse gases and aerosols is that they thicken the atmosphere and trap more of the out-going infrared radiation, thus the atmosphere heats up worldwide (Guggenheim, 2006).

According to the Environmental Protection Agency's website, the addition of greenhouse gases and aerosols has changed the architecture of the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. The most recent UN International Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) argues that these changes in the atmosphere have influenced temperature, precipitation, storms, and sea levels (United Nations, 2007). However, these features of the climate also vary naturally as has been seen throughout the Earth's existence, so determining what fraction of climate changes are due to natural variability versus human activities is challenging (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2008).

As stated in the EPA estimate, "determining what fraction of climate changes are due to natural variability versus human activities is challenging". Because we live in a politically charged world, the media may provide multiple perspectives on the causes of global warming. From the Al Gore-Inconvenient Truth crowd, we receive dire projections of apocalyptic proportions if drastic actions are not taken to avert the man-made global climate crisis. One statistical argument that is raised by this documentary is centered on the melting of Greenland and West Antarctica. Al Gore states that “Greenland would raise sea levels 20 feet [worldwide] if it went”. According to this projection, Miami Beach, Fort Myers, Palm Beach, Tampa, and Lake Okeechobee, Florida would be completely under sea water along with much of the San Francisco Bay area, the Netherlands, Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Manhattan (Guggenheim, 2006).

In college, Al Gore took a class from Dr. Roger Revelle, who began measuring CO₂ in the atmosphere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean since 1958. Since the initial readings, atmospheric CO₂ levels have greatly risen. An Inconvenient Truth links these rising CO₂ levels and global warming to decreasing snowpack on Mt. Kilimanjaro. Specifically, Gore states “within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro” (Guggenheim, 2006).

Alternative media outlets present the issue a little differently. Recently, nationally syndicated radio host and TV personality Glenn Beck devoted the first chapter of his book, An Inconvenient Book, to the issue of global warming. Beck explains, "I am not a scientist...but I am a thinker. I have tried to boil down a ridiculous amount of information into some of the more interesting arguments from actual scientists known as 'skeptics'". In this chapter, Beck outlines the dangers and fallacies of making drastic environmental and economic changes in attempting to curb man-made global warming when we may not fully understand this phenomenon. In one of his more compelling arguments, Beck points to a central argument in Al Gore's documentary, the predicted ocean level rise as a result from man-made global warming and the melting of Greenland. Al Gore's predictions, as seen in An Inconvenient Truth are about 17 times higher than what the UN IPCC is expecting. Beck states that in Gore's predictions are "even five times higher than the high-end of the worst-case scenario painted by scientists who thought the UN report was too conservative” (Glenn Beck, 2007).

The most central argument to Al Gore's documentary was the correlation of CO₂ levels and global temperature increase. In Beck’s book, he quotes Dr. Bob Carter, a noted geologist and paleoclimate expert from the Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University as saying, “To say that CO₂ is the primary cause of temperature change is like saying lung cancer causes smoking” (Glenn Beck, 2007). Although a somewhat radical statement, Dr. Carter has a point. Beck explains that when you look at the graph of CO₂ levels and global temperatures more closely than is seen in An Inconvenient Truth, in many cases temperatures rise before CO₂ levels; sometimes between 800 -1,000 years earlier (Glenn Beck, 2007).

As an alternate theory to greenhouse gasses as the primary cause of global warming, an increasing number of scientists are pointing to the sun as a plausible culprit for climate change. Many of these scientists believe that sun activity has been at an 8,000 year high over the past 60 years and may be at least partly responsible for the warming trend. Beck quotes another paleoclimate expert, Paula Reimer from Queens University, as saying, ”A couple of years ago, I would not have said that there was any evidence for solar activity driving temperature on Earth….Now I think there is fairly convincing evidence.” (Glenn Beck, 2007).

There are mountains of studies, facts, and opinions, with more being published daily on global warming. With all of these seemingly contradicting studies, one thing is constant. The planet has warmed “about 0.74 degrees Celsius (+/-0.18 degree) in the last 100 years” (Glenn Beck, 2007). With one study saying that human kind is 100% responsible for the warming and the very next study saying that a further study is needed to confirm the validity of the previous study, we need to be careful before society and government jumps to conclusions about what may or may not be happening to our climate as a result of human activities and implement supposed solutions to try to curb these changes. I could not have said it any better myself as Glenn Beck did, “I believe we don’t fully understand the climate yet, and we must be careful until we do” (Glenn Beck, 2007).

Government has a history of making things worse well before they fix the actual problem. President Ronald Reagan once said “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”. Before we entrust governments with major problems, we as individuals need to take the lead. Each of us can do our part to take care of our surroundings and reduce our impact. Without sacrificing our way of life and going back to the dark-ages, we can do a lot. We as stewards of this planet need to take care of it and do all we can to keep it beautiful and able to sustain life.

Bibliography

Glenn Beck, K. B. (2007). An Inconvenient Book. New York: Threshold Editions.

Guggenheim, D. (Director). (2006). An Inconvenient Truth [Motion Picture].

United Nations. (2007). Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Valencia, Spain.

United States Environmental Protection Agency. (2008, April 15). Climate change; EPA. Retrieved April 15, 2008, from United States Environmental Protection Agency web site: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/

You Tube Debate

I find it quite interesting when the Democrats begin planting questions in a Republican debate. It seems that Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have greater fear of their Republican counterpart than of each other. Could it be that the "Republican smear machine" scares the bat crap out of the Dems so bad that they feel the need to protect themselves even before the general election begins? What could be striking such great fear in these stoic, all-knowing, and all powerful Democrats? I believe it is something that we as common-sense American conservatives take for granted; the truth. The Dems do not want to expose their true beliefs to the American people. They do not want to expose their core 'values' to the American people. They know that in doing so, we will see them for the incompetent, selfish, socialistic, and deceiving, politicians they truly are.
The Republicans don't see the need to call out the Dems until the general election; let the liberals duke it out and beat each other up before we get the chance to challenge their craziness. Although many of the Republicans referr to Mrs. Clinton, or Mr. Obama, they due so only to point out how wrong the other side of the isle truly is. No need to fear, Dems...no need to fear....yet.