Apollo moonwalker Dr. Buzz Aldrin announces his climate skepticism

The video on the bottom is classic

Smokey (06:42:05) :
You are welcome. I found that little surprise when doing a web search of Buzz Aldrin. Hip Hop just “isn’t my thing” (generational/cultural separation), but Snoop Dog did score positive points with me with his work with Buzz on that. Everyone, also be sure to visit http://buzzaldrin.com/
Don’t forget fellow bloggers that the Eagle landed with less than 25 seconds of descent fuel remaining.
From a NASA web document is this quote:
Fjeld – “An engine cut-out at any height above 10 feet would have produced a touchdown harder than the landing gear was designed to withstand.”
I suspect that for anyone to challenge the “reality” of that experience would be just about the worst thing a person could say to another person. I’d bet that “reality was never so real” that day on the Moon, 20 July 1969.

One of the big problems with “global warming” is the name that was coined for it. People have a hard time wrapping their minds around global warming when 26 states experienced sub-normal Spring and early Summer temperatures.
What we need is a PR firm to change the image the media portrays of this phenomena. With a different set of descriptors it may be possible for people to grasp the idea that what matters here is that the extremes — whatever their source, natural, manmade or “all of the above” — are becoming the new norms. That’s what makes this frightening. Much of the African subcontinent has been dwindling away for decades for lack of rain. Excessive drought plagues much of the Western US to the point where water rationing is inevitable, with the golf courses and suburban sprawl winning out to the farmers in the Central Valley of California, a nationwide, if not worldwide “breadbasket” agricultural region. In other cases, the opposite problem prevails: Excessive rains, unseasonable temperatures throwing crop yields off kilter even as vector-borne illnesses manifest in places formerly unplagued by malaria, among other leading killers worldwide. The outcome of this phenomena we’re spending too much time arguing about and not enough time tackling head-on is that food production seems less likely to be a “given” — the yo-yo effect of famine to plenty — whereas water wars seem inevitable in the decades to come when one considers that even the best of systems will be taxed purely by virtue of the world population explosion. Erratic climate change is the last thing we need.
The nail in the coffin was to characterize this complex process as little more than “global warming”. At this rate, the vast majority of people will never “get it”. When you’re talking to half of the people in the US and Canada who loathe their frigid winters, all that comes to mind is blissful dreams of a California or Florida-like climate year around. What doesn’t come to mind is the idea that hurricanes, tornados and monsoons are becoming more destructive. Already talk that these “100-year floods” are arriving every 10 years or so instead. Global warming is not stacking up to be a winter shut-in’s sunny daydream but climate on the war path. We can spend all our time disagreeing over the particulars, or we can do what little we can about the portion of influence we do control. Whatever else might be to blame — even justifiably so — the only part of this climatic “recipe” we can control is our own behavior. And while I see too many problems with cap & trade to count — and, in fact, fear that it will not achieve its stated goals as much as it will line the pockets of select industry captains — the bottom line is that we must put our collective brainpower and technology together in pursuit of a solution. Arguments, by contrast, are time wasters, and time we do not have on our side if we want to say to our kids and grandchildren that we honestly did our best to curtail whatever percentage humanity has contributed to this chaos.
To Buzz and all the other climate change doubters: Acknowledging the illogic that 6 billion people amount to zero impact ought to be enough to get folks off the fence. To buy into a politically-motivated notion that defies scientific consensus is statistically, mathematically speaking, nonsense. There are far too many aspiring consumers joining the developing world each and every day — more than half the world’s population in China and India alone — to entertain the notion that we can simply dismiss our own presence in this picture.
To describe this as “global warming” romanticizes the situation to many a cold-climate resident and media pundit, whereas to call it “climate change” is a dangerously vanilla euphemism. “Climate Chaos” is the only phraseology, IMHO, that makes the point effectively. Therein lies our starting point when it comes to solution building: Semantics that are specific and sufficiently evocative to matter to the average Joe or Jane.

re: Stefan – “But what is their actual plan?”
Hi Stefan,
I’m the author of the Green Agenda website. I’ve been struggling to answer that particular question for several years now. It is clear to many people that AGW, whether true or just part of a natural cycle, is being used to push various other agendas. This became absolutely clear to me while working for various environmental organizations. So I started to intensively research the most alarmist and influential leaders of the AGW movement. I was absolutely amazed to discover that they were all very closely associated with an organization called ‘the Club of Rome.’
I am not a conspiratorial person by nature and was faced with a dilemma when I first read their reports. But, in the end, I came to the conclusion that there are two possibilities – either the CoR wrote all these reports and setup a vast network of supporting organizations just for fun *or* they actually believe what they have written and are working hard to implement their agenda.
In 1991 the CoR released a lengthy report called The First Global Revolution in which they state:
“It would seem that humans need a common motivation, namely a common adversary, to organize and act together in the vacuum; such a motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one invented for the purpose. New enemies therefore have to be identified. New strategies imagined, new weapons devised. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” – you can go to Google Books and read it for yourself on page 75.
So, who belongs to this Cub of Rome and its two sub-groups (the Clubs of Budapest and Madrid)? – Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev, David Rockefeller, Kofi Annan, Ted Turner, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Maurice Strong, Javier Solana, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Tony Blair, George Soros, Bill Gates, Stephen Schneider, Garret Hardin, Deepak Chopra, Desmond Tutu – to name just a few.
Freaky stuff!! If you go to the Club of Rome website right now the first item in their ‘current news’ section refers to a briefing delivered by the CoR to G8 officials in preparation for the upcoming G8 meeting. The second item is a summary report from the Club of Rome’s ‘strategy planning retreat’ with 150 senior UNESCO officials. The joint CoR/UNESCO communiqué states:
“We are at the end of an era – a turning point in history. We are approaching the threshold of runaway climate change. We underline the urgency of radical action to reduce emissions, by both immediate action and longer-term measures; to stress to political leaders the non-linear nature of the processes at work which will generate sudden change; and to assert that the overriding priority must be to avert the impending risk of catastrophic climate change.”
The basic worldview of the CoR is that modern industrial society is destroying the earth and (to use their words) “our only hope is to transform humanity into an interdependent global sustainable community, based on reverence and respect for the Earth.” If you wish to read some of the CoR reports I discuss some of them here – http://www.green-agenda.com/turningpoint.html

Saying that we are responsible for Global Warming is like saying that the cavemen who lived in the ice age are responsible for ending it by building campfires to heat their abode and to cook their meat.
If you need further proof that manmade global warming is a hoax..just Google
the word “Volcano”. You will find some awsome video of mother nature at her most extreme. Three of these volcanoes going off at the same time (not necessarily in the same place) puts more crap into our atmosphere in 24hrs than we have since the start of the industrial revolution. “nuff said….

I think Ol’ Buzz is actually being very intelligent when he states that climate is always changing. I fear that the current global cooling will either be short lived or of too small a magnitude. By focusing on cooling as refutation of the AGW prediction, we leave ourselves open to failure. If temperatures should rise again, the Warmers will claim victory. What I and many others believe is that the climate will get cooler, and warmer, but that anthropogenic forces are minimal in this changing climate. Neither warming nor cooling proves or disproves their hypothesis, this is the whole problem.

As an additional comment, if anyone believes in the Apocalyse then why bother with worrying about something out of our control anyways. Of course that is to say that Sir Issac Newton (who was a pretty smart guy by the way) predicted the end of the earth in 2060. So really, does it really matter ?

Ted Annonson (13:35:25) :
And a couple more quotes from ” The Green Agenda”.
How does one counter this kind of belief?

A one week nationwide complete electrical power outage would do wonders to focus our attention on how much we depend on it.
Maybe the sun will furnish us with a well aimed CME [is that the correct acronym?].
Not that I really wish the above but it would be so nice to have SOMETHING to shut up these modern(?) day Cassandras and shut down the cap ‘n trade farce.

Pete W:
“Call me selfish then, because I am concerned about the ability of my great grandchildren to be able to live a life as rich as the one I have had.”
You don’t even know what any conditions will be like for your great grandchildren, if any. Oh the subtlety of the “jam tomorrow” merchants, while filling their own pockets (not with jam, I presume). Yet another old story in new terminology.
Your statement contains an oxymoron: being concerned about your great grandchildren vs. selfishness.
—
We suffer from a lot of silly people, who often think they are very clever, who tell us there is no reality; we make our own reality.
Dr. Buzz would be the ideal teacher. Smack them on the nose, and while they are mopping up the mess, tell them to create a reality where it never happened.

@theshank (20:25:42) :
“paying attention to our environment and conserving natural resources is obviously a responsibility we need not take lightly. I think everyone can agree to that.”
Well, I for one do NOT agree. Man does best when the environment is altered to suit our needs – build roads, bridges, dams with hydroelectric plants, ports, cities, railroads, tunnels, airports; and houses, commercial buildings, hospitals, schools, factories, power plants, chemical plants and refineries. Also, cut down forests to create farmland for crops for food to eat. Who wants to live in caves, or in the open air on the ground, or in trees, and as hunter/gatherers?
Conserving natural resources is NOT how man’s standard of living increased from stone-age standards to modern western civilization standards. Instead, life improves and standard of living improves as natural resources are consumed. No natural resource has ever left the planet – except for isolated pounds of spacecraft. Other than those spacecraft, not one atom of iron, or copper, or any other natural resource has disappeared.
All of the natural resources, and that is an absolute ALL, is still on the earth, available to anyone with the smarts and ingenuity and cheap energy to form it to his/her needs.
I write about this entire matter here:
http://energyguysmusings.blogspot.com/2009/03/intro-environmental-science-versus.html