The stupid, it burns. OTOH, he’s with Gore and Hansen and there’s press with him, so maybe he’s just being sociable . Get a load of this from Richard Branson’s blog, CO2 can apparently contradict solar forcing due to the Earth’s precession wobble and orbit:
Here’s the money quote:
The good news is we now know how to heat up the world. We just release an excess of carbon into it. So any time we’re heading to an ice age again that is what we can do to stop it.
Yeah, sure, that’ll go over well with the people that think Branson, Gore, and Hansen are heroes. And walking from Scotland to North Africa? Really?
But I agree with Sir Richard on one point; warmth is far preferable to an ice sheet. You can’t dodge ice sheets but you can take steps to stay cool.
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“If you look at the history of the world we are normally in an ice age”
Making the suggestion that our planets natural state is a ball of ice to lay the blame of the observed interglacial warming on anthropogenic carbon dioxide is a dishonest and very transparent publicity stunt, I wasn’t convinced by the first 30 years of lies promoting the weak idea of AGW, changing the parameters of the argument every year is very reveling of how weak their position is, we’ll be decades into an ice age before the hard core element of AGW admits that they are wrong.
The rest of the world (frozen or not) will have moved on!
The sad thing is that these guys have so much influence on politics and media.
Ultra liberal moviemaker Camerron will now move to and settle in New Zealand as the US is falling apart after 2 decades of big money, big philantrophists, big hollywood and big government.
Poor New Zealand, these people should stay where they are and contributed so much to change for the worse with their gigantic political footprints.
Breathing all that rarified air at the top of the global entrepreneurial mountain has left Sir Richard seeking new challenges. Despot, deity or crusader? Only the latter remains acceptable these days, so sadly we’re stuck with his grandstanding nonsense, and that of his successors
From the above link to his web site.
“The bad news is that we’re are in danger of releasing so much carbon that we could fry our beautiful earth and our great-grandchildren too.”
Ah yes, fried grandchildren! Personally, I prefer bacon. 🙂
Branson is a capo di tutti of the biofuels mob whose quest for bio-jetfuel has aided in worldwide starvation, deforestation and the deaths and land confiscation of farmers trying to grow food instead of biofuels. Here we see him hard at work researching and advocating for the end of global warming.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/04/20/article-1171739-04888F37000005DC-717_470x419.jpg
He certainly seems to fit right in with others that are enriching themselves (Al Gore) while enjoying an excessive wealth driven standard of living from occupations that spew thousands of tons of CO2. The only “bit_h slapping” of Mother Earth that is comparable to Branson’s fleets of CO2 spewing jets, would be if Branson set of the Amazon Forest on fire. What morons in the global warming movement looked at Branson and thought, “Hey this guy would be the perfect choice to represent a movement to reduce CO2”?
Andy says.
Branson doesn’t need to be smart. He just needs to be smarter than average.
Being a greenie is profitable, it’s happy-face PR, and it makes him feel good in side. Why would he want to look any closer than that. And once you are committed, you are committed. No going back. No saying “oops”. Just fight to prove that whatever you said last year is still true.
Thats it really, You’ve got to think about what make sense.Imagine if he was a denier!! He’d have a lot more enemies accusing him of polluting world with all his carbon burning aircraft.
As for not grounding them all, he was asked that recently and his response was, “BA would simply take up the slack!
I was that kind of greeny once, but with no financial interest in it, I’m free to consider the evidence.
Repent, Richard! Sell your evil tar sands burning airplanes, boats and cars! Swear off the big tar sands burning cruise liner that is taking you to the paradise of cold! REPENT!
I just don’t get it. It is ok for them to do, not us.
More Richard please…keep on message…keep the messages coming.
Given the widespread and intense loathing of Richard Branson (have you ‘ever’ met anyone who says they like him?) and the fact that he is a shameless self publicist and noted hypocrite….every time he opens that odious hole of a mouth – the Global Warming scare dies off a little faster!
From Maggie L. Fox’s blog:
‘We have just listened to an inspiring talk from Jill Bolte-Taylor, who speaks of tending the garden of the mind. Jill says, “I care about the climate crisis because I care about mental health.”
She sees the climate crisis as a projection of our mental health. “If we can help shift our society to being more in the present and focusing on the relationship between things,” she says, “then we can communicate at a different level and work toward solutions.”’
—
BS psychobabble as well as climatebabble. Are there any sane normal fare-paying passengers on this cruise? If so, has anyone jumped overboard yet?
“Come back, I want to tend the garden of your mind!” Pompous simpleton.
I think Branson has a valid point — According to two recent survey articles by Dana Royer, during most of the past 550 million (not thousand) years, CO2 was in the range 1000-3000 ppm. During only two episodes — the past few million years and the late Carboniferous-early Permian period — did it fall below 500 ppm, and according to Royer, both of these were periods of repeated ice ages.
It’s hard to say whether low CO2 is causing coolness through a reduced GHG effect or whether coolness is causing low CO2 through oceanic absorption (or both). However, Royerestimates that less than 500 ppm is required for glaciation, and that below 1000 is relatively cool.
This suggests that if we can CO2 above 500 ppm, it might stave off or at least delay the next glaciation. There may be a solar trigger as Anthony suggests, but clearly a warmer earth will be less susceptible.
Unlike a little warming that makes present-day wastelands like Siberia and Minnesota actually habitable, 😉 having a KM or more of ice over N Am and N Europe would be a true environmental disaster.
Of course, it may be that no matter how hard we pump out CO2, the biosphere and oceans will eventually start gobbling it up, but it sounds like it’s worth a shot to try to “correct” the current (past few million years) abnormally low CO2.
Of course the solution is not government action to encourage CO2 production, but rather government inaction to allow people to use the cheapest fuel they can find. I’d be concerned if CO2 threatened to pass 1000 ppm, but we’ll be out of fossil fuels long before then.
Note that CO2 in the geohistorically normal range 1000-3000 ppm is perfectly consistent with healthy corals, planktons and mollusks, since most of that limestone we see everwhere was laid down under these conditions. Some species may move north if the oceans warm, but life will go on.
Richard: Only 10,000 years ago you could walk from Scotland to North Africa on hundreds of feet of ice.!
Al: Yes, then the rocks under the surface of the Earth were warmed to 10 million degrees!
Richard: The good news is we now know how to heat up the world.
Al: Yes, we can convert carbon credits to degrees and inject them in the Earth!
Richard: If we move quickly and get on top of this issue we could regulate the earth’s temperature so that we need never go back into another ice age.
Al: Yes, purchase and dontate some carbon credits to Redi-Heat at http://www.redi-heat.com/fleeceme
Richard: Work to do!
Al: Yes, Act Now!!! Visa, Master Card and Paypal are accepted.
O M G ! ! ! What-was-that ! ! !
A communist?
A nazzi?
A fascist?
No, just another kind of paradoxical socialist extremist fundamentalist, Sir Environmentalist to the rescue: Save the planet b(u)y rocket fuel to the stars!
Stock photography proves that ice is a thing of the past and that women like to laugh while eating salad alone: http://thehairpin.com/2011/01/women-laughing-alone-with-salad
Al: Yes, purchase and dontate some carbon credits to Redi-Heat at
Andrew, don’t worry about the mis-spell Branson is not only niave but also dislexic
Charles Gerard Nelson says:
February 1, 2012 at 11:33 am
His children are just as self-centred and arrogant.
I’ll say it again: “Al Gore, Richard Branson and Jim Hansen go to Antarctica…” sounds like the setup for a joke… because it is.
From Nature mag
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101022/full/news.2010.558.html?s=news_rss
“Climate change caused by black carbon, also known as soot, emitted during a decade of commercial space flight would be comparable to that from current global aviation, researchers estimate. The findings, reported in a paper in press in Geophysical Research Letters, suggest that emissions from 1,000 private rocket launches a year would persist high in the stratosphere, potentially altering global atmospheric circulation and distributions of ozone. The simulations show that the changes to Earth’s climate could increase polar surface temperatures by 1 deg C, and reduce polar sea ice by 5-15%.”
Whah! Better ground your tourist spacecraft as well as your airplanes, Richard, before you Destroy The Planet!
I think Sir Richard is confusing history with movie…
“…everything from 30° north and south of the equator turns to absolute zero (–273°C) turning the Southern United States, Mexico, Central America, north of South America, and Africa into an ice desert…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Zero_%28film%29
A good flick for the cruise.
Branson Hansen and Gore
(Oh my!)
http://s158.photobucket.com/albums/t81/thatsanicepicture/CAGW/?action=view¤t=BransonHansenandGore.jpg
John:
Yes we can tell that ice did NOT extend to Africa at the last glacial MAXIMUM. You could have walked from Scotland to North Africa on dry land, but not on ice. There is a map of sea level in my post at http://suspectterrane.blogspot.com/2010/04/neanderthal.html
at the end of the post. You can see that lowered sea level allowed one to make that trek. What we must understand however, is that 10,000 years ago was NOT glacial maximum for the Wisconsin glacial epoch. Glacial maximum occurred about 18,000 years ago and ablation reached what we now consider an interglacial stage (the Holocene – see http://suspectterrane.blogspot.com/2011/10/anthrop-obscene.html) at 11,500 years ago.
He is wrong, but we have to chalk it up to the usual sloppy, loose, sound-bite, headline grabbing hyperbole typical of Gore and his ilke.Remeber that according to St Gore the Earth is several million degrees hot just a few kilometers below its surface.
A little true story about Richard:
Many years ago when Richard was planning to fly across the Pacific as a passenger in a balloon, he approached a mate of mine who worked for him at his airline. Richard wanted to find an aeroplane and pilot who could fly up to the balloon, fly alongside it and resupply it in flight. Ah well!
The moral of the story is, if you suspect the oncoming of another ice age, then it would be good to get yourself a set of skates.
R. Shearer says:
February 1, 2012 at 10:43 am
Bigfoot. And people take him just as serious.
The ignorant/stupid wealthy, how society loves to associate wealth/popularity with the property of some sort of knowledge and insight. Branson is one of many where society confuses wealth with intelligence, keeping in mind some very high IQ types can say and do some incredibly ignorant unwise things.
@Brent Hargreaves:
Well, a moment of web searching shows it’s easy to find lots of remnants of the prior forest type outside the Islands:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauroide
You might also want to look through:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_forest
which covers more global forests of the same type (but various species) for a list of overlapping species to asses just how MUCH of the Lauroide is compose of unique species and how much is just an isolate of a broad type…
As to where rumors start, well, I suggest checking at the UN and WWF…