Live feed for Obama's 'Climate Speech' today at 1:55PM EDT

This is a work in progress.
This issue of “carbon pollution” got me to thinking: why put it this way.? Two sylables instead of 5? Car-bon-Di-Ox-ide.
So I got a copy of the transcript and started searching
“pollution” (37 times)
“carbon pollution” (30 times !!)
“carbon dioxide” (2 times, both in paragraph 8 (of 94).
“greenhouse” (6 times)
Then I saw some whoppers. Not bending of facts, not misrepresentations, but things that are just not so. I quote paragraph 15 (all of it emphasis mine)

15. So the question is not whether we need to act. The overwhelming judgment of science — of chemistry and physics and millions of measurements — has put all that to rest. Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that to rest. They’ve acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it.

Well the biggie is “Ninety-seven percent of scientists“. Not climate scientists, not scientiests who express an opinion, not 97% of papers that express an opinion. There is no data to support whatever 97% of the entire population of “scientists” believe.
I would wager, “put that to rest” is a concept that 97% of scientists are more likely to disagree with in a matter of science.
“planet is warming” — at least has warmed, but the last 15 years are more in doubt. But by how much? It has warmed before and cooled before.
“human activity is contributing” — again, by how much? Strawman.
As a work in progress, I started numbering the paragraphs and clauses to winnow out the checkable statements.
8. And what they’ve found, year after year, is that the levels of carbon pollution in our atmosphere have increased dramatically.
9. [Earth changing]
10a [12 hotest years in last 15]
10b. “…and ice in the Arctic shrank to its smallest size on record — <bfaster than most models had predicted it would. …”
11. ….The fact that sea level …, in New York Harbor, are now a foot higher than a century ago — that didn’t cause Hurricane Sandy,….
12a. Here at home, 2012 was the warmest year in our history.
12b. Midwest farms were parched by the worst drought since the Dust Bowl,
12c. and then drenched by the wettest spring on record.
12d. Western wildfires scorched an area larger than the state of Maryland.
12e. Just last week, a heat wave in Alaska shot temperatures into the 90s.
13 {pay for fire seasons]
14a Farmers see crops wilted one year, washed away the next;
14b. and the higher food prices get passed on to you, the American consumer.
14c. Mountain communities worry about what smaller snowpacks will mean for tourism —
14d. and then, families at the bottom of the mountains wonder what it will mean for their drinking water.
14e. Americans across the country are already paying the price of inaction in insurance premiums, state and local taxes, and the costs of rebuilding and disaster relief.
….to be continued.

I suppose that William Stoughton and Thomas Newton gave convincing speeches in their day. But that doesn’t change the fact that they were some of the officials involved in the Salam Witch Trials of 1692-93.

The episode is one of the most notorious cases of mass hysteria, and has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations and lapses in due process.
I bring this up because there are elements of “witch trials” in President Obama’s speech of 6/25.
Paragraph 12:
12a. The potential impacts go beyond rising sea levels.
12b. Here at home, 2012 was the warmest year in our history.
12c. Midwest farms were parched by the worst drought since the Dust Bowl,
12d. and then drenched by the wettest spring on record.
12e. Western wildfires scorched an area larger than the state of Maryland.
12f. Just last week, a heat wave in Alaska shot temperatures into the 90s.
12c: Even if true, the Dust Bowl years could not have been caused by “carbon pollution” So today’s droughts are caused by carbon pollution (witch) but not 1930’s?
12d: Same farmers? Don’t think so. Really, “on record”? by how much? And what “carbon pollution” model predicted record wet springs? Another cry of “Witch!”?
12e: the wildfires of 1988 were far bigger. Is it “carbon pollution” (witch) or is it mismanagement of the forests?
12f: Ok, Alaska had a brief heat wave (witch!) after a record setting snow season. http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130622/why-alaskas-heat-wave-bad-example-global-warming
12b: Ok, 1st in US, 9th (out of 34) Globally. We had a warm March. (Witch!)
Does “carbon pollution” = “Witch!”
Are unsatisfactory observations being blamed on the curse of an invisible gaseous witch?

Robert Prudhomme says:
June 25, 2013 at 11:01 am
To David Finnegan – Why not reduce CO2 to below 200. ppm { not possible } and we can kill all
all living things and save the planet. Of course if we were able to drop CO2 below 200-300ppm humans would stop breathing ….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A good site that describes the effects of CO2 on humans link says

…Having a normal level of CO2 in the lungs and arterial blood (40 mm Hg or about 5.3% at sea level) is imperative for normal health. Do modern people have normal CO2 levels? ? When reading the table below note that levels of CO2 in the lungs are inversely proportional to minute ventilation rates, in other words, the more air one breaths the lower the level of alveolar CO2….
Note that advanced stages of asthma can lead to lung destruction, ventilation-perfusion mismatch, and arterial hypercapnia causing further reduction in body oxygen levels.
Hypocapnia (CO2 deficiency) in the lungs and, in most cases, arterial blood is a normal finding for chronic diseases due to prevalence of chronic hyperventilation among the sick.
Furthermore, as we discovered before, over 90% of modern people (so called “normal subjects”) are also hyperventilators (see the link below to the Hyperventilation Table with over 20 medical research studies related to normal subjects). Hence, chronic hypocapnia is very common for modern man.
[lots of links to studies and more articles]
When chronically hyperventilating, should I experience all these bad effects? The above CO2 deficiency effects take place in all people. However, the degree of these problems and the symptoms (what is felt) are individual.

See the link CO2 and Lifestyle Diseases

….Yugoslavian doctors from Zagreb asked 90 asthmatics to do voluntary overbreathing (Mojsoski & Pavicic, 1990). All patients (100%) experienced symptoms of asthma attacks (chest tightness, wheezing, feeling of suffocation and lack of air).
In 1997, the American Journal of Cardiology published results of a similar study with the title, Hyperventilation as a specific test for diagnosis of coronary artery spasm (Nakao et. al, 1997). Over 200 heart disease patients were asked to hyperventilate, and as you probably guessed, all of them had coronary artery spasms (or symptoms of impending heart attacks).

Overbreathing or hyperventilating means you are not getting enough CO2. The ‘cure’ given to my Mom was to breath into a paper bag and rebreath an air mix much richer in CO2. At that point the hyperventilating would stop.
Many medical textbooks suggest defining hyperventilation based on arterial hypocapnia. The most common example of this is: Hyperventilation is a physiological state when the partial pressure of arterial CO2 is less than 35 mm Hg.
The take home is not only plants but humans are on the edge of CO2 starvation…