Global Warming News n Views

One of the wonderful things about global warming is that no matter what happens with the weather, it can always be blamed on global warming. Of course, that only works if you’re one of the Goracle’s Kool-Aid drinkers. Any kind of weather symptoms whatsoever mean that global warming is real. Really hot? Global warming. Really cold? Global warming. Too many hurricanes? Global warming. Too few hurricanes? Global warming. Flooding due to excessive rain? Global warming. Droughts due to not enough rain? Global warming.

The National Climatic Data Center just released their global temperature data for May and also for meteorological spring/fall (March, April, May). Here is a summary…..

–The Mar/Apr/May combined period was seventh warmest on record.

–May 2008 (combined land and ocean) was the eighth warmest on record.

The British and the Chinese understand global warming has driven their record flooding. The United States? Not so much.

Although you wouldn’t know it from most U.S. media coverage (here or here or here), the record “once-in-a-hundred-year flooding” the Midwest now seems to be getting every decade or so is precisely what scientists have been expecting from the warming.

A 2004 analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center found an increase during the 20th century of “precipitation, temperature, streamflow, heavy and very heavy precipitation and high streamflow in the East.” They found a 14 percent increase in “heavy rain events” of greater than 2 inches in one day, and a 20 percent increase in “very heavy rain events”-best described as deluges-greater than 4 inches in one day. These extreme downpours are precisely what is predicted by global warming scientists and models.

In the book Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships Janja Lalich, Ph.D. & Michael D. Langone, Ph.D. created a list of common cult characteristics. It’s not intended to serve as “cult scale”, but it does serve as a layman’s scorecard for deciding when a religion has cultish tendencies. After reading the list I was struck by how many on the list applied to social and political fads like Global Warming. Is Environmentalism a religion? Could Global Warming be considered a cult within that religion? Let’s take a look at Lalich & Langone’s cult characteristics and see for ourselves.

The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).

Here are a collection of videos featuring debates on the anthropogenic global warming theory. This was originally collected by a Free Republic user named Entrepreneur, but the FR post had only links. I wanted to put all the videos on one page, so a person could just watch one after another without going anywhere.

When the man who coined the phrase “global warming” speaks up, people tend to pay attention. So it was that when Wallace Broecker, a professor at Columbia University, recently called for the use of millions of giant tree-like “scrubbers” (see here for another recent example) to fight global warming, observers didn’t immediately dismiss the scheme as harebrained.

The BBC reports that Broecker, addressing a literary festival in the U.K., said that roughly 20 million scrubbers would be needed to suck up all the carbon dioxide produced in the U.S. A grand total of 60 million would be needed worldwide to trap all carbon emissions; he estimated that the entire scheme would cost $600 billion a year — though how he came up with that figure is unclear. Each scrubber would be 50 ft high and 8 ft in diameter and use a special plastic to capture CO2. The gas could be either pumped underground or liquefied under pressure.