Global Warming News n Views

The headline is “Expert Says Artic Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea.” Sounds like your run-of-the-mill global warming alarmism, huh?

Heck, the story’s in the New York Times. Must be authoritative, huh? Not only that, but it’s supposed to happen “within a decade or two.”

Gosh, we’d be impressed with this level of authoritative alarmism. Except for one thing. It’s a headline and story from a 1969 news article in the New York Times. That’s NINETEEN SIXTY NINE. Four decades ago.

Of course, if you keep yelling that the sky is falling, sooner or later it might.

Who cares about climate change? And what should we call it?

I decided to answer these grand questions, using Google Trends, a tool which allows you to plot search frequency over time and compare different search terms and different countries. It’s a great little tool although it still lacks some important functionality and sometimes the results are a little… unexpected.

The first thing I wanted to know was what terms people are searching for on the topic of climate change. My impression was that the term greenhouse effect was used when the science first started floating around in the 70s and 80s, then global warming came to describe the overall problem, and more recently climate change took over as the dominant phrase.

Adding to a growing list of disappointments for the Global Warming zealots, French geophysicist Claude Allegre has changed his views:

Washington DC - One of the most decorated French geophysicists has converted from a believer in manmade catastrophic global warming to a climate skeptic. This latest defector from the global warming camp caps a year in which numerous scientific studies have bolstered the claims of climate skeptics. Scientific studies that debunk the dire predictions of human-caused global warming have continued to accumulate and many believe the new science is shattering the media-promoted scientific “consensus” on climate alarmism.

Claude Allegre, a former government official and an active member of France’s Socialist Party, wrote an editorial on September 21, 2006 in the French newspaper L’Express titled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”

Larson, the?vice chairman of the House Democratic caucus, is?hauling the House’s select committee on global warming and energy independence up to Hartford for a Monday morning hearing. The committee is set to gather at 11 a.m. at the Mark Twain House on Farmington Avenue.

The witness panel for this field hearing on?”the?economics of global warming”?is full of Connecticut people, including officials with United Technologies Co. and General Electric and experts from Yale.

According to the advisory, “This hearing will examine the current and future business opportunities and challenges that global warming presents.”

Global warming alarmists in recent years have applauded Europeans for fighting the warming boogey man the way Americans so far have been hesitant to.

Before Americans buy into the European way, they might check how things are developing across the pond where the fight against so-called global warming has been waged longer, and stronger - with (gee here’s a surprise) unintended consequences. (Emphases ours)

Just as Chicken Little was up on Capital Hill, telling Congress that the sky is falling, and we only have 10 years to fix it before the earth spontaneously combusts… we have a major voice for the eco-commies saying ‘whoops, I was wrong after all… global warming isn’t cause by man… so sorry for all that alarmism!’ This from the Australian (full article as?it is extremely important to stop the eco-commies before they destroy?America as?we know it):

Last Thursday, Al Gore sought to whip up declining global warming hysteria in Washington, D.C. by challenging our nation to produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy sources within the next 10 years.? Gore not only doesn’t care about how much more this is going to cost taxpayers and consumers, he wants to take advantage of the high cost of oil and gas to force the nation off fossil fuels.? He claims that if we don’t reduce global warming in the next ten years, we may never recover from his imaginary, apocalyptic environmental crisis.? He believes the single most important policy change would be placing a carbon tax on burning oil and coal.

An article by Kenton Williston in EE Times
suggests that the issues of Global Warming and Intelligent Design are
comparable. He says that you need faith that the facts are wrong to support
Intelligent Design and to oppose Global Warming, and that there is no place
for such faith in the field of Electrical Engineering. So, he’s disturbed to find out that not
every EE agrees with him.

The trouble with his posting is that global warming is primarily an issue
of economics. What decisions we make depends on the costs we face. After all
if global warming posed no risks, no costs of adjustment, no changes in
lifestyle, who would care whether it was happening or not. But some people
claim that we must pay huge costs now, or suffer much larger costs later.
So, to get the correct answer on what to do about global warming, you must
consult economists.

Hardly a day goes by that global warming isn’t blamed for something. Did you see this one?

“A top Democrat told high school students gathered at the U.S. Capitol thursday that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Darfur, which led to the ‘blackhawk down’ battle between U.S. troops and Somali rebels.”

Right. Personally, we tend to think global warming is responsible for the current below par performance of our Beloved Dodgers. But we digress.

Here’s something you can blame on global warming. Every dime spent trying to fix this unfixable, non-problem is a dime that can’t be spent doing something that’s actually profitable or redeeming.

In Canada they have announced the intention to waste $2 billion to pump carbon dioxide into depleted oil reservoirs, to hide it there eternally, while at the same time they lament the lack of $150 million to expand the mental health wing of a new hospital.