New Federal Climate Change Agency Forming
Posted February 8, 2010
WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is proposing a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.
Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting.
Kent comments:
Don’t you love it: ‘climate change’ is ‘also known as global warming.’
Of course, ‘climate change’ could just as well be global cooling. But as far as I know, the ‘human beings are creating too much CO2 which is causing the earth to warm’ thesis wouldn’t be helped much if the globe were cooling. The fact is, it is not clear that the earth is warming right now in the short term. But as you can now tell if you pay attention, mere matters of fact do not matter much in this debate.
The point of the ‘widespread concern’ (mostly spread by groups like the Associated Press) ‘climate change’ is mostly concerned to create more government agencies as revealed in the headline above.
I have tried to keep a webpage about all this. It is still a fun place to visit. I call it the Environmentalism Watermelon. That name is the best way I can think of to describe what most ‘environmentalism’ is really all about. Like a watermelon, it is ‘green’ on the outside and ‘red’ on the inside. (And when I say ‘red’ I mean socialist/communist/statist of some variety.)
Today’s newsroom discussions of how all the cold and snow around the United States are the result of ‘global warming’ would be funny if they were not so stupid.
This topic quickly becomes very technical and sometimes hard to follow. For the ‘true believers’ (in the most perverse sense of that phrase) in ‘global climate change’ facts simply do not matter. But if you want to see something that is from a source completely outside this whole debate that will open your eyes, should then need opening, check out “The Big Chill” from Nova. Here are just a few highlights:
During the past billion years, the Earth's climate has fluctuated between warm periods - sometimes even completely ice-free - and cold periods, when glaciers scoured the continents.
Between 52 and 57 million years ago, the Earth was relatively warm. Tropical conditions actually extended all the way into the mid-latitudes (around northern Spain or the central United States for example), polar regions experienced temperate climates, and the difference in temperature between the equator and pole was much smaller than it is today. Indeed it was so warm that trees grew in both the Arctic and Antarctic, and alligators lived in Ellesmere Island at 78 degrees North.
We are still in the midst of the third major cooling period that began around 3 million years ago, and its effect can be seen around the world
Through a million year period, the average amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is affected by four fluxes: flux of carbon due to (1) metamorphic degassing, (2) weathering of organic carbon, (3) weathering of silicates, (4) burial of organic carbon. Degassing reactions associated with volcanic activity and the combining of organic carbon with oxygen release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Conversely, the burial of organic matter removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Our climate today is actually a warm interval between these many periods of glaciation. The most recent period of glaciation, which many people think of as the "Ice Age", was at its height approximately 20,000 years ago.
You should read the whole thing, but it is clear from this informative little article on the history of the earth’s climate that the whole political debate about ‘global warming’ is idiotic at best. It is an excuse for governments to control even more than they already do. It is easy to see this if you look even slightly beyond the nitwits at AP and the talking heads on television.
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