There seems to be some really bad news for those uneducated and over educated alarmists who jumped on Al Gore’s self serving Climate Change Bandwagon. It is amusing watching the political sponsors backpedal and distance themselves from this “important” issue that they were so recently extolling. Both Barrack Obama and John McCain drank the Al Gore Kool-aide on Global Warming but now are suffering from the effects of unintended consequences as their support for ethanol as a fossil fuel replacement is causing alarming rises in food prices and creating worldwide food shortages. Apparently the politicians along with many of the trendy fashion setters on the East and West Coasts fail to understand that corn is not just eaten, it is used in a wide variety of ways – like corn syrup. John McCain has joined other GOP politicians in proposing that the Environmental Protection Age (aka We know what’s best for you agency) in loosening federal mandates on ethanol in the fuel supply. Barrack Obama in his usual breathtaking grasp of problems and solutions stated that “this is just something we are going to have to deal with”. Very decisive and I’m sure he HOPES that someone somewhere will come up with a solution while he is focused on CHANGE.
It is understandable that Al Gore has led the charge to de-industrialize the Western Powers, the US in particular, because after all he has admitted at a March 1st conference that he has a financial stake in various “green” companies that are pushing alternative energy sources. But this must be placed in context with his alarmist warnings “that what is at stake here is our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization.” But it seems that in light of recent developments both McCain and Obama are moving away from Gore and his “inconvenient truth” which was never the whole truth and certainly self-serving. What are these “recent developments?” Well it seems amidst the dire warnings from the Goreacle that the Earth was in imminent danger of becoming the “scorched Earth “ due to global warming, we are now faced with a cooling planet.
What science has learned from that old fashioned scientific standby – observation – and not easily manipulated computer models – is that temperatures on Earth have been cooling since 1998. Arctic sea ice is growing and the Antarctic summer thaw began later because of colder temperatures. Furthermore a report in Nature projects that cooler ocean currents are going to cause at least a decade of colder weather. This projection follows two straight mild hurricane seasons. This last winter was the worst that has been experienced in the US and Canada in some time and the snowfall in Michigan was the worst they have experienced in the last 50 years. And all of this happened in spite of a rise in carbon dioxide emissions.
These are facts which the Goreacle and other alarmists would rather not consider even though reputable climatologists have been sounding the warning that the Earth’s climate is a great deal more complex than a self-serving oracle like Gore realizes and that these dire warnings are very pre-mature. Nevertheless this debate is far from over but the spike in food prices and growing food shortages worldwide show the folly of premature action and a failure to understand the ever changing Earth and the scientists who study the Earth and its climate. Recently there was a great deal of media attention over a large calving glacier but what was not given the same amount of media attention was the explanation offered by a University of Alabama scientist (Roy Spencer) who dismissed all of the concerns by pointing out that this “happens every 150 years”. This is very indicative of the way the whole climate change hysteria has been handled by the media. In the early 19th Century Charles Lyell postulated the “Theory of Uniformitarianism” which essentially says that the geological processes that we see today are the same processes that have always existed. This means that it is very rare – if it occurs at all – for something to happen that has never happened before.
There has been concern over the Great Lakes and their falling water levels. This has been viewed as another example of global warming and environmental destruction brought on by irresponsible human activity. However, the Army Corps of Engineers who monitors these things has reported that Lakes Ontario and Erie are closer to record high water marks than they are to their low water marks and this is after just ONE snowy winter. Perhaps it is time for the environmental alarmists to re-examine their position now that it seems that so many of their concerns seem to be unfounded or at least not demonstrable based on empirical data. Computer models can be manipulated and must be verified based on actual observations. Instead of supporting his “Inconvenient Truth” self-serving hype and the de-industrialization of America based on the Kyoto Protocol, maybe it is time for Al Gore to listen to scientists specializing in the climate rather than psychology, sociology, or other unrelated disciplines.
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