There is a new phrase, you know. Perhaps you didn't get the memo .. but what was once continually referred to as "global warming" is now just becoming "climate change." Why? Well, I suppose a few record cold winters around the world have made it a bit harder for the left and the eco-cultists to push the "warming" bit. Besides, as more and more is written more people come to understand that we're in a period of increased solar activity, and even those educated in government schools understand that increased solar activity might somehow cause a bit of warming here on Earth. So ... now it's "climate change," a much more vague term and thus harder to refute. Of course the climate is changing. The climate has been changing in one direction or another since there was a climate.Here's a couple of "climate change" news bits you might not have heard somewhere else.
Glaciers are retreating! Did you know that! Yup, retreating! It's that pesky climate change thing. But something rather odd is happening as the glaciers retreat. We finding evidence of civilization where those glaciers once stood! In Switzerland they're finding silver mines. That's right, silver mines. As the glacier retreats they're finding the mine shafts and the mining tools stacked up and waiting ... waiting for the mine workers to return as the winter snows melted. It seems that one year those winter snows didn't actually melt. Then year upon year passed and the snows grew deeper. Finally, a glacier. It was the little ice age! Now the little ice age is ending, the glaciers retreating, and evidence of civilization emerging where we've known nothing but ice. We're also finding water management structures built by man where glaciers are retreating elsewhere. In other words .. yes, it's warmer. One whole degree in the last 100 years. But we've been there before. Warmer than this. And we did it without SUVs and the industrial revolution.
Maybe ... just maybe .. the tide of hysteria is turning. Thank the new media. While mainstream newspapers and media outlets regurgitate the global warming and climate change mantra, people remain free to log on to the Internet (for now) where they'll find more than enough to read from scientists who were once global warming alarmists but who are now skeptics.
Take Dr. Nir Shaviv, an Astrophysicist. has recently recanted his belief that man was warming up the earth. He recently wrote: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye." Shaviv adds that "Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming."
Dr. David Evans is a mathematician and engineer. This is the man who did the carbon accounting for the government of Australia. He spent six years building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions. He's now a global warming skeptic. Evans says that "By the late 1990s lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming." He adds: "The science of global warming has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched."
And there's the curious question. Global warming, or climate change, if you will, has indeed become a partisan political issue. But there's more to it. It's an issue for the left; for the world's anti-capitalists and socialists. And just why would that be? Could it possibly be because these anti-capitalists and leftists see the religion of climate change as a way to bring down or harm powerful nations with economies based on capitalism and free enterprise?
Just something to think about.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
...Or whatever they're calling it this week
Neal Boortz, May 22: