The climate change debate is intensified by a heat wave on the east coast. The climate change debate was also hot last March when raging blizzards battered the east. Extreme weather events are getting used by both sides to support their global warming arguments within the debate about climate change and energy bill in Congress. And just in time for the heat wave, a British panel exonerated the “Climategate” scientists, saying it found no evidence the group manipulated any of their research to back up global warming. Meanwhile, 2010 is shaping up to be the warmest year in history.
Source for this article: Heat wave ignites climate change debate, 2010 warmest year ever by Personal Money Store
Wave of heat is going around the globe
The heat wave is mostly hitting the news because it is cooking places like New York and Washington where the national media hang out. Other places in the world are hot also. The Christian Science Monitor reports the heat wave has gone global. Beijing heat about 105 degrees. It was 113 and 111 degrees on July 6 in Baghdad and Riyadh. The world temperature high was set in Kuwait at 122 degrees. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the first five months of the year was the warmest on record, and 1.22 degrees warmer than the 20th century average.
Climate change leads to more heat waves and blizzards
During the March blizzards, climate change skeptics built igloos and mocked Al Gore. But will heat waves continue if carbon emissions aren't reduced? TIME reports that the fact that no single weather event is caused by climate change is obvious, but politicians and lobbyists will make an effort to use them in the climate and energy bill debate anyway. Weather and climate aren't actually the same thing. Finding out how climate change affects weather is tricky. But the March blizzards and the July heat wave conform to a general scientific consensus that climate change will result in more extreme weather.
Climategate scientists’ research is being called legitimate
The above climate change argument is the position of the Climategate scientists, a group of researchers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia which is in England. It was reported by the New York Times that these individuals have played a leading role in efforts to understand the earth's climate. Last year some e-mail messages sent by the scientists about global warming were stolen and posted to the Internet for every person to see. Politicians, lobbyists and some of the other global warming skeptics seized upon the e-mails as proof that the scientists were hiding data that conflicted with their positions on global warming. But a report by the panel investigating Climategate said that there was no evidence found of behavior that might undermine their conclusions.
Climate change – better safe than sorry
Heat waves and blizzards aside, climate change is such a controversial issue because climate science is incredibly complex and hard to explain, and the people doing the explaining still don’t understand climate also as they would like. This opens windows of opportunity arguments on both sides of the issue. Meanwhile, Ezra Klein at the Washington Post points out that if we can’t deal with a disaster like the oil spill within the Gulf of Mexico 2010, how are we going to reverse concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere?
Pay me later or pay me now – carbon tax
This leads us to the climate and energy bill and its intended cap and trade system or carbon tax. Republicans against government intervention are potentially setting up a future in which the government has to intervene on a planetary scale. Klein said he’s a lot more comfortable with the government’s ability to levy a carbon tax at the moment than its ability to repair the atmosphere later. That’s why when faced with the choice between being avoiding the economic risk of a carbon tax or taking a step to preserve the future of the planet, we should choose the planet.
More information accessible at these websites:
Christian Science Monitor
csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0707/Global-heat-wave-hits-US-reignites-climate-change-debate
TIME
ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/07/06/turning-up-the-heat-on-climate-change/?xid=rss-topstories
New York Times
nytimes.com/2010/07/08/science/earth/08climate.html?src=mv
Washington Post
voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/07/the_case_for_being_careful_wit.html
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