Is It Oldtimer's Disease - Or Something Else?
According to the Sierra Club, Republican nominee for President John McCain says he supports clean energy.
Hmmm...curious. McCain was the only lawmaker who didn't show up the last time the Senate voted on renewable energy tax incentives -- which failed to pass by just one vote.
All is not lost, though.
The Senate will vote on renewable energy again in April, so Johnny has another chance -- provided he shows up.
You can help him remember by sending him an e-card: Dear John -- Don't Forget to Vote this time.
posted by kate @ 8:17 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Good idea. While they're all still making promises.
As straws in the wind, note that it snowed in Baghdad in January, for the first time in a century. There is still snow in the Australian Alps at midsummer, never before seen. The extent of the Antarctic sea-ice last austral winter exceeded all records. These are of course mere anecdotal evidence, not to be taken seriously.
However, the four major organizations that track the global average temperature have now released their results for 2007. They are the Hadley Centre in the UK (Hadley), the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), Remote Sensing Systems, Inc., in Santa Rosa, CA, (RSS) and the Christy group at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). The first three have been alarmed about GW for years, while the UAH group (which uses satellite MSU measurements) has tended to be skeptical.
All four of these studies report an astonishing drop in global temperature during 2007, between 0.59 and 0.75 degrees C. You can see graphs of their data at
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/
02/19/january-2008-4-
sources-say-globally-cooler-in-the-past-12-months/ .
This is by far the fastest change in global temperature on record. It is probably just a blip – but if the climate stabilizes at this level, it will have wiped out all the increase since 1920, and the whole GW thing will have gone away. Moreover, if 2008 shows another decrease of this magnitude, we will have to consider seriously the possibility that the 20-year transition to the next Ice Age has begun.
To paraphrase Eugene O'Neill, The Ice Age Cometh?
If this is true, the consequences are appalling. Most of North America and all of Europe north of the Alps will be under a mile of ice by 2030. This means that most of the advanced countries except Australia will cease to exist. There can be little doubt that the need to survive will trump any international norms of behavior: I would expect that Europe would invade Africa and the US would invade Mexico, accepting genocide of the indigenous populations as an unfortunate necessity, given the absolute need for lebensraum.
Perhaps we could delay or stop the transition by using nuclear explosions to release floods of methane (a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) from the hydrate deposits under the Arctic permafrost and on the continental shelves, and/or by mounting a major effort to reduce the albedo by shoveling dirt over northern snowfields. Unfortunately, the reputations and income of far too many influential people now depend on the existence of the GW threat, and they will resist recognizing the truth as long as possible. In any case, I don't expect politicians to have the chutzpah to act before it is too late.
Until we find out whether the present cold is transient or getting worse, the Precautionary Principle demands that we all do our duty by guzzling as much gasoline and emitting as much CO2 and CH4 as possible. Flatulence is now a patriotic duty.
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