On the east coast there is a heat wave making the climate change debate more intense. The debate was hot when blizzards hit the east also. 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. 2010 is turning out to be the hottest year in history.
Source for this article: Heat wave ignites climate change debate, 2010 warmest year ever by Personal Money Store
Heat wave is going global
The heat wave is news because it’s cooking places where the national media hang out. You will find also other places getting hotter. As outlined by the Christian Science Monitor, the heat wave has gone global. Beijing got as hot as 105 degrees Fahrenheit. 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 causes there to be more heat waves and blizzards
During the March blizzards, climate change skeptics built igloos and mocked Al Gore. But will heat waves be the norm if humans fail to reduce carbon emissions? According to TIME, the fact that no single weather event is caused by climate change is clear, but politicians and lobbyists will make an effort to use them in the climate and energy bill debate anyway. Weather and climate aren't really the same thing. Finding out how climate change affects weather is tricky. But blizzards and heat waves 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. As outlined by the New York Times, these people 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. Politicians, lobbyists and other global warming skeptics used these e-mails as proof 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.
Better safe than sorry with climate change
Even without the heat waves and blizzards, climate change is such a controversial issue because climate science is incredibly complex and hard to explain, and also the individuals doing the explaining still do not understand climate also as they would like. On both sides of the issue, this opens arguments. Ezra Klein at the Washington Post points out that if we can’t deal with a disaster like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico 2010, how are we going to reverse concentrations of carbon within the atmosphere?
Pay me later or pay me now – carbon tax
This leads us to the climate and energy bill and its cap and trade system or carbon tax. Republicans that are against government intervention are potentially setting up a future in which the government is forced to intervene on a planetary scale. Klein said he’s a lot more comfortable with the government’s ability to levy a carbon tax currently than its ability to repair the atmosphere later. That’s why, he said, 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.
Citations:
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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