On the east coast there is a heat wave making the climate change debate more intense. 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 in 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 that the group manipulated any of their research to back up global warming. 2010 is turning out to be the hottest year in history.

Resource for this article: Heat wave ignites climate change debate, 2010 warmest year ever

Heat wave is going global

The heat wave is news because it's cooking places like New York and Washington where the national media hang out. There are also other places getting hotter. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the heat wave has gone global. Beijing heat about 105 degrees. It was 113 and 111 degrees on July 6 in Baghdad and Riyadh. Kuwait hit 122 degrees making it the world temperature high. 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

Climate change skeptics mocked Al Gore during March blizzards. But will heat waves be the norm if humans fail to reduce carbon emissions? According to TIME, the fact no single weather event is caused by climate change is clear, but politicians and lobbyists will try to use them within 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 the March blizzards and the July heat wave conform to a scientific consensus that climate change will result in much more extreme weather.

Climategate scientists' research is considered 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 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 for everybody to see. Politicians, lobbyists and other global warming skeptics seized upon the 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 no evidence was found of behavior that might undermine their conclusions.

Climate change - better safe than sorry

Climate change is such a controversial issue because climate science is complex and hard to explain, and the individuals doing the explaining nevertheless don't understand climate as well as they would like. On both sides of the issue, this opens arguments. Meanwhile, 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 in the atmosphere?

Carbon tax with the idea pay me now or pay me later

This leads us to the climate and energy bill and its proposed 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 now 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 data about this topic 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