Heat wave ignites a new debate on climate change, 2010 warmest year ever
The climate change debate is intensified by a heat wave on the east coast. 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. A British panel exonerated the "Climategate" scientists, saying it found no evidence the group manipulated research to back up global warming. Meanwhile, 2010 is shaping up to be the warmest year in history.
Source of article: Heat wave ignites climate change debate, 2010 warmest year ever by Personal Money Store.
Heat wave goes global
The heat wave is news because it's cooking places like New York and Washington where the national media hang out. Other places within the world are hot also. The Christian Science Monitor reports that the heat wave has gone global. Beijing heat about 105 degrees. In Baghdad and Riyadh, on July 6 it was 113 and 111 degrees. The world temperature high was set in Kuwait at 122 degrees. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) reports that 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.
More heat waves and blizzards caused by the climate change
During the March blizzards, climate change skeptics built igloos and mocked Al Gore. But will heat waves be the norm if humans fail to cut back carbon emissions? It was reported by TIME that 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. Actually, weather and climate aren't 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 can be legitimate
The above climate change argument is the position of the Climategate scientists, which is 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. Politicians, lobbyists and 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.
Better to be safe than sorry – climate change
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 nevertheless don't understand climate as well as they would like. This opens arguments on both sides of the issue. Meanwhile, Ezra Klein at the Washington Post points out that if we can't even deal with a simple disaster like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico 2010, how are we going to reverse concentrations of carbon within 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 cap and trade system or carbon tax. Republicans 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 now than its ability to repair the atmosphere later on. 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.
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