Global Warming in the News

Three news items in the last several days on Global Warming.

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First, Time Magazine's latest issue has Global Warming as its cover story. CNN published a summary of the cover story on Sunday. The Time cover story's title, "Be Worried. Be Very Worried," is a paraphrase of the "Be Afraid" speech from the movie, Air Force One.

Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us.

My friend's lefty friends would be so proud.

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Second, the crisis has unexpectedly hit Palm Beach, Florida, where they posted a record low temperature Sunday morning. The Palm Beach Post reported the story.

Sunday morning's low of 47 degrees at Palm Beach International Airport, recorded at 6:36 a.m., was the coolest on record, according to the National Weather Service in Miami.

The old record was set in 1979, when the overnight temperature dropped to 48 degrees.

Yep. Global warming.

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Third, this story was published March 14, 2006, by PhysOrg.com ("Science, Technology, Physics, Space News").

A new theory to explain global warming was revealed at a meeting at the University of Leicester (UK) and is being considered for publication in the journal "Science First Hand". The controversial theory has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil.

Shaidurov has used a detailed analysis of the mean temperature change by year for the last 140 years and explains that there was a slight decrease in temperature until the early twentieth century. This flies in the face of current global warming theories that blame a rise in temperature on rising carbon dioxide emissions since the start of the industrial revolution. Shaidurov, however, suggests that the rise, which began between 1906 and 1909, could have had a very different cause, which he believes was the massive Tunguska Event, which rocked a remote part of Siberia, northwest of Lake Baikal on the 30th June 1908.

A meteorite hits Siberia, sending tons of dust and debris into the atmosphere, changing the climate perceptibly. It's gotta be tough on all those environmental socialists to have a theory handed to them that says mankind isn't powerful enough to affect the climate.

If we weren't the ones to cause Global (outside of Palm Beach) Warming, then we probably can't fix it with our puny efforts. And if we can't fix it, then there's no need to hand over any of our sovereignty or property rights to the global environmentalists. I think I like Vladimir Shaidurov.