Heat wave ignites climate change debate, 2010 warmest year e

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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 being seized upon by both sides to support their global warming arguments in the debate that is all about climate change and also the 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. 2010 is turning out to be the hottest year in history.

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Wave of heat going global

The heat wave is news because it’s cooking places like New York and Washington where the national media hang out. But other parts of the world are also roasting. The heat wave has gone global according to the Christian Science Monitor. Beijing heat about 105 degrees. It was 113 and 111 degrees on July 6 in Baghdad and Riyadh. The world temperature high was set in Kuwait at 122 degrees. As reported by 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 continue if carbon emissions aren’t reduced? It was reported by TIME that the fact that no single weather event is caused by climate change is obvious, but politicians and lobbyists will make an effort to use them within the climate and energy bill debate anyway. Actually, weather and climate aren’t the very 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 could 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. The New York Times reports that these individuals 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 every person to see. Politicians, lobbyists and some of the 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 that was given by the panel investigating Climategate said no evidence was found of behavior that might undermine their conclusions.

Better safe than sorry with 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 individuals doing the explaining nevertheless do not understand climate also as they would like. This opens arguments on both sides of the issue. 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, he said, when faced with the choice between avoiding the economic risk of a carbon tax or simply just taking a step to preserve the future of the planet, we should choose the planet.

More data available 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

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