| After a break in reporting, the MSM has noticed global warming, again. It also appears that the weather-related problems around the globe (and in NYC, in particular) have made the coverage much less of the "on the one hand vs. on the other hand" which, in the past, has given too much credibility to the deniers. I had my first one-on-one briefing about global warming from NASA's Dr. Jim Hansen in 1987. |
| He was running his computer models on one of NASA's supercomputers (both of which were much less sophisticated than those used today) and the results said that average global temperatures would increase, and the increase would mostly be manifested by increases in the night time minimums, particularly in winter. He also predicted that the increase in atmospheric low temperatures would increase the moisture content, resulting in increases in the severity of localized storms and weather events. This is exactly what has been happening over the last 25 years.
There are still other things that happen to affect the weather, like the Pacific El Nino/ La Nina effect, volcano aerosols, and land clearing fire particulates, but the overall trend is clear. It is not possible to positively ascribe any one weather event to global warming, as Russia's Chief Meterologist recently did. But is is possible to say that when increased atmospheric temperatures increase the moisture content of a large mass of air over a large area, and then drop it in a localized area, such as Pakistan's Indus Valley, or the American mid-West, or the middle-Atlantic snowstorms last winter; it is probably due to global warming.
So, Dr. Jim Hansen says we only have a short time to take effective corrective action before we reach a tipping point. You only have to listen to Rush Limbaugh to know that conservatives have turned a scientific issue into a political issue. The US Senate has been blocked from taking anything more than rudimentary steps toward remedial action through conservatives exploitation of procedural rules. Just as we all paid the price of the conservatives desire to remove all oversight of Wall Street, we'll all pay the price for this latest sacrifice of everyone's interests in the name of ideology. |
