Thursday, November 16, 2006

No, sorry, it's Climate Change.

It’s interesting how the AGW alarmists (those of a particular political stripe who try to distort reality by tampering with how we describe it) are now modifying their language. Global Warming is now Climate Change. How perfect. This covers them when, embarrassingly, Earth’s climate fails to conform to their models, when we actually have a few cold years, when the Ross Ice Shelf fails to collapse, or when the oceans fail to rise up and drown our modern day coastal cities of Sodom and Gomorra. Also, Climate Change is an excellent catch-all on which all these can be blamed: a cold wet winter, heavy snowfall, expansion of the ice-caps, drops in sea temperature, hurricanes, tornados and quite probably genital warts. All man-made of course and all due, when you shunt aside the words ‘Climate Change’, to Global Warming. For the alarmists it's rather annoying that we aren’t all being fried or drowned now for our capitalist sins.

From 1895 until the 1930’s similar alarmists peddled a coming ice age. Overlapping this, in the period from the late 1920’s until the 1960’s, they warned of global warming. In a similar sort of overlap from the 1950’s until the 1970’s they were back to telling us the big freeze was coming. And now that we’ve moved back into a global warming phase I guess the alarmists need to cover their arses for when the fashion changes yet again. I look forward to further modifications of language. I wonder when sea level rises will become sea level fluctuations, when melting ice caps will become Artic temperature variations. You see, should AGW be disproved you need to get your catch phrase into place else the funding just might stop rolling in. ‘Climate Change’ is excellent – you can be really alarmist about stuff that has been happening to this planet for four and a half billion years.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

brilliant!

next presidential election here in the US? i'm writing you in. 8)

Anonymous said...

I live on the edge of the Loughor Estuary in Wales, and therefore anything that might effect the rise of sea levels is something that concerns me. However, after living here for nearly 25 years I can't honestly say I've seen any change at all in the river level. In fact, the only time I ever saw any flooding that concerned me was the first year we moved here and a field quite close to us flooded at a high tide, this hasn't happened again.
I walk my dogs along the river's edge nearly every day and although the mudbanks, channels and main course of the river is in constant change I would imagine that if indeed sea levels are rising enough to worry then surely some indication of this would be seen even where I live?
The only thing I've noticed along the estuary that has possibly something to do with our climate becoming more temperate is the steady increase of birds that perhaps don't usually frequent this area. I'm not a bird-watcher so am ignorant of their migrations etc, however, some people here comment on the influx of the Little Egret, which is a small white stork-like bird, that now seems to be on the increase, I believe these are quite new to our country. Cormorants, which were fairly rare here seem to have increased in numbers too.

I'm still hoping to see a flotilla of frog-whelks or even a giganticus sailing up the river, what sort of water temperature do they prefer, Neal?

Anonymous said...

Thanks Kirby ... would that mean I'd be allowed to send a cruise missile to 10 & 11 Downing Street?

Bob, as I pointed out somewhere before: sea levels have risen 120 metres since the end of the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago, that's an average of 6.7mm per year. The IPCC predicts a rise of 1.5-3mm on top of that, per year, over the next century (of course believing what they say is like believing the results of a Papal enquiry into the existence of God - vested interests somewhat). So if you walked away from Loughor for about fifty years, then came back, you might notice a difference.

Don't know the temperature of Spatterjay's sea - never wanted to dip a finger in.

Anonymous said...

Ever read the book State of Fear, by Michael Crichton? It centers on the fact that we really don't have any basis for saying that this is all based on human actions, and talks about the shift to "abrupt climate change" as a way of hedging their bets. Pretty interesting book overall, and as I recall he has some decent research laid out at the end of the book.

Anonymous said...

Great stuff, Neil. Love your books too! Some years ago also read Nigel
Calder's The Weather Machine - a case for the weather actually getting colder. Am hugely sceptical of all this, and how about Wales being smothered by wind farms? On what pretext? We're moving very near the river Loughor half a mile from Ammanford, so it's good to hear that the estuary has remained pretty normal. There's a lot of alarmist stuff flying around, which we won't let affect our decision to buy.
Keep up the good work, Neil

Anonymous said...

The trouble is, Sally, that the Government has picked this up and run with it, even whilst more and more questions are being asked and opinion is swinging the other way. Government, as we know, never drops an idea no matter how ludicrous. It especially won't drop this one, since it netted something like 30 billion in 'green' taxes last year.

BTW, click the environment link below the article for numerous other articles debunking it all.