I know that some people at my job, as well as a few others that I heard, expressed some doubt about the global warming "theory" while we here in the northeastern United States were experiencing one of the harshest, most brutal winters ever. We had colder temperatures than we had seen in decades, with a term that is now, suddenly, quite familiar to us, called the "polar vortex", responsible. We had some huge amounts of snow. Here, in the suburbs of New York City, it was seventh or eighth on the all-time list of snowiest winters. Not too far down, however, Philadelphia is a few inches away from recording it's second snowiest winter ever. And records were shattered for both cold temperatures and snow amounts throughout the Midwest.
So, yes, I am aware that it was very cold, and that this, on the surface, does not jive, if you will, with something that is called "global warming."
That is true, only if you read only the one word that many skeptics (and skeptics of this "theory" seem to be many in these United States) into what it is called, and think about how cold it is in your particular neck of the woods, during one particular season - which happens to be the coldest season of the year.
Also, it is easy to dismiss if you happen to forget the other key word in that "theory", which would be global, of course. It is not because it is a cold, or even snowy, day in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area that it, as one coworker long ago so delicately put it, "shoots the shit out of the global warming theory". After all, there is a whole world out there, and just because one particular corner of the world is experiencing very cold or snowy conditions, it certainly does not prove a whole global theory wrong.
Frankly, also, these skeptics simply do not understand - either because it is too sophisticated or, more tellingly, because they choose not to understand - that "global warming" does not actually entail a constant, uninterrupted warming of the Earth's temperatures at all times. Obviously, there would be changes of the seasons, which means that winter is colder than summer. But also, what the global warming "theory" suggests is that weather would become more extreme due to the melting of the polar ice caps because of global temperatures warming overall.
Case in point, is that while we were experiencing severe cold and snowy (and far worse, icy) conditions here in much of North America, another part of the world, which is experiencing summer right now, is struggling with extremely hot conditions.
Australia is known as a hot place, generally speaking. But with each summer that passes, it seems that new high temperatures are recorded.
Just during this summer alone, 150 records were broken across Australia. There are records being set for high temperatures across the continent nation, and Sydney is experiencing it's worst drought in decades.
This follows a year in 2013 that established itself as the hottest year on record in Australian history to date. But it might not keep that record for long, after the hellish summer that Australia experiences - and right around the same time that we here in North America were suffering through brutally cold temperatures and an annoyingly high and intense wintery season.
Evidence suggests that this is not some kind of a fluke, a freakish occurrence. Rather, this is an alarming trend, and it is scary to think about where this trend might take us, or just how extreme things could get. In the article from the Associated Foreign Press (see link below), we read this:
The latest report follows a joint study last week by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Bureau of Meteorology that said temperatures across Australia were, on average, almost 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than a century ago.
It said seven of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998 while over the past 15 years the frequency of very hot months has increased five-fold.
Obviously, many Australians have not only noticed or been a bit inconvenienced by the hot temperatures, but they have had a detrimental effect on the country as a whole.
"The latest summer was an another example of climate change tearing through the record books," council scientist Tim Flannery said.
"It's not just about one summer but an overall trend to more extreme weather.
"Things are getting bad and if we want to stop them getting worse this is the critical decade for action. We need to cut the emission of greenhouse gasses and we need to do it urgently."
Then again, perhaps there is some poetic justice to extreme weather conditions occurring in places where tremendous levels of polluting occur, and the people elect "leaders" who continue to enact anti-environmental policies, and contend the legitimacy of the global warming "theory", such as in Australia, Canada, and especially the United States.
In the article, we learn that:
Australia is among the world's worst per capita polluters due to reliance on coal-fired power and mining exports.
Furthermore, they elected a prime minister who, like many American politicians, feel their expertise in the area outweighs that of the general consensus in the world scientific community:
Since assuming office last September, the conservative government of Tony Abbott has moved to abolish an Australian carbon tax designed to combat climate change, which charges the biggest polluters for their emissions at a fixed price.
Abbott, a long-time climate change sceptic, instead favours a "direct action" plan that includes an incentive fund to pay companies to increase energy efficiency, a controversial sequestration of carbon in soil scheme, and the planting of 20 million trees.
The government last year abolished what was then the Climate Change Commission, saying an independent body was not needed.
What's that expression about sleeping in the bed that you made?
Those kinds of extremes - and they are not restricted merely to Australia and North America - would be precisely what scientists that argued that there was, indeed, a global warming (the popular term now seems to be climate change) were suggesting in the first place. More extremes in many places the world over. And in recent years, we have seen extremes in temperatures and weather conditions overall - as well as storms - in many parts of North America, Europe, and Australia, as well as elsewhere in the world.
All of that means that we should be careful not to so easily dismiss a whole theory about the entire world, simply because we have to put an extra sweater on, or see the first or last snowflakes falling from a winter storm. The global warming "theory" has a misleading name, perhaps, but that certainly does not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that it is somehow irrelevant, even if some obviously wish it were so.
As Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently said to skeptics, science is not there for you to cherry pick!
Much of the information used in this article, and all of the quotes, were from this link:
"Australia endures sweltering 'angry summer'" by Associated Foreign Press, March 9, 2014:
http://news.yahoo.com/australia-endures-angry-summer-005405362.html
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