Wednesday, January 13, 2016

The Coming Ice Age... er... Global Warming... er... Climate Change!

In April of 1975, Newsweek published this story about The Cooling World.  Ominous signs portended likely famine because average temperatures were falling.  Dr. Murray Mitchell noted a half degree drop in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968.  Columbia University's George Kunda saw a large increase in snow cover.
 
In May of 1978, In Search of, the television show hosted by Leonard Nimoy, investigated The Coming Ice Age in this episode.  Several scientists (Dr. James Hayes, Dr. Chester Langway, Dr. Gifford Miller, Dr. Stephen Schneider) were consulted.  The glaciologist argued that Baffin Island in Canada was signaling the next ice age; ice didn't melt in the summer of 1972.  A severe winter across North America in 1976-77 showed just how close we were.  Buffalo, NY had 40 days straight of snow!  Dr. Miller suggested that the current warm period likely ended 3000 years ago.  The show concludes that, in as little as one lifetime, we could see ice sheets stretching into Kansas.  It was all very dire.
 
Then, in 1987, Dr. James Hansen of NASA testified before the Senate that Global Warming was going to ruin us.  Senator Al Gore seized upon this doomsayer's testimony and soon published a book, Earth in the Balance (1992).  Later, he wrote and starred in the Oscar winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which predicted doom from fossil fuels and the earth becoming an oven.  The polar bears are doomed!
 
In a space of less than 10 years, scientists had switched from an Ice Age to a heat wave.  With ice cores dating back scores of millennia and geologic weather data that stretches back hundreds of millions of years, somehow the predictions all turned on a dime.  How could all of those scientists in the 70s have been SO wrong?  Were they fired for incompetence?  Moreover, the predictions were now based on human activity, not natural cycles.  We can stop it, but only if we give government the power and money to rescue us from our folly.
 
Climate change is a government fundraiser, kind of like a school bake sale but scarier.  Scientists who are funded by government grants offer research that says government needs more power and money.  You scratch my back...  Climate change is a convenient lie; by the time the warming would have occurred, most of us will be dead.  However, in the present, government will have increased its authority and funding.

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