Feeling A Little Hot, Cold, Or Just Right — It’s Probably Global Warming

21 Feb, 2003 by John Hawkins

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Feeling A Little Hot, Cold, Or Just Right ? Then It’s Probably Global Warming: This week the East Coast was hammered with massive snow and ice storms. DC was practically shut down, part of Maryland got four feet of snow and even down here in Charlotte NC, we were hit with a pretty nasty little ice storm. While the storms were hitting, I thought about doing a global warming related post. After all, every time we get particularly hot weather in a region, we have people coming out of the woodwork to claim that global warming is responsible. So if that’s the case, why wouldn’t the reverse be true?

Well, CNS News posed that question to “Melissa Carey, a climate change policy specialist with the Environmental Defense Fund”. She then politely explained that the cold weather was important evidence — of global warming!

“It’s very hard to link one event for sure, but certainly, increased extreme events like this are very, very much in line with the predictions of climate models, definitely,” Carey told CNSNews.com.

“One thing climate change models predict is more increased precipitation and more extreme precipitation events like flooding or blizzards,” she added.”

…”It’s not all about warming, it’s really about the changes in our climate and our environment that go along with the increases of the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere

Sigh — so if we have a heat wave it’s evidence of global warming. But, if we have a blizzard, it’s also evidence of global warming. Do you see why it’s so hard to take these environmentalists seriously, especially when we’re talking about something as unpredictable as global climate change? Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the free-market environmental think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute agrees…

“Climate is inherently unstable. It is always changing. This supposed ‘balance’ that man upsets is mythical,” Horner explained.

“To insist otherwise is to view the entirety of man’s presence not as part of the environment but as a pollutant,” he added.

Horner believes the only consistent belief among environmentalists is that man is at the center of any weather-related changes.

“First, man caused cooling, then warming. The darned climate kept changing, but the insistence that man simply must be ruinous didn’t.”

Exactly. The truth is that we don’t know enough to make an informed decision about what causes global warming and how severe the warming trend will be — if it’s happening at all. Furthermore, we’re probably decades away from having that knowledge. I know what the answer to that is, “Decades from now it will be too late! global warming will be wrecking the planet by then!” Sure it will — and back in the sixties we were being told to get ready for a new ice age. Given that we already have more than enough real and immediate problems to deal with, I see little need to get all upset about a problem as nebulous as global warming.