Heat wave ignites a new debate on climate change, 2010 warmest year ever

On the east coast there is a heat wave making the climate change debate more intense. The climate change debate was also hot last March when raging blizzards battered the east. Extreme weather events are being seized upon by both sides to support their global warming arguments within the debate about climate change and energy bill in Congress. And just in time for the heat wave, a British panel exonerated the “Climategate” scientists, saying it found no evidence the group manipulated any of their research to back up global warming. 2010 is the hottest year in history thus far.

Article source: Heat wave ignites climate change debate, 2010 warmest year ever by Personal Money Store

Heat wave goes global

The heat wave is news because it is cooking places like New York and Washington where the national media hang out. Other places within the world are hot also. The Christian Science Monitor reports that the heat wave has gone global. Beijing got as hot as 105 degrees Fahrenheit. In Baghdad and Riyadh, on July 6 it was 113 and 111 degrees. The world temperature high was set in Kuwait at 122 degrees. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the first five months of the year was the warmest on record, and 1.22 degrees warmer than the 20th century average.

Climate change – more heat waves and blizzards

During March blizzards, climate change skeptics mocked Al Gore. If carbon remission isn't reduced, will heat waves be the norm? TIME reports that the fact that no single weather event is caused by climate change is obvious, but politicians and lobbyists will try to use them in the climate and energy bill debate anyway. Actually, weather and climate aren’t the very same thing. It is tricky to figure out how climate change affects the weather. But the March blizzards and also the July heat wave conform to a scientific consensus that climate change will result in much more extreme weather.

Climategate scientists’ research is considered legitimate

The above climate change argument is the position of the Climategate scientists, a group of researchers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia which is in England. The New York Times reports that these people have played a leading role in efforts to understand the earth's climate. Last year some e-mail messages that were sent by the scientists about global warming were stolen and posted to the Internet. Politicians, lobbyists and other global warming skeptics used these e-mails as proof the scientists were hiding data that conflicted with their positions on global warming. But a report that was given by the panel investigating Climategate said no evidence was found of behavior that might undermine their conclusions.

Better safe than sorry – climate change

Even without the heat waves and blizzards, climate change is such a controversial issue because climate science is incredibly complex and hard to explain, and the individuals doing the explaining still don’t understand climate as well as they would like. This opens windows of opportunity arguments on both sides of the issue. Ezra Klein at the Washington Post points out that if we can’t deal with a disaster like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico 2010, how are we going to reverse concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere?

Carbon tax-Pay me later or pay me now

This leads us to the climate and energy bill and its supposed cap and trade system or carbon tax. Republicans that are against government intervention are potentially setting up a future in which the government is forced to intervene on a planetary scale. Klein said he’s a lot more comfortable with the government’s ability to levy a carbon tax now than its ability to repair the atmosphere later. That’s why when faced with the choice between being avoiding the economic risk of a carbon tax or taking a step to preserve the future of the planet, we should choose the planet.

More information about this topic at these websites:

Christian Science Monitor

csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0707/Global-heat-wave-hits-US-reignites-climate-change-debate

TIME

ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/07/06/turning-up-the-heat-on-climate-change/?xid=rss-topstories

New York Times

nytimes.com/2010/07/08/science/earth/08climate.html?src=mv

Washington Post

voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/07/the_case_for_being_careful_wit.html