Saturday, January 07, 2006
GLOBAL WARMING ACTUALLY LOCAL
The debate on global warming is officially over and we really shouldn’t be talking about it, but maybe if we’re really quiet nobody will find out. Anyway—shhh!—it seems that global warming is concentrated in the Arctic, where the atmosphere has warmed seven times faster than the planet’s southern two-thirds:
"It just doesn’t look like global warming is very global,” said John Christy, director of UAH’s Earth System Science Center.
"The carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is distributed pretty evenly around the globe and not concentrated in the Arctic, so it doesn’t look like we can blame greenhouse gases for the overwhelming bulk of the Northern Hemisphere warming over the past 27 years,” he said. “The most likely suspect for that is a natural climate change or cycle that we didn’t expect or just don’t understand."
Please, nobody tell hysterical Tim Flannery, currently bouncing off the walls:
"We have to make deep, deep reductions in emissions within the next 20 years,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “We will have won or lost the battle for climate stability in that time.”
As archaeologist Jim Allen once said: “I wish I could be as sure of anything as Tim is of everything”. So, what can you do to stop this terrible crisis that isn’t happening? Why not follow the advice of actress Emma Thompson:
We should all not be flying any more because of global warming.
Her six-year-old daughter, by the way, is named Gaia. No lie.
UPDATE. Up to 200 employees at the Department of Environment’s Greenhouse Office in Canberra are being tested for lead poisoning after their recycled drinking water was discovered to be contaminated with lead, zinc and copper.