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OT: Moorabal/Lal Lal wind farm 9-Jun-2009 At 4:23:43 PM SwineOfTheTimes

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On 9/06/2009 Wendy wrote:

>eg, the last 10 years of "cooling" - where's the counter to the explaination
>that the overall trend is still up, that 1998 was the hottest year on record,
>therefore yes, the others are less hot, but still hotter than every other
>preceding year bar 1997?

I had heard that nine of the ten warmest years recorded in the US lower 48 states since 1880 have occurred since 1995, with the hottest being 1998. Well, that also has been shown to be wrong. Less than a decade ago, the US government changed the way it recorded temperatures. No one thought to correlate the new temperatures with the old ones, until Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre did so correcting the record to show that 1934 was in fact the hottest year, with 1998 second and 1921 third. Four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s and only 3 in the past decade. Eight of the 15 hottest years in the past century occurred before carbon dioxide began its recent rise.

Global warming is a major industry today. Between 1992 and 2008 the US Government spent $30 billion on climate change research and now contributes $6 billion a year. This finances jobs, grants, conferences, international travel and academic journals. It not only keeps a huge army of people in comfortable employment, but also fills them with self-righteousness and moral superiority regardless of the fact that real science did not support it.

Climate change is not a scientific problem that found political support; this is about eco-activists and politicians who found a scientific issue they feel can leverage them into power and control. The environment is a great way to advance a political agenda that favours central planning and an intrusive government. What better way to control someone’s property than to subordinate one’s private property rights to environmental concerns?

By focusing our priorities on future generations, we focus less on improving the lives of people who are alive today. These future generations bear no closer relationship to us than those now living in developing countries whose lives we disdain to save. Why are we not feeding people in the world who are hungry? Why are we not giving clean water to the almost one billion people who don’t have clean water? The greatest source of environmental degradation is poverty. Why aren’t we helping eliminate poverty? One answer is that perhaps it is a lot easier worrying about future generations than trying to fix present day problems.