As the Copenhagen Climate Change conference nears, the gloom and doom "news" reports have begun. Daily now we are seeing stories of swarms of icebergs heading toward New Zealand, and other stories about how western countries are going to have to come up with billions of dollars in aid to help developing countries deal with the claimed results of global warming, such as droughts, floods (?), and the like. China and the US have pledged to cut carbon emissions by half (not to half their present levels, but to decrease by half the amount of
increases over the next 20 years, which is negligible.
The "fear" machine is in high gear, preaching doom and gloom as priests once did in order to fill their collection plates. But now, instead of God saving us from Evil, we need the government to save us from global warming. Those who tell us how much we need to change our lives to stop global warming are as much hypocrites as the priests of old, as they do their preaching world-wide while traveling on chartered jets and armored motorcades.
And, as the priests of old did, they have their disciples and followers, who swoon at the news stories, thump their Blackberries, and curse the names of George Bush and Hummer.
New stories are stating that global warming is now occurring at a faster rate than predicted by the IPCC 2007 report's predictions, and that we are going to feel the effects "soon". Never mind that in 2009 many parts of the world experienced their coldest weather since measurements began being taken.
I wonder how it is that the "experts" have determined that global warming is occurring faster than the 2007 IPCC's models? Perhaps they got their information from the University of East Anglia's Climate Change research center. Perhaps they used the same method they came up with to show New Zealand is getting warmer, when in reality, it hasn't:
Climategate: Making New Zealand warmer | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog
Evidence has always suggested that Co2 has very little, and possibly no effect whatsoever on climate change, and even Al Gore's famous "Hockey Stick' chart shows that Co2 didn't cause global warming in the past, if you look at it close enough. In the last 10 years, Co2 in the atmosphere has continued to increase, yet world temperatures have decreased.
News reports have blamed global warming for the snow disappearing from Mount Kilimanjaro, while conveniently failing to mention that the temperatures from the snow line up have never climbed above freezing. The disappearance of the snow was caused by the deforestation of the mountain itself.
Global warming has been blamed for droughts, and the drying of large lakes, and even gradual disappearance the Dead Sea. But left unmentioned is the fact that the populations around these lakes and in drought affected areas has increased by as much as 100 fold in just the last century. The water hasn't been evaporated by global warming, it has disappeared because the population has drank it, or used it for agriculture. But once again, no one wants to hear the truth, especially one so "inconvenient". Irony can't begin to describe the Climate Change/Global Warming (or lack thereof) phenomena.
Is the world getting warmer? Even according to the IPCC, the effect has been much less than they predicted in their '93 and '98 reports. They hate to admit that temperatures have decreased since 1998, and in their 2007 report, they ended up using ground data to formulate their temperature measurements because satellite data haven't shown any increases.
I'm curious to see how much "warmer" this winter will be compared to last winter, even though temperatures here in Japan fell to near record lows at the beginning of November. If it is a colder-than-normal winter, it will of course be blamed on "global warming".