Who Came Up With That Phrase Anyway?
When the first scientist or climate change activist (I’m really not sure who to blame for it) coined the phrase “global warming” someone should have told them to shut their mouths and explained to them how “climate change” deniers would use their words against them – take this shining example linked from SDA titled “Y2Kyoto: The Polar Bear Swim“.
Some of the world’s top athletes had to seek medical attention after competing in what may have been the coldest swim in World Championship Triathlon history in downtown Vancouver.
The preliminary sprint distance race kicked off early Friday morning in unseasonably cool weather when about 600 competitors — lashed by wind and rain — hit the 11-degree water for a 750-metre swim in English Bay.
Then, with the air temperature hovering around eight degrees, the athletes jumped on their bikes for a 20-kilometre ride followed by a five-kilometre run through Stanley Park wearing only light Lycra triathlon suits.
That’s when things really got chilly, according to Jeff Hayne, one of the dozens of athletes shivering under a reflective Mylar blanket in the medical tent after the race.
Kate offers no commentary, indeed she does not have to, whoever coined the phrase “global warming” made that completely unnecessary didn’t they?
A few chilly days on the west coast is not an indicator that global warming climate change is a bunch of hokum, however that Canadians should start getting ready for more tornado’s is an indicator that something is going on — it’s not a story you’ll find linked off many, if any, of their sites though.
Who cares what the climate change deniers have to say. The world has moved on, every government recognizes the need for action, many governments are taking action in one way or another and nobody is listening to those dinosaurs.
Robert
You mean governments like China, India, the USA and Russia and even Canada? What great strides have the worlds biggest polluters made towards cutting back greenhouse gasses to the level Gore, Suzuki and the IPCC say they need to?
Great strides? Well, politicians and URQ bloggers are now being forced to lie where once they could simply ignore. That’s progress of sorts.
My point, nastyboy, isn’t that enough is being done it’s that we have moved beyond the debate over whether or not climate change is occurring. So who cares what the climate change deniers have to say.
“Y2Kyoto”
That phrase makes both laugh and very angry. Behind it seems to be the idea that the Y2K bug was overhyped and chicken-little like worrying for nothing because, after all, nothing happened.
Of course, nothing happened because governments and companies spent billions (that they would have otherwise spent on other things) fixing the issue. As someone who was unfortunate enough to have to work on this problem during the late 90s (OS 390, jcl and COBOL…ick….), let me assure everyone it was real. Where I worked, we ran tests against the various modules by running the clock ahead and there were some pretty catastrophic failures. But then we fixed the problem so nothing happened.
So I have to laugh at the ignorance of mouth-breathers like KKKate and be enrage by it.
Y2Kyoto? You bet. We ought to treat climate change exactly like we treated Y2K – fix it so nothing happens. Only an ideological fool like Kate woult take the logically untenable position that Y2K wasn’t real because nothing happened and ignore the billions in effort that went into preventing it in the first place.
Nasty,
I can’t speak for China, but India, despite its growing demand, is actually doing way more than we are in regards to Co2 and pollution. The vast majority of people who have a vehicle have a mortorbike or an autorickshaw. Most cars are new models, small cars, with better gas mileage than most cars in North America. All cars in India are required to sport a sticker on the headlight that indicates it has passed some fairly strict standards. In large cities like Mumbai, people actually sell their garbage to competing collectors who recycle almost everything.
So India has its vast population working against it, numbers wise. But it is doing something. What do we have here? A place where people living in the heart of Toronto drive a 4×4 SUV to the corner to buy milk, where our gasoline and oil production are heavily subsidized by the state and where autoworkers whine about job losses at plants that make cars nobody seems to want anymore – trucks.
I believe, based on the evidence, that climate change is occurring and that it is created by humans. That being said, I don’t think some of the more draconian, eco-fascist, scientifically unsupported methods to fight it are the way to go – carbon taxes, cap and trade, outlawing fuels, mandating efficiency etc.
First, remove all state subsidies, including the billions in tax breaks and regulatory favouritism our oil industry has. Then let the price of gas reflect the price of oil as it does in the rest of the world. Allow people to sue industries and producers for polluting. Then sit back and watch as market demand for better, more fuel efficient cars and alternative fuel vehicles coupled with energy companies and industry actually having to internalize their pollution and emitting costs, reduces the actions contributing to climate change.
The other alternative is to simple figure out ways to deal with the change and plan, at a personal level, accordingly.
But saying stuff like “But India!!!” as an excuse to continue with the status quo is plain dumb.
I believe, based on the evidence, that climate change is occurring and that it is created by the sun. Geothermal effects are orders of magnitude less, and human-induced effects are a rounding error.
And I believe that common sense should dictate that we cannot [continue to] pump ever increasing amounts of sh*t into the atmosphere for hundreds of years without experiencing some sort of atmospheric side affect.
My beef is with the yahoo who coined the phrase “global warming”, yes, the planet as a whole is warming, but that does not necessarily mean that everywhere on the planet is going to experience warning now does it?
Yet every time some short, cool/cold weather event happens some idiot who doesn’t know the difference between weather and climate uses it as proof positive that nothing is happening.
Whooee! I tend to agree with Robert on this. The fact that misinformed, uneducated and lied-to Luddites deny AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) does not make it cease to exist. The same suckers who bought into the Iraq WMD propaganda promulgated by the world’s best PR machine are the ones who have bought into the GWB version of climate change.
In the Articles of Impeachment that were brought against GWB by Dennis Kucinich two days ago, article #32 reads:
What? You say you didn’t hear anything about Articles of Impeachment being brought against Bush? Not surprising. The so-called liberal media didn’t report it much. Of the big 3 US TV networks, only NBC gave any play to the development. The tweedle-dee-dum Congressional Dem’s who the US voters elected 2 years ago to end the Iraq fiasco are not pushing Kucinich’s charges and are content to let lying liars lie.
AGW skeptics have been played by the biggest propaganda machine on earth: the US government. It’s difficult to admit that your leaders lied to you — whether on Iraq WMD or on Global Warming. Those who fell for the scare tactics of the Bush admin vis-a-vis Iraq and al Qaeda also fell for the Bush team’s obscurement and denial of AGW. It’s rather disheartening, I’m sure, to discover that scientific facts were covered up so that Bush’s Big Oil buddyboys could continue profiting at the expense of the deceived.
The planet is warming. The trend is undeniable. Whether we call it Global Warming or Climate Change or Climate Crisis or, as Elizabeth May now terms it, a Climate Emergency, the end results are the same. I don’t think we need to dumb it down for the people who can’t tell the difference between weather and climate.
Climate is to weather as forests are to trees.
JB
>Yet every time some short, cool/cold weather event happens some idiot who doesn’t know the difference between weather and climate uses it as proof positive that nothing is happening.
And I’m sure we’ve never seen short warm/hot weather events used as excuses to trumpet some conclusion, let alone unusual weather events which would seem contradictory or counterintuitive to the theory for which they are claimed as evidence.
>The same suckers who bought into the Iraq WMD propaganda promulgated by the world’s best PR machine are the ones who have bought into the GWB version of climate change.
That’s a very interesting claim of correlation, JB. Did you pull it out of the usual place?
>Failure to ratify Kyoto.
Do you ever bother to learn the deep background of the matters which preoccupy you, JB? Hint: Bush wasn’t the first president to fail to do that. Suggested topics for further reading: how a treaty is approved (gains force of law) in the US; Byrd-Hagel Resolution.