Snow in Dallas? Global cooling anyone?

Waking up to snow and freezing rain in Austin, TX this morning put me in a foul mood…not because of the weather, but because of the inevitable carping it will cause among the handful of remaining skeptics and naysayers. As the Eastern seaboard is buried under huge snowfalls, as Texas sports fans had to brave a foot of snow during the NBA All Star festivities two weeks ago (I know, Northerners, I know), it might give pause to even the staunchest supporter of dangerous climate change. Nonsense.

As we discuss in many of our training sessions, the planet is a closed system. If you unnaturally heat it up, water evaporates but it does not disappear into outer space. It accumulates in the atmosphere to be dumped elsewhere, hence hurricanes hitting south of the equator for the first time, record floods in the Dakotas early last year, and yes, a lot of snow in unusual places this year. Check with Olympic officials and see how happy they are with the precipitation in Vancouver. Someone said the ongoing weather phenomena should really be called climate chaos as that is far more accurate of what we will be experiencing.

I recently overheard two guys debating this on a plane a couple of rows behind me who claimed the green conspiracy had now intentionally changed the topic from “global warming” to “climate change” to cover themselves. I guess the UN’s 2007 Nobel Peace Prize-winning “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” was clairvoyant naming. As one of the Lead Coordinating Authors of that report, Richard Somerville, told us himself at the ECOngress we organized at Las Vegas market in January 2010, the average global temperature for both the past decade and the past year are the warmest on record and that these wild gyrations in weather patterns are to be expected.

In fact, Richard predicted that carbon dioxide emissions may actually show a reduction over this past year as the global economy took a dive. But sadly, none of it denies the relentless upward march of greenhouse gas emissions and related temperature increases over the past century that will continue for many years to come. As you well know, this is not religion, people, it is science.

Please see this small piece above on the subject that appeared in the Chicago Tribune, sent to us by Gat Caperton, SFC Treasurer ...enjoy!

Hope all is well with you and yours,

Jeff Hiller
SFC/President
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