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April 23, 2008

Pondering Climate Change

As the snow and rain and hail drag on and on here in Oregon, the oft-repeated comment, "So much for global warming!" becomes increasingly annoying. It's more science than I am capable of explaining to show how global warming could lead to long, hard winters. And I wonder if that's why the language used to describe the phenomenon is changing - why we are now referring to "climate change" instead of "global warming."

If you read a variety of news media as I do, the contradictions in scientific claims about climate change are easy to find, and occasionally they even show up within the same article. For instance, Fox News this morning is reporting on the opinion of a physicist who is also a NASA Astronaut, who claims the lack of sunspot activity on the sun is actually setting the stage for an ice age (after the kids' movie "Ice Age" and the film "The Day After Tomorrow," we should all have a sense of what that could mean). But even Fox News has to cover its ass if it's going to retain any level of credibility, so the article also notes that other scientists are accusing him of "cherry-picking" his data. They claim we are still seeing rapid warming, with March this year being the warmest March on record. Which is hard to believe when we're still seeing snow and hail on a regular basis at sea level in mid-April.

But I think maybe there might be another explanation for what we're experiencing, though I haven't heard anyone talk about it. This article looks at scientists' efforts to control the weather, specifically to stop it from raining during the Olympics in Beijing. But it also says that weather manipulation in the U.S. been going on since before the 1980s and continues today.

Scientists are monitoring more than 150 weather-modification projects in 40 countries, including at least 60 in the Western United States. The projects include wringing additional snow out of clouds for California hydropower and easing droughts in sub-Saharan Africa.

I remember quite distinctly the first time in my community the talk began about strange weather. It was 1976 and I was in Southern California when we had an exceptionally wet year with a lot of flooding. From that time forward, every year people have talked about how strange the weather has been. Could it be that human efforts to control the weather are disrupting natural weather patterns, intentionally or not, in ways we do not understand? Could it be that our weather manipulation is the cause of climate change, or at least an exacerbating factor in it? I'm only a layperson, not a scientist, but it seems more than coincidental to me that human efforts to manipulate the weather have so perfectly coincided with the climate change phenomenon.

Posted by Becky at April 23, 2008 08:49 AM