And here we go!
If you were in the space shuttle looking down yesterday, you would have seen a pair of truly awesome, even fearful, sights.
Much of North America was obscured by a 2,000-mile storm dumping vast quantities of snow from Texas to Maine — between the wind and snow, forecasters described it as “probably the worst snowstorm ever to affect” Chicago, and said waves as high as 25 feet were rocking buoys on Lake Michigan.
Of course, that means
Welcome to our planet, circa 2011 — a planet that, like some unruly adolescent, has decided to test the boundaries. For two centuries now we’ve been burning coal and oil and gas and thus pouring carbon into the atmosphere; for two decades now we’ve been ignoring the increasingly impassioned pleas of scientists that this is a Bad Idea. And now we’re getting pinched.
Oh, there have been snowstorms before, and cyclones — our planet has always produced extreme events. But by definition extreme events are supposed to be rare, and all of a sudden they’re not.
See? It’s so simple. Someone drove an SUV or took a fossil fueled private jet (we could point the finger at plenty of climate alarmists for that!), so, the weather is getting more extreme, and all the cold and snow is proof that it’s all mankind’s fault!
That’s just a start, of course, and so far not enough to counter the power of the fossil fuel industry, the most profitable enterprise humans have ever engaged in. So we’ll keep building, and hoping others will join us. But the good news is simple: More and more of this planet’s inhabitants are remembering that they actually live on a planet.
The whole story is actually a set up to tell us how great the organization 350.org is, and to get people to “spread awareness” and to “(get others) to take action.” Now, I’m all for reducing the use of fossil fuels and coal (I’ve said before and I’ll say again, they are not particularly clean, and I’m not referring to CO2. I’m also not buying the “clean coal” meme) and using more alternative sources. Yet, how would solar, wind, and water stand up? Solar panels would have been covered by snow, wind turbines would have frozen, and there are only so many places you can build hydro-electric, which could have seen the water that drives the turbines frozen.
We’ve been able to forget that fact for the last 10,000 years, the period of remarkable climatic stability that underwrote the rise of civilization. But we won’t be able to forget it much longer. Days like yesterday will keep slapping us upside the head, until we take it in.
Except, it hasn’t been stable: instead, it has vacillated between cool and warm periods since the effects of the last glaciation period ended. And, interestingly, one of the results of a “less active” Sun is……more clouds! A less active Sun means less solar wind, which leads to an influx of more cosmic rays, which create clouds, which cools the planet, and clouds are made of water vapor! When it’s cold, that means snow and other winter weather. Ain’t science grand?
