Global WHAT?

Yesterday I commented on the "20 Things You Can Do To Stop Global Warming" handout that the Junior Logician came home with. Today I found a couple of stories that I may send him to school with. The first comes from Fox News and it reports that (shades of 1970) we may be headed into another Ice Age.

Sunspot activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that — far from warming — the globe is about to return to an Ice Age, says an Australian-American scientist.
Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun.
He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade."This is the fastest temperature
change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,"
Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. "If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over."

Of course critics said that Chapman "cherry picked" the data....a charge that never really seems to gain much traction when it is leveled at the global warming zealots!

The second comes to us via the Idaho Statesman and it reports that there is a new anthropogenic global warming denier....and he comes from a very unexpected direction.

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore says there is no proof global warming is caused
by humans, but it is likely enough that the world should turn to nuclear power - a concept tied closely to the underground nuclear testing his former environmental group formed to oppose.

Needless to say, this call for nuclear power has not gone over well with Moore's former mates.

His critics, like Andrea Shipley, executive director of the Snake River Alliance, say he has simply sold out.
"The only reason Patrick Moore is backing something as unsafe and risky as nuclear power is he is being paid by the nuclear industry to do so," Shipley said.

Sadly, the charge that someone who changed their mind on an enviro issue has "sold out" is a very common one. However, Ms. Shipley's charges that nuclear power is "unsafe and risky" ring hollow when you consider that nuclear power generation IS the cleanest, most environmentally friendly power source out there and it has been much safer than it's detractors fear.

When one looks at the 1991 report by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, (UNSCEAR) one would see that the routine generation of nuclear electricity releases only negligible amounts of radioactive materials to the environment. "The average dose any individual in the world receives each year from all of the activities in the peaceful nuclear fuel cycle is less than 0.1 percent of the inevitable exposures he or she receives from natural radiation sources, such as cosmic rays and radon emitting building materials" ( Trudeau 59).

If these enviro-groups were serious about stopping carbon emissions and were serious about cleaning up the environment, they would back nuclear power. It is safe for people and the environment and is a guaranteed source of cheap, plentiful energy. Since they don't, one has to assume that their goals are not to guarantee cheap, plentiful energy for all nations....which leads one to assume that they really want us all to go back to pre-industrial times which is not good for those living in poverty now.