Global warming is a fact
By Drs. Robert & Sonia Vogl
President and Vice President, Illinois Renewable Energy Association
Our friend Jay Friberg told us that when teaching his botany course at Rock Valley College, he came across six plants in bloom that were not listed as spring wild flowers in Fassett’s book, one of his texts. Another friend, Bob Piros, found a plant blooming a month early this spring. Chicago-area plant expert Gerould Wilhelm told us recently that blooming dates, established after years of recording observations, in his and Floyd Swink’s Plants of the Chicago Region are now all incorrect.
Some western hummingbirds, including the broad-tailed, are missing their connection with food plants, which now bloom 2-1/2 weeks before historic blooming dates.
Based on simple observations that can be made locally, climate change is happening.
While critics have spent years trying to discredit global warming theories, according to a New York Times article, 97 percent of climate scientists now assert that strong evidence proves global warming to be a fact.
Leading dissenter and meteorology professor Richard Linden has placed his hopes on the cloud theory, which claims cloud activity can counter climate change effects. Other scientists criticize his work, asserting that clouds would need to have a more powerful cooling effect than they do.
Some politicians support Linden and other contrarians, elevating their argument in the public’s mind. Supporting this theory allows them to avoid action, including lifestyle changes that would counter the trend.
The Heartland Institute eagerly supports Linden’s theory, which University of Washington atmospheric researcher Christopher Bretherton states, “it’s wrong science … I don’t think it’s intellectually honest at all.”
Energy Bulletin reports that Heartland also funded a billboard with Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s face and the words “I still believe in global warming. Do you?”
When Wisconsin Republican Jim Sensenbrenner threatened to boycott their conference, they pulled the ad, complaining that they “had been subjected to the most ‘uncivil name-calling and disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,’ which was both a little rich … but also a little pathetic.”
The Guardian reports that 28 U.S. companies, most of which claimed to support climate change policy, spend heavily to block it. Two major oil companies lead the attack since climate change benefits them by facilitating drilling for more oil.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently visited the Arctic to see firsthand the effects of global warming. After her visit, she commented that “many of the predictions about warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by the actual data. That was not necessarily surprising, but sobering.” Global warming is opening up 18,000 square miles of the Arctic for oil exploration and trade routes. Five countries — Russia, Canada, Norway, Denmark and the United States — have Arctic coastlines, which gives them exclusive economic rights to it.
An anticipated new book, Climate Change Policy Failures: Why conventional mitigation approaches cannot succeed, authored by Howard Latin, Rutgers University law professor and 2010 Illinois Renewable Energy and Sustainable Lifestyle Fair keynoter, is now available. Yale Law School Professor E. Donald Elliott states: “Howard Latin is one of the world’s most provocative and creative environmental experts. His new book challenges the conventional consensus about climate change. It is vintage Howard Latin, and will definitely make you think about alternative mitigation approaches.”
Professor Latin’s book can be found at www.ecovitality.org.
Attend this year’s Illinois Renewable Energy and Sustainable Lifestyle Fair Aug. 11-12 at Ogle County Fairgrounds in Oregon, Ill.
Drs. Robert and Sonia Vogl are founders and officers of the Illinois Renewable Energy Association (IREA) and coordinate the annual Renewable Energy and Sustainable Lifestyle Fair. E-mail sonia@essex1.com.
From the June 13-19, 2012, issue
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One Comment
Global warming is a fact! Yeah, thanks. My teacher taught me that in 4th grade as she let me understand why we have plains and hills and valleys.
Who says that there is no global warming?
The leftists do that for immigration too. They forget the optimum defining words to lump everyone together, and it’s wrong! Illegal immigration is apart from Immigration, like Global warming is apart from man made global warming.
Glad that we have that straight!
I am not much of a scholar, and I have not written many books, but I have a real good suspicion that the glaciers that made the great plains didn’t melt as they did because of cow farts or the idling of vehicles at a red light.
Funny, we are being told that our machines cause the global warming, but no mention is there of the volcanoes and forest fires of the last hundred years.
Colorado now has the worst fire in it’s history, and that is just peachy if I use mercury filled florescent light bulbs to lessen my carbon footprint.
As we all fuel up our vehicles, or make sure the A/C is at the right government settings, do we even wonder where the fuel comes from that operates our machinery? Most of it comes from deep beneath the ground we walk on. Below the dry, dry desert of the middle East, where nothing grows but the wind, millions of animals died and fermented to make the oil we refine into fuel. These animals ate lush greens and lived many years ago. Was it them that caused heir global warming too? Could they have stopped it if only they had not driven so many miles per year?
Yes, it’s a pretty stupid game, this blaming global warming on man and then claiming that those who don’t believe the lie, don’t believe there is and always has been a warming of our planet!
It’s all good and well to employ renewable energy options, but it diminishes your credibility when you misrepresent a problem to prove your point.
I remember the big snow storms when I was young, and I remember selling the snow mobiles because we stopped having enough snow to ride in town and the parks. With the winter we had last year, and with some others that you could have mowed your yard, no one believes that global warming is a hoax.
The hoax is that my car or the hair spray I used to use in the 70s did nothing to make the world a warmer place to live! As I watch the marvels of the great Hawaiian volcanoes and lava tubes spill into the ocean, I marvel at the way life grows from something so deadly.
Your sham is the same as those that said chlorofluorocarbons were burning a hole in the OZONE, Earth’s protection from the harmful elements of the Sun, as they now say that our problem with greenhouse gasses is that the OZONE is keeping too much inside our atmosphere!
You can’t have it both ways!