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Originally Posted by Inner Dirt
In my lifetime they have went from global cooling, to global warming, to climate change. The thing with "climate change" that is their greatest invention yet, they can never be wrong. Anything off the norm it is "climate change." What a freakin joke. If anyone misses about hearing about climate change pick up a copy of National Geographic they mention it a couple 100 times in each issue and blame everything on it.
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In the 70's a guy named Peter Gwynne wrote a nine paragraph blurb in Newsweek (no, it wasn't a cover story). The story observed – accurately – that there had been a gradual decrease in global average temperatures from about 1940, now believed to be a consequence of soot and aerosols that offered a partial shield to the earth as well as the gradual retreat of an abnormally warm interlude. Some climatologists predicted the trend would continue, inching the earth toward the colder averages of the "Little Ice Age" from the 16th to 19th centuries. Ultimately, those climatologists gathered more an better data and reached an entirely different conclusion. However, since 1975 the right has been using that throw away story as proof scientists are making it up. Science is like that. You develop data, form a hypothesis, and then work to disprove the hypothesis. Science worked perfectly well in this case, to the point where almost no reputable scientist refutes the theory. As I've said, there is no doubt about the warming trend (unless you believe the thermometer is a hoax, and don't believe carbon dioxide behaves chemically as it does); however, there is certainly room for discussion about the predictive models and that is where the discussion would be productive.
Interestingly, I was in on some meetings where Republicans said that while they might not buy into global warming, there were climatological changes affecting their state, like drought, tornadoes, and flooding. The idea of climate change was to sound more inclusive of the problems that states were experiencing. Drought, for example, may or may not have had something to do with global warming, but by calling it climate change you could deal with the problem without necessary going over to the dark side. Climate change was meant to be a term that didn't imply cause or source. It described the problem without assigning blame. So what you see as a joke was a way of allowing Republicans to talk about climate and address climate problems (like drought) without sounding like it was the fault of their constituents.
