Pari faktaa ilmastonmuutoksesta

Seuraavassa pari tosifaktaa ilmaston tilasta tällä hetkellä:

"In South America, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed.

In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country's 24 provinces.

In August, Chile's agriculture minister lamented "the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years," which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.

Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand's vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.

Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years."

Venäläinen tiedemies Oleg Sorokhtin ja tanskalaiset fyysikot Svensmark ja Friis-Christensen selittävät tapahtumia seuraavasti:

"Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity - sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time - as having the greatest effect on climate.

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write."

Onko tässä nyt syytä olla oikeasti huolissaan ihmisen vaikutuksesta ilmastoon vai onko kaikki tarkoituksenmukaista liioittelua, vääristelyä ja propagandaa? Pelolla ihmisiä on ainakin helpompi hallita.

Lähde: Br-r-r! Where did global warming go? (The Boston Globe 6.1.2008)