Let’s grant that, as the article says, New England’s winters are milder and less snowy than they were 31 years ago. Let’s grant that this is due to a global climate change. My question is this: Why 31 years? Why do they trace back to 1965 and 1970 for the baseline? What was the climate like 100 years ago? 200 years ago? 1,000? 10,000? Was it even warmer? Colder? What caused those shifts?
This is the primary issue of the whole climate change debate for me. Is global climate change a result of human action and even if it is, which I’m not ready to concede yet, can it even be reversed by legislative decree?
I recall reading that in the mid-19th century here were summers in which it snowed in mid-July? Is that preferable? Yet in the Middle Ages, they had years without winters. In northern Europe, they were able to grow grapes for varieties of wine that only live in southern Europe now.
The primary complaint in the hearing of the U.S. House’s Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held for effect on top of Cannon Mountain in Franconia, New Hampshire, was that the changes will affect the maple syrup and tourism industries by making New England’s climate more like South Carolina’s. Seems South Carolina doesn’t do too bad for tourism. It’s just different tourism and it stinks if you’re a snow skier, I suppose. They could turn the ski resorts into vineyards and make an East Coast Napa.
Seriously though, has anyone definitively determined that these changes are the result of man’s intervention and not the result of a natural global climate pattern of high and lows?
I’m not going to buy the theory just because someone says there’s a consensus. Yeah, there also used to be a scientific consensus that the world was flat. A lot of people agreeing on something doesn’t make it necessarily so. Never mind that there isn’t a consensus, that there are plenty of good scientists who disagree. Ah, but the global warming zealots say that anyone who strays from their orthodoxy are heretics and not to be trusted. And who are the religious extremists?
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