Posted on 12/01/2005 4:33:26 PM PST by goldstategop
RUSH: This is just getting better. This could be summed up by saying that global warming is causing global warming cooling, which may lead to a mini-ice age. This is from NewScientist.com and the UK Guardian also has a version of this story. If this comes to pass, Great Britain is in big trouble. Europe is going to be hardest hit. "The ocean current, the Gulf Stream that gives Western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini-ice age. The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the north Atlantic which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream. The slowdown which has long been predicted as a possible consequence of global warming, will give renewed urgency to intergovernmental talks in Montreal this week on a successor to the Kyoto protocol. Harry Bryden at the Southampton Oceanography Center in the UK, whose group carried out the analysis, said that he's not sure yet if the change is temporary or if it signals a long-term trend. 'We don't want to say the circulation will shut down, but we are nervous about our findings. They have come as quite a surprise.'"
Here's how all this is supposed work: "The North Atlantic is dominated by the Gulf Stream – currents that bring warm water north from the tropics. At around 40° north – the latitude of Portugal and New York – the current divides. Some water heads southwards in a surface current known as the subtropical gyre, while the rest continues north, leading to warming winds that raise European temperatures by 5°C to 10°C. But when Bryden’s team measured north-south heat flow last year, using a set of instruments strung across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas, they found that the division of the waters appeared to have changed since previous surveys in 1957, 1981 and 1992. From the amount of water in the subtropical gyre and the flow southwards at depth, they calculate that the quantity of warm water flowing north had fallen by around 30%." Now, you might be asking yourself, "Okay, how is global warming causing this cooling?" Well, the first thing you have to understand is that global warming explains everything! Global warming explains why Bush sent troops to Iraq. Global warming explains what happened to New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. Global warming is said to be the reason for everything. Global warming is a political issue.
Global warming is a political issue, and as such, it cannot die; it will not die. It is an issue that leftists around world are carrying in their hip pockets and trumpeting from their mouths as a means of doing their best to destroy or weaken capitalist industrial societies. Well, the theory on this, as I understand it -- now, I am not a scientist. But I'll tell you, as they explain this, what happens is this warm water from the Gulf Stream flows north, and obviously it cools, and as it cools, as it gets north, it sinks, and it interacts with another current in the deep that brings it back down toward the equator and back to the Gulf Stream, and that's like the conveyor belt. So if that water stops sinking, then it stops being conveyed back and then stops being returned on the south-to-north part of the conveyor belt. Now, you say, "Wait a minute, Rush. Global warming says we're already losing a bunch of glaciers up there, the glaciers are melting, and because the glaciers are melting that ought to be putting a whole lot of cool water in the area where it's not staying cool enough." Well, the explanation for this is that the melting water from the ice caps is freshwater; it is not saline, and what is happening is that the freshwater is diluting the saline content of the Atlantic in the northern regions here of that conveyor belt where the Gulf Stream drops to the cooler section, comes back, ends up flowing north again as warm water. And as the saline content of the north Atlantic is diluted, the Gulf Stream warm water that cools doesn't sink as deep because there's a difference in weight and mass between saline and freshwater.
The saline content is diluted, and that's what they're worried about. They're worried, but, now, interestingly, this is the first I've heard of this although they say they've been predicting it for all these years. But here you have global warming, which is causing the melting of the ice caps, which is going to lead to an ice age. Now, the bottom line is a lot of people have been predicting this. As recently as 1975, Newsweek had a cover, The Coming Ice Age and then in the eighties, "Nope, we're going to make this global warming because it's never 30 degrees in June, but it can be 65 in January, and so global warming will be much more believable to people. You tell people we're having an ice age, and it's 105 degrees when it's supposed to be 105 degrees, nobody is gonna believe it. But if we tell them global warming is happening, and the sun is out in New York, or Michigan, or wherever, and it happens to be 65 or 70 a couple of days in January, as it always is, then we'll be able to sell that." So this whole concept of global warming has been sold since the eighties, and it's been sold as, "Well, you know, we can't really predict it; we can't guarantee it, but we don't have time to pretend otherwise! We don't have time to wait because if we wait and it turns out to be true we're doomed, our goose is cooked." Well, the Kyoto protocol came along. We didn't sign onto that. There hasn't really been a whole lot of, at least as far as the wackos are concerned, concerted, devoted effort to deal with global warming.
So now they say that the Gulf Stream is down by 30%, and the result of this, by the way, if this happens, is that in the next ten to 12 years, Europe's average temperature will decline one degree Celsius, one degree. That is not a mini-ice age. One degree Celsius is not a mini-ice age. But regardless, let's say they're right about this. Let's say that all this happens to be true. Here we have global warming, which I guess the predominant factor here would be the ice caps melting, because that's what's supposedly is getting in the way of everything. These glaciers and ice caps are melting and they're weakening the saline content in seawater. Now, I have another question -- and look, I'm not a scientist, so I'm not afraid to ask what some of you scientists might think are dumb questions, but if an iceberg at the North Pole is freshwater, I want to know where it was made and how it got there. How can an iceberg in ocean water be freshwater? I understand how it can rain freshwater over the ocean because the whole evaporation process and condensation process actually distills it, but I don't understand how an iceberg can be freshwater. But it must because they're saying so. So the icebergs melt and that weakens the saline, that causes the Gulf Stream flow to be interrupted and perhaps stopped, and the result is everybody's going to freeze their tushes, as a result of global warming. So they've got a hard PR sell here because now they're saying that the worst outcome of all this would be a mini-ice age as a result of global warming. I just wanted to keep you up to speed on where they are headed with all this. Meanwhile, NOAH has made it plain (National Oceanic Atmospheric Association -- it's a government agency, hurricane people) there's no evidence whatsoever global warming has anything to do with any increasing hurricane activity or intensity.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, don't get confused. I've not done a 180 and starting to buy this. I believe what may be happening could be happening, this conveyor belt business with the Gulf Stream and being interrupted. We've had ice ages on this planet, in case you don't know that, and we've had ice ages long before man was ever industrial, before we started burning all these fossil fuels and so forth. I have not abandoned my belief that whatever is going on is not caused by us. I do not believe that prosperity, technological advancement, and western democracies and civilizations are causing all these weather fluctuations. I think the earth's climate is more complicated than we can possibly understand, but certainly we cannot control it. We cannot make it rain when we want to, we cannot stop it from raining, we can't do anything where the weather is concerned other than go somewhere else. Now, if this stuff is happening out there, and if these icebergs are melting, it's happened before. It's happened long ago, and all these systems are cycles and they repeat themselves.
We've had ice ages. If you're in France, don't worry about it. You can burn cars! You've got all kinds of cars in France you can burn to stay warm. Another upside: summertime, not going to be nearly as hot. All these thousands of deaths that happen in Europe in the summertime because of no air-conditioning. You may not need air-conditioning if we get this mini-ice age. There's an upside to all of this. But the idea that we are causing this, do not fear. I have not wavered, not changed from any of that. I just think these wacko environmentalists take these naturally occurring climatic cycles and try to blame primarily America and other civilized industrialized nations for all this, and it's purely political. But these things are going to happen, and if this is happening, there's nothing we can do to stop it. Snerdley says, "Well, head up there and just dump a bunch of salt." There's nothing we can do to stop this if it's happening and there's nothing we've done to cause it, but it is an interesting fact. Now, if you start reading the right places you can find a lot of scientists who actually do believe that we are nearing the end of a solar warming cycle, and that could be a factor here in whatever new sense of global cooling is now being forecast by people.
Didn't they try this crap in the very late 70's/early 80's? "Nuclear winter" so some garbage?
I read it, and enjoyed it. I'll bet he's taking a lot of heat from the Hollywood set (after all, he writes screenplays) for daring to scoff at the Chicken Littles (even in fiction).
I'm still waiting for the leftists to explain how come there was global warming as long ago as 55 million years ago and global warming on Mars that is causing the Martian Polar Caps to melt - especially in light of the fact that neither event involves humans, fossil fuels or SUVs.
Could be a long wait.
Nogales, Arizona! Here I come!
See, those muzzies knew what to do!
So it it true! GLOBAL WARMING WILL FREEZE US ALL!
Hey, c'mon. Let's keep our junk science horror scenarios straight. Nuclear winter was a Carl Sagan theory that came out in 1983.
Wasn't it in the '70s that the tree-huggers predicted there'd be no more oil by 2000? Or when was that?
But hasn't the opposite happened. The most technologically advance cultures have moved to places that are so cold, the backward cultures can't thrive there.
I read a Scientific American article that said the US would run out of coal in 100 years. The issue was dated about 1866.
Actually you can. Depending on latitude everything between the tropics gets hotter cooling more quickly as you move toward the poles. Places like the Middle East and SW USA will become wetter while Equatorial Africa and South America can become vast deserts.
I wonder if Al Gore will issue a retraction on his predictions... Hah....
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Does anyone remember that awful and unusually cold Winter in NY when it was 7 degrees below, and there was ole Al Chore giving a speech on the impending global warming crisis? That captured Looney Left for me.
"But hasn't the opposite happened. The most technologically advance cultures have moved to places that are so cold, the backward cultures can't thrive there."
"Best" = food growing.
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