You think climate change spurred by global warming is real? It’s all just a figment of your imagination. Just ask a farmer in the Southeastern United States. Or, then again, maybe not:
TONEY, Ala., July 2 — Northern Alabama has become acre after acre of shriveled cornstalks, cracked red dirt for miles and days of unrelenting white heat. The region’s most severe drought in over a century has farmers here averting their gaze from a future that looks as bleak as their fields.
The drought is worst here, but it is wilting much of the Southeast, causing watering restrictions and curtailed crops in Georgia, premature cattle sales in Mississippi and Tennessee, and rivers so low that power companies in the region are scrambling and barges are unable to navigate. Fourth of July fireworks are out of the question in many tinderbox areas. Hay to feed livestock is in increasingly short supply, watermelons are coming in small and some places have not had good rain since the start of the year.
Now I know some “junk” scientists have claimed that an increase of severe droughts would be a consequence of global warming. And, yes, Australia is in the throes of one of its worst droughts in years half a century or more. And I know that droughts in Africa have been linked to global warming, and have been predicted to double within the next 100 years (and that’s a so-called conservative estimate).
But I don’t see that as any reason to stop buring coal, oil or gasoline for our big SUV and trucks, do you? Who cares if a lot of Africans die, or a few farmers in the South go under, financially speaking:
Struggling to pay their bills, farmers here in the Tennessee Valley say they are burning through cash reserves and staring at bankruptcy, as last year’s dry weather turned into a singeing drought this year. Gleaming steel grain bins that should be full of corn ready to become ethanol are virtually empty. Cattle sales are several times normal; the farmers have nothing to feed them. Harvest day’s expected small returns will be make-or-break time, farmers here say.
It’s all caused by cosmic rays anyway, so that means it’s an act of God, not man. Right?
According to Sloan and Wolfendale, the 2000 paper highlighting the connection between cosmic rays and low-level clouds completely avoids clouds at other altitudes. This is surprising because cosmic ray ionization should increase with altitude. Cosmic rays should be intercepted earlier by the atmosphere and turned into clouds, not down at the lowest altitudes. If cosmic rays were to blame, you would expect the exact opposite, with more high-altitude clouds.
It can’t be ruled out, but it’s pretty unlikely.
The next piece of skeptical evidence is the likelihood that cosmic rays will create ions that turn into water droplets. The researchers estimated the density of cloud droplets that could be produced by cosmic rays at the lowest altitudes. They found that the rate of ion production was too low generate the number of water droplets required to create clouds. […]
“There is no connection between global warming and cosmic rays. That’s because there’s no trend in cosmic rays. It’s completely bogus,” remarked Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt, a NASA researcher and contributor to Realclimate.org.
Well, who you gonna believe? The good people funded by Exxon Mobil or some twerp scientist working for NASA? My guess? It’s all the fault of homosexuals and slutty girls gone wild, just like with Katrina and New Orleans. Couldn’t possibly be burning all that wonderful crude oil and coal God left for us to use as we saw fit. Those folks in Alabama and elsewhere in the South just need to pray more, that’s all. We all know what slackers they are in that department.