Since America has experienced severe snowstorms this winter, the climate skeptics are out in droves poking fun at how “ Al Gore’s liberals” use every weather event to prove global warming.  I’m not sure how climate change, or global warming, got politicized because its ramifications will impact conservatives and liberals; Republicans and Democrats alike.

It’s easy to tell when a climate denier is really on an ideologically hate rant. They almost always bring up Al Gore’s name or use the word politics a lot in their diatribe. That’s the give-a-way.

Climatologists have known for decades that climate change is happening. Al Gore didn’t invent or make up climate change information. He just compiled it into an effective documentary from many scientific sources.

As the science progresses and gets more sophisticated more is discovered. Weather patterns are regional and the snow storms are just that, weather. The operable word for climate related storms is: extreme. Many parts of America had very extreme weather events. A recent snowstorm was 2,000 miles across. You can see a satellite photo of it at NASA’s website. Ask Australia about extreme weather.  They had the most extreme flooding ever seen in that region. If I had the space here, I could go add a very long list of extreme storms.

The bottom line is, CO2 concentrations have increased by 110 parts per million (PPM) in the last 150 years from burning fossil fuels. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more moisture rises and the more comes down in extreme storms.  When Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth came out CO2 was 385 PPM, it is now 390 PPM and rising by 3 PPM per year. That’s a fact!

Rather than listening to ideological hate rants and following hearsay by people that have no clue what they are talking about, find out the real facts by following reliable scientific websites, get the science from the scientists not misinformed ideologues:

NASA http://www.giss.nasa.gov/
National Snow and Ice Data Center  http://nsidc.org/
NOAA’s National Climate Data Center  http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html

Richard Whiteford

Savebiosphere3@verizon.net