Bryan Lawrence : US policy on climate change. What the left hand gives, the right takes.

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US policy on climate change. What the left hand gives, the right takes.

Just when it seems like the US (federal government, don't blame the rest of them) is making progress (progress in the sense that the first steps are to admit you have a problem and need to do something about it) ... ... we find that the juggernaut of federal crankiness is grinding exceedingly small: the US is continuing to cutback on climate observations from space (via Eli).

And what sort of observations will be most at risk?

... data that can be collected only from satellites about ice caps and sheets, surface levels of seas and lakes, sizes of glaciers, surface radiation, water vapor, snow cover and atmospheric carbon dioxide.

So when we have a few years of cooler weather ... as we most definitely will (the climatological trend is just that, a trend, natural variability still has a part to play)the US political process will have just turned off observations that make the identification unambigous !

Categories: environment

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Comments (1)

Sean Gillies on Friday 08 June, 2007:

The right wing's best bet is to keep muddying the issue, which sorta works because the US media sucks. A documented cooling trend won't pay off for them unless it happens very soon.

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This page last modified Friday 08 June, 2007
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