El Nino and Global Warming: A Dangerous Combination?

An interview with Greenpeace USA executive director, John Passacantando on the unusually warm winter in Northeast, Exxon Mobil's funding of global warming skeptics, and the squelching of the views of U.S. government scientists on climate change.

2 minute read

January 8, 2007, 11:00 AM PST

By Abhijeet Chavan @http://twitter.com/legalaidtech


"Britain's Meteorological Office predicted that 2007 is likely to be the hottest year since record-keeping began in the mid 1800's. The organization cited rising temperatures due to global warming from greenhouse gases and human activity - combined with the naturally occurring El Nino- as likely to break the earth's temperature record this year. The world's 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1994 with 2006 the sixth warmest on record..."

"...with no particular weather event can we say this is from global warming, but what we can say from a heat wave like we're experiencing in the East is that this is exactly what the scientists have been telling us to expect from global warming: not only increasing temperatures, but disturbed weather patterns and much warmer winters. Now, while some people have been sunbathing this weekend and enjoyed the warmer weather, most people understand that there's something very wrong with this, that this effects the size of the insect populations we're going to see in the spring...It's going to effect so many things..throwing this kind of wrench into our climate systems is a very dangerous thing."

"...this government, at the behest of its oil company contributors, has been told not to put out information about global warming, not to allow the scientists to talk about their expertise with the press, about the connection between global warming and hurricanes....There have been numerous scientists who have come forward and gone public with the fact that they have been really shut down working for the government, and there are many others that we have talked to that are still afraid to come forward. So there's been a -- really a great crime has been perpetrated on the public, in terms of allowing the public to know what the government scientists know about global warming."

Monday, January 8, 2007 in Democracy Now

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