Man With Food In Beard Saying Something About Climate Change | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

GENEVA—A man with a piece of food stuck in his beard is currently addressing an auditorium full of world leaders and prominent scholars on what seems to be the subject of global warming, sources are reporting. The food particle has been dangling from the man's facial hair for more than an hour while he has mentioned such phrases as "sulfides," "ice caps," "immediately, otherwise we all may," "underwater tomb," and "of human life as we know it." It was briefly dislodged during a particularly animated portion of the presentation in which complete global apocalypse was remarked upon, only to fall one inch and reattach to a lower portion of beard. The exact nature of the crumb has yet to be ascertained. Some are speculating that it is aioli. Others, however, believe it to be a bit of chewed-up turkey. (Via Planet Gore)

What does Palin believe causes climate change? | csmonitor.com

So what, exactly are the cyclical temperature variations? And could they be enough to account for the warming that we’ve experienced so far?

Palin is light on specifics here. She could be talking about the periodic wobbles in the earth’s orbit that have caused the earth’s 100,000-year ice ages (but that would conflict with her reported belief that the world is only a few thousand years old). Or she could be alluding to changes in the sun and the amount of energy that it emits. Or she could be thinking of El Niño events, or of the temperature oscillations ocurring in our oceans. Or maybe she’s talking about volcanic activity, which isn’t really cyclical but nonetheless changes the composition of the atmosphere and therefore affects the climate.

The problem with each of these explanations is that there is not yet any theory to explain how they account for the rapid warming that we have seen beginning in the second half of the 20th century. Nobody has managed come up with a model that is satisfactory to the scientific community that explains how any of these natural processes account for the roughly one-degree-Fahrenheit rise in global surface temperatures over the past 30 years. In fact, the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that such natural variabilities “would likely have produced cooling” during this time.

But we do have a model that explains how human activity – namely, the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use – accounts for this rise in temperature. This model has been endorsed by the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, and most of the presidential and vice presidential candidates endorse it, too. Except, it seems, Sarah Palin.