The overall temperature of our planet has been rising for some time now. It’s the basis for the scientific environmental term “global warming.” In recent years, there has been a push to re-brand global warming as “climate change.” The need to do this has been the result of how effective idiotic statements like this are on putting doubt into the public sphere of discussion.
Kunda Dixit has a photo essay about Mount Everest, in the Nepali Times that details the changes to the Everest landscape over the last decades. Inside Climate News reports that the photographs detail dramatic evidence of global warming’s deleterious affects on the enormous, high altitude glaciers.
Visitors returning to the Everest region after many years will notice changes in the landscape: large lakes where there were none; glacial ice replaced by ponds, boulders and sand; the snowline moving up the mountains; and glaciers that have receded and shrunk. [...]
Further up, near the village of Tengboche, the Imja Khola bears signs of another huge glacial lake outburst flood that thundered down the western flank of Ama Dablam in 1977. And below the formidable south face of Lhotse is Imja Tso, a lake 2 kilometers long that has formed and grown in the last 30 years. It does not exist on trekking maps from the 1980s. All these lakes were formed and enlarged as a result of global warming melting the ice.
According to scientists, the top ice-layer of the world’s highest glacier has “all but gone due to natural and anthropogenic warming.”
But, while everyone studying our changing climate conditions continues to tell anyone who will listen that humans, regardless of their political opinions, need to make big changes in the hopes of slowing the rising temperatures of the planet, there are still idiots like this, saying:
It’s bad enough to hear some dummy on talk radio spout easily disproved theories based on looking out of their windows. It’s criminal to hear the leader of a country that has risen to prominence in the world in no small part due to its reliance and innovations in science and technology.