I was a sixth grade teacher for ten years.  One lesson I tried to convey to every student I taught was to not be afraid to ask questions.  I explained to my students that they should never be ashamed to ask questions, that questions were they key to a better understanding of the world as they got older.  I taught them that even adults ask questions when they are unsure of things or if something doesn’t sound right. 

Now there are some people who believe that if you question authority you are being unpatriotic.

I came across a video of television science teacher Bill Nye appearing as a guest on the Rachel Maddow show.  The interview was to center around the recent heavy snowstorms that have hit the Washington DC area.  Bill Nye answered the questions, but then took it further.

Now, I understand that Bill Nye is passionate about his beliefs.  He is clearly convinced that climate change is real and that something must be done about right away.  In fact, he is not the only one.  Senator Byrd (D-West Virginia), while debating climate change and cap-and-trade energy policy, made it clear that Congress needs to do something to stem the damage man is doing to the earth.

When it comes to climate change, sounds like some are using a two-headed coin. 

Senator Byrd says look outside in Washington.  Only one storm resulting in just three inches of snow in 2002.  A warm winter that, according to Sen. Byrd, clearly indicates that something must be done immediately. 

But wait, now Washington is facing one of the snowiest winters in years, so what does that mean?

Bill Nye says one can’t look at the weather and determine whether or not climate change is real.  He then says that the extra storm activity is actually an indicator of the extra energy in the atmosphere caused by climate change.

Huh?  And I am unpatriotic because I am questioning whether or not man has caused the climate of the planet to change?

I have heard people recently point to the warmer than usual temperatures in the Northwestern United States and Canada, and the colder temperatures in Texas, as well as the crazy weather from Washington to New York, and claim that there is evidence that climate change is real.  Actually, the weather for this winter was accurately predicted, and explained, by Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi in an interview on July 15, 2009.

Children love to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy on television.  Watching him is fine, but I will remind my former students that you are not unpatriotic if you questions things about which you are uncertain.

In fact, I encourage it.

My friend Tom, a regular text/emailer sent me a message that he forwarded from a co-worker.  The message read:

PLEASE KEEP THIS GOING

FOR YOUR INFO:

> >> This is a great video. See the link below.
> >> You have to watch this video from Portland, Oregon
> >>
> >> Here’s the story behind the video.
> >>
> >> “Our daughter-in-law, Emily (MacInnes) Somers, created,
> >> directed and choreographed this in Portland last week for her
> >> Medline glove division as a fundraiser for breast cancer
> >> awareness.
> >>
> >> I don’t know how she got so many employees, doctors and patients to
> >> participate, but it started to really catch on and they all had a lot
> >> of fun doing it.
> >>
> >> When the video gets 1 million hits, Medline will be making a
> >> huge contribution to the hospital, as well as offering free
> >> mammograms for the community. Please check it out. It’s an
> >> easy and great way to donate to a wonderful cause, and who
> >> hasn’t been touched by breast cancer?
> >>
> >> Ann Somers
> >>
> >> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEdVfyt-mLw>
> >>
> >> Please forward this in honor of all the women we know and all
> >> we have lost.
> >> Thanks.

Regular readers will know that I recently lost a longtime friend who succumbed to cancer that started out as breast cancer. (Read her story here.)  Since Tom is a trusted friend, I decided to follow the link.  The link took me to a You Tube video posted last November called Pink Glove Dance For Breast Cancer Awareness.  The video shows employees of Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland Oregon, from janitors to surgeons, dancing to the tune Down by Jay Sean while wearing pink gloves.  It is a fun video to watch and certainly has done well promoting breast cancer awareness since it has received over six million hits since its posting.

Unfortunately, According to Snopes.com, Medline had no intention of making a large contribution to the hospital once the video received one million hits. 

The Pink Glove Dance does, however, have its own web site and the story is a great one.  Here is the story behind the video from www.pinkglovedance.com:

The Story Behind the Making of the Video

Why would perfectly sane and incredibly busy hospital workers agree to dance in a YouTube video viewed around the world? The short answer is to get people talking about breast cancer. But there’s more to the story. It all began back at the Medline Corporate office.

As the nation’s largest privately held manufacturer and distributor of medical supplies, Medline is focused on helping to improve lives. So it’s a natural extension of our corporate mission for us to help save lives through the early detection of breast cancer. (visit www.medline.com/breast-cancer-awareness for details).

In the past five years, Medline has donated almost a half million dollars to provide education and free mammograms to those in need and continues to make contributions every year. Medline hosts several breast cancer awareness breakfast forums throughout the year to help spread the word about the importance of early detection.

As a way to extend Medline’s breast cancer awareness campaign, we developed a pink glove called Generation Pink™. Gloves are also the first point of contact between the healthcare worker and the patient. And, the fact the glove is pink, we hoped would get people talking about breast cancer. When the gloves were launched in October, Medline committed to donating $1 of every case purchased to the National Breast Cancer Foundation to fund mammograms for individuals who cannot afford them. But we needed another idea to help spread the word. So, we asked, “What if we were to film a video of healthcare workers dancing in pink gloves? I wonder if we could produce a viral video?” Little did we know. . .

The first step was finding a hospital that would partner with Medline to create the video. Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, OR., part of the Providence Health System, a 26-hospital system spread over the northwest area of the country and a close friend of Medline’s, was at the top of the list.

A few phone calls later, the hospital enthusiastically agreed to participate in the video. The next few days were a blur of action. The hospital sent out a call for employee volunteers to dance in the video. Back at Medline, the wheels were in motion. Jay Sean’s hit song “Down” was selected for the video and discussions took place to coordinate which areas of the hospital would be filmed, the number of staff participating in each shot and the overall plan of events.

The Making of the Video

A week later, Emily Somers, Medline’s product manager for gloves and who also just happens to have a dance background, was at the hospital with a few boxes of pink gloves and a film crew. More than 200 employees of all ages, departments and skill levels
answered the call to participate.

“We had so many people who said, ‘You know, this disease has touched my life. I want to be a part of it,’” said Martie Moore, the chief nursing officer at Providence St. Vincent.

The filming took two days. Emily spent countless hours teaching the volunteers basic dance moves to showcase the pink gloves. In an environment filled with sickness and gloom, she brought incredible energy to the set, helping every one of the caregivers express their great heart and spirit. From lab technicians and the kitchen help to surgical teams, they all let loose, dancing from place to place in the hospital.

Watching this video made me smile as I was reminded of the caring and kindness that still exists in our country.  Amidst all the bad news with which we are bombarded each day, and I am guilty of spreading some of that bad news in this blog, it is nice to hear of something good.  I hope you enjoyed the video while thinking about the message behind it.

Christmas Day, on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, a 23 year-old Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab attempted to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 by igniting a chemical explosive.  The explosive, PETN, is a highly explosive organic compound.  It is being reported that this incident may have been a test to determine whether or not the compound could make it through screening and onto aircrafts.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano spent the Sunday after Christmas making the rounds on the Sunday network talk shows talking about the attempted airline bombing on Christmas Day.  She commented on the security system in place stating, “One thing I’d like to point out is that the system worked.  Everybody played an important role here, the passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action.” 

Watch the following clip as Secretary Napolitano comments on the events and the reactions of the two CNN reporters:

Less than 24 hours later, Secretary Napolitano was back on the network circuit trying to do damage control.  The fallout from Sunday’s interviews must have been great, because here is a sampling of her Monday morning backtracks:

The question is, how did Abdulmutallab actually get on that plane? 

First, Abdulmutallab is on a terror watch list maintained by the United States.  He was placed on the list when the man’s father, Alhaji Umar Abdul Mutallab, reported to the United States Embassy in Nigeria that his son had gone missing and had turned to extremism.  A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press that the father’s information had been passed along to State, Justice, and Homeland Security departments.  The watch list upon which Abdulmutallab’s name was placed contains approximately 550,000 names.  The list does not prevent people from flying into the United States, instead it is a database that will match known information to future information as new intelligence is gathered.  According to the New York Times:

A law enforcement official said it was not unusual that a one-time comment from a relative would not place a person on the far smaller no-fly list, which has only 4,000 names, or the so-called selectee list of 14,000 names of people who are subjected to more thorough searches at checkpoints.

It is certainly understandable that a one-time comment from a relative would not be enough to bar someone from flying into the United States.  Alhaji Umar Abdul Mutallab, however, is not just any relative.  He recently retired as Chairman of the First Bank Plc of Nigeria and in the past had served as the Nigerian Minister of Economic Development and Reconstruction.  One would like to believe that a warning coming from a former government official regarding his son may be taken seriously.

Northwest Flight 253, a plane with Delta markings, in Detroit after the Christmas Day attempted bombing.

Second, Abdulmutallab was not permitted to fly to the UK.  Home Secretary Alan Johnson told the BBC that Abdulmutallab was placed on a UK watch-list when he applied for a visa to study at a bogus college.  While there are different watch-list categories, Secretary Johnson explained that people in the category which Mr Abdulmutallab is in cannot come into the UK.  One has to question why someone on a U.S. watch-list is permitted to travel to the United States, while the U.K. will not allow the same person to travel within its borders?

Finally, and if true most disturbing, it is now being reported that Abdulmutallab may not have even had a passport.  Still under investigation is a report that an American lawyer witnessed Abdulmutallab, with the aid of a “sharp-dressed man,” attempted to board the flight without a passport.  The lawyer, Kurt Haskell of Newport, Michigan, states that the well dressed gentleman told a ticket agent that the poorly dressed Abdulmutallab was from Sudan and didn’t have a passport.  He allegedly asked the agent if Abdulmutallab could board the plane anyway, stating that they “do this all the time.”  Mr. Haskell says that the agent referred the two men to her manager and that he didn’t see Abdulmutallab again until the incident on the plane.

By the way, even if Abdulmutallab had a passport, he did pay cash for the ticket and checked no luggage.  Between the watch-list, paying cash, not having luggage, and flying internationally to the United States, shouldn’t someone in Homeland Security have been able to connect some or all of these facts to keep him from boarding that plane?

Homeland Security is difficult.  I have witnessed people getting annoyed with the inconvenience of screening that now occurs in airports.  I have heard the grumbling of people being told to remove their shoes.  There are people in the public complaining about privacy issues regarding the new body image technology now available for airports.  That being said, it is highly inappropriate for our Secretary of Homeland Security to appear on television telling the world that our security system works because passengers on a plane were able to thwart what could have been a deadly disaster.  The system is flawed, Secretary Napolitano knows it, we know it, and the terrorists know it.  Forget the cover-up, then the damage control to which it inevitably leads, just admit mistakes were made and do your best to fix them!

By the way, sit back and enjoy your next flight, Homeland Security has you covered.

Tiger Woods has been named the AP Athlete of the decade.  He has absolutely dominated the game of golf over the past ten years.  He has won 56 PGA tournaments, including an amazing 12 major championships.  Tiger has been winning tournaments at an incredible 30% clip, unprecedented in the world of golf.  That’s just the beginning, however, of the Tiger story.  Tiger won the 2000 U.S. Open by 15 shots, becoming the first player ever to finish double digits (12) below par.  Tiger Woods has been the number one ranked golfer in the world for all but 32 weeks of the decade.  It can be argued that he alone is the reason that total PGA purses rose from $65 million in 1996 to a whopping $275 million in 2009!

While all of the above listed accomplishments are unparalleled, Tiger Woods does not deserve to be named the AP’s Athlete of the Decade.  By the way, this has nothing to do with the scandal in which Tiger is currently mired.  There are at least two more deserving athletes who were dominant in their sports, sports which require much more physical strength, agility, and stamina.

Cycling great Lance Armstrong finished second to Tiger Woods.  We all know the story of Lance Armstrong.  On October 2, 1996 Lance was diagnosed with advanced testicular cancer which had spread to his brain and lungs.  Emergency surgery, along with aggressive chemotherapy, saved Armstrong’s life.  Following time to recuperate and rehab, Lance Armstrong went on to become a seven time Tour de France champion.  Six of those tour victories, cycling’s premier event, occurred during this decade.

Only seven championships, how can anyone compare this number to 56 tournament wins or 12 major championships?  Look at the event that Lance Armstrong dominated for much of the decade.  The Tour de France is arguably the most grueling recognized sporting experience in the world.  Riders must race other riders and the clock for a period of two weeks, covering 3,600 km, which converts to over 2,200 miles!  Included in the 2,200 mile race, in the summer heat, is over 900 miles of racing through the Pyrenees Mountains.  Along the road to his fifth of seven championships, Lance had to overcome a nasty fall that would have broken many lesser athletes.  From John Leicester of the Associated Press:

At the Tour, the most ferocious demonstration of his implacable will came in the mist-cooled Pyrenees in 2003, when his winning streak brushed within a whisker of a premature end. Accelerating uphill away from his rivals, Armstrong shaved too close to the roadside crowds and snagged his handlebar on a spectator’s bag, slamming him to the ground.

Riders with less steel and less luck — Armstrong was fortunate not to break a bone — might have thrown up their hands in despair. Not him. His eyes burning charcoal black with fury, Armstrong jumped back on his bike and powered past everyone, rescuing what until then had been a sub-par race for him. Of the Tours he won, that was the only one where he showed hints of vulnerability.

“Everyone has a bad day, an off day but Lance is that well-trained that it never happens to him. Hats off,” says 13-time Tour veteran Stuart O’Grady. “For seven years, to never fall sick, to never have (a serious) accident. The level of professionalism that he’s shown has made cycling that much bigger. Armstrong is a superstar, a celebrity in all aspects of life.”

Tennis sensation Roger Federer finished third behind Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong.  Roger Federer has dominated the tennis scene over the past decade, winning on all three of the surfaces on which modern tennis is played.  Federer was the number one ranked player in the world from Feb.2, 2004 until Aug. 18, 2008, when he slipped behind rival Rafael Nadal, a record 237 straight weeks.  Then, becoming only the second player in tennis history to do so, Federer recaptured the number one ranking to close out the decade.

The past ten years has seen Federer capture the all time record 15 Grand Slam titles.  He has played in 21 Grand Slam finals, including 17 of the past 18.  He strung together a streak of 24 victories in a row when reaching the finals of a tournament.  His versatility is displayed with 65 consecutive victories of grass courts and 56 consecutive victories on hard courts.  He won so often despite the fact that he has been pushed by his chief rival, the before mentioned Rafael Nadal.  Tiger Woods has had no such rival over the course of his career.

In September of 2009, TENNIS magazine proclaimed Roger Federer the best tennis player of all time.

Tiger Woods had an amazing decade as a golfer, but this does not make him the athlete of the decade.  Golf just doesn’t require the athleticism required in sports such as cycling and tennis.  I am not saying that Tiger Woods is not athletic, on the contrary, Tiger keeps himself in great shape.  It is not his athleticism, however, which makes him the world’s number one golfer, it is his skill at hitting the ball as he walks from shot to shot.  A golfer shouldn’t be athlete of the decade any more than a race car driver should be, and I love auto racing.  The point is, both Lance Armstrong and Roger Federer deserve the honor for dominating their sports more than Tiger does for dominating the game of golf.

An athlete is a person who is trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring physical strength, agility, or stamina.

Here’s a treat for you.  If you have not seen this before, or even if you have, this clip must be watched.  Roger Federer playing in this year’s U.S. Open.

1939 was a great year for Hollywood!  Here is a partial list of other films released during the year that many film historians call the greatest in the history of Hollywood:  The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Dark Victory, Beau Geste, Gunga Din, The Women, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Wuthering Heights, Golden Boy, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Roaring Twenties, Stanley and Livingstone, Of Mice and Men, and Stagecoach.

Gone With the Wind will air on Turner Classic Films on December 15, 2009 at 8:00 PM.

An update from the International Climate Change Summit taking place in Copenhagen.  Apparently, former United States Vice-President Al Gore delivered a heated speech calling for immediate action to prevent a complete melting of the ice in the Arctic region.  Al Gore quoted Dr. Maslowski, saying that the doctor told him that there is a 75% chance of an ice-free summer in the region within five years.  The former VP neglected to mention that this was an exaggerated retelling of a conversation the two shared several years earlier.  The doctor has denied making this claim.  States Dr. Maslowski, ““It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at.  I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Again, I have never stated that man caused climate change is, or is not, actually occurring.  I am not sure who to believe, there is a lot of evidence on both sides of the argument.  I do know this, that if people who believe that climate change is a man caused problem want to convince the world they are right, then they should stick to the facts. 

Let the data do the talking.

Update:  Learn how to create your own “Hockey Stick” graph by clicking here.

Here is a little Adam Sandler to kick off the Festival of Lights.

Straight No Chaser is an a capella group formed in 1996 on the campus of Indiana University.  They have performed all over the United States, but for me the holidays wouldn’t be the same without listening to their version of The Twelve Days of Christmas recorded in 1998.  I hope this clip enhances your holiday spirit.

Everyday I read a blog written by my friend Marty Holman.  Marty is a popular minister in a local church and a heck of a basketball player.  He and I have become friends after playing together on a basketball team for the past few years.  There are many reasons I enjoy being around Marty, among them is the fact that he challenges me to think.  Don’t take that the wrong way, Marty does not push nor even wear his religion on his sleeve.  Instead, he lives his life trying to be more Christ-like without telling everyone how virtuous he is.

This past Tuesday, after reading Marty’s reflection on a game we had lost the previous evening, I began to think about losing.  In life, losing is inevitable.  While coaching at Wachusett, we put together a forty game winning streak.  My players gained so much confidence that we wound up winning games even when it looked for sure like we would lose.  The streak started toward the end of one season, continued through an entire season the following year, and into a third season.  It just felt like we would never lose again.  Of course, we did.  I didn’t sleep for two nights.  I hate to lose.

Marty’s post made me start thinking about losing in areas other than just sports.  As I have grown older, my interest in politics and the world around me has grown.  Age has also found me becoming more conservative than in my younger days.  Officially registered as unenrolled, lately I have been supporting Republicans more than Democrats.  While I respect everyone who steps into the political arena for the right reasons, I lean more toward smaller government and less spending.  I have moved to the right of the younger Bogey.

Then came President Obama.

There has not been a political leader I have feared more than President Obama.  His beliefs are opposite of mine on almost every major issue.  President Obama was recently quoted that he believes our government must spend our way out of this recession in which we are currently mired.  Combine that with health care reform and Cap and Trade, it won’t be long before we will be reflecting on the days when our national debt was only 12 trillion dollars.  Sorry, I don’t mean to preach. 

The point is this, on November 4, 2008 conservative thinking Americans, such as myself, had to face losing. 

Watching how people face losing has interested me for as long as I can remember.  When I was growing up, I was what one might call a very poor loser.  I hated losing and let everyone know it every time I found myself on the losing end of any contest.  It appears many adults today are much like the child I once was.  There are people attacking the president on every front, including personal.  Let’s face it, nobody likes to lose.

I don’t pray nearly enough, but I have turned to prayer to help me deal with losing.  I pray for our new president and the people with whom he has surrounded himself.  I pray for our nation to recover from this recession and to return to the glory we once enjoyed.  I pray for our military personnel putting their lives on the line each day for the safety of American citizens around the world. 

Most of all, I pray that I am wrong.  Maybe the president’s ideas are the right way to go.  Maybe he can pull us out of the recession and then reduce the national debt without inflation going through the roof.  Perhaps we can strengthen our position in the world while not being a big supporter of the armed forces.  He is my President and I will pray his decisions are correct.

If not, I’ll pray he loses on Tuesday, November 6, 2012!

Speaking of sore losers, take a look at the clip below.  Is this really how some people pray?  Let’s pray this guy’s prayers are not answered.

As world leaders and climate change proponents gather in Copenhagen, Denmark starting December 7, debate will rage on about what to do about the earth’s changing climate.  A global cap on carbon output and trillions of dollars for under-developed nations will be at stake, but climate change proponents are not real confident a global agreement will be reached.  As reported in Newseek:

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for climactic change, or even to allay its effects.  They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed…might create problems far greater than those they solve.

Part of that pessimism may be because the earth has stopped warming.    According to data attributed to the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit located in Britain, the world’s leading climate research center, the planet’s temperature rose sharply (0.7 degrees celsius) from the 1970s through the 1990s.  Since the 1990s the earth has stopped warming.  From Spiegel online:

“At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”

Part of this pessimism may stem from the fact that there is still debate about whether or not climate change is taking place and whether or not it is caused by mankind.  Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research released their latest calculations of global average temperatures.  Their findings indicate that the earth has not warmed by .02 degrees celsius between 1999 and 2008 as assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but instead only 0.07 degrees celsius.  Then the British experts go on to report that when you adjust the temperatures for naturally occurring El Niño and La Niña, then the temperature change is reduced to 0.0 degrees celsius.  This is important because the summit in Copenhagen will be driven by the numbers assumed by the United Nations panel.

Part of this pessimism may come from Climategate, or the what is being called the “the worst scientific scandal of our generation.”  Thousands of emails and documents were hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit which show that leading climate change scientists have acknowledged that their own data collection is inadequate, that they altered data to prove their theories, and worked to suppress scientific opinions which differed from their own.  Excerpts from the hacked emails:

From Phil Jones (head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit):

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

From Kevin Trenberth (Head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research):

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

From Phil Jones (witholding of data):

The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here! …  The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate! Cheers Phil
PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act ! 

As a result of the released emails and documents, a request for the raw temperature data was made under the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act.  Clearly, having this raw data available for the scientific community around the world to be able to study would go a long way to proving climate change theories.  Unfortunately, once the request was formally made, the scientists at the University of East Anglia had to confess that much of the raw data upon which their predictions are based were thrown away.  This means the only data still available are the figures adjusted for variables by climate change scientists.

Climate change science is not cut and dry, which is why using adjusted data makes theories and predictions so cloudy.  In 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998 as had been reported, was the hottest year on record.  NASA later changed their data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are back in first place for hottest year, with 1934 dropping to third in the standings.  Don’t worry, if the past is any indication, there is plenty of time left in the season for 1934 to catch the new leaders.  What data did NASA use to change the data more than once?  According to the Washington Times, “NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.”

What does all this mean?  It may mean that after 100 years of debating climate change, sometimes global warming and sometimes global cooling, scientists still aren’t sure what is going on with our planet.  The internet and instant news sources, as well as money, has allowed the current climate change push to gain steam.  The debate doesn’t mean that climate change is or isn’t occurring, it just means that there are very intelligent, reasonable people on both sides of the aisle.  Check out the web site Climate Debate Daily for a comprehensive guide to the debate.

If you followed the link to the report in Newsweek cited above, then you read how climate change scientists were urging governments around the world to stockpile food to prepare for widespread food shortages caused by the upcoming ice age.  The article was published by Newsweek in 1975 to report on the impending disastrous results of the upcoming ice age.  Time Magazine had published a similar article in 1974.  Read both articles as they could have been written this year, only substituting today’s global warming for the past’s global cooling.  From the Time Magazine article:

Man, too, may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend. The University of Wisconsin’s Reid A. Bryson and other climatologists suggest that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of the earth.

While the climate debate rages on, one thing remains certain; World leaders are being pushed to take action now.