New Ice Age the New Worry?
Shilling for global warming is getting to be a dreary business these last several months.
DBKP has reported on the record snowfalls, the deaths from cold snaps in Europe, the increase in ice packs--in short, all the things that are sure to freeze the heart of any advocate of man-made climate change.
And now, there's the news that snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater at any time since 1966.
That's 42 years, for those whose math skills aren't what they should be.
Talk about inconvenient timing. Al Gore probably needs an ice pack.
Oh, sorry.
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."
China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
Besides the bad timing, there's other signs that the hysteria which drives the global warming crusade is encountering more bad news than it can handle.
The Arctic Sea Ice?
That story isn't going well either for the First Church of the Man-made Climate Change.
The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
The ice is back.
Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
The thing that's striking here is that Canada has a "Canadian Ice Service".
So, they ought to know.
After being subjected to the nonsense of "computer models" where the GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) principle is always in play, maybe the sheer fact that the earth isn't going to hell in a handbasket--climate-wise--will begin to dawn on people treated to a MSM Globaloneyfest everytime they turn on the TV or pick up a MSM print piece.
That's assuming that anyone still is reading and watching the Mainstream Media.
Maybe Time and Newsweek ought to dust off those "Global Cooling" graphics, covers and stories they featured so prominently in the 70s--just like they the ones today about Global Warming that are so popular in their "newsrooms".
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.
"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.
But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
What a handful of scientists have been insisting--to those who would listen--is that climate is a tricky business.
It's not something you can make a buck on by hysterically insisting that's there is 'scientific consensus' about a non-existent problem that calls for more government, taxes, regulation and schemes.
Oh, sorry again.
Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."
He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
The Little Ice Age is the reason the Irish started planting potatoes--it became too cold to plant the grains they were used to harvesting to survive.
Of course, that bit of history doesn't fit into the tidy scenario of Help! Humans-are-destroying-Mother-Earth-Quick-Call-Al-Gore. It also doesn't help the PC researchers in need of a quick grant fix or the hysterics who've hitched their stars to the Global Warming wagon.
Those who have invested so much in the Global Warming storyline--the U.N., Al Gore, various environmental groups--are not likely to take this news quietly.
Already, some have tried floating the notion that the cold is really a result of Global warming. Can't blame them for trying to cover all the bases.
It can be pointed out to Mr. Gore not to lose hope just yet.
It's still not too late to resurrect the old Time and Newsweek magazines from the 1970s and make a Global Cooling film.
by Mondoreb
image/idea: RidesAPaleHorse
image: Time
Source:
Forget global warming; welcome to the New Ice Age
Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page.
Click on image to enlarge.
