Saturday, January 03, 2009

An inconvenient truth: The Earth is cooling

I came across this interesting, over a week old article. I think it should be on any one's good 2009 must-read reading list. This article, from baltimoreexaminer's opinion section, is entitled "An inconvenient truth: The Earth is cooling." (Emphasize mine.) For some reason the author of this excellent article does not see fit to reveal his or her real name, just "The Examiner Newspapers." Nevertheless it's not a long article and I think it deserves to be copied in its entirety here:
The "scientific consensus" that Al Gore and his fellow global warming alarmists rely upon to force radical changes in how Americans live and work is being unraveled by Mother Nature. In addition to the recent freak snowstorms in Malibu, Calif., New Orleans and Las Vegas, Arctic ice is expanding this year -- not shrinking -- and there were 115 record-low temperatures reported in the United States in October, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Despite rising carbon dioxide levels, the Earth has actually been cooling -- not warming -- since 1998, when the warming trend peaked in conjunction with heightened sunspot activity.

It appears that 2008, the National Climatic Data Center now says, will go down as the coldest year in a decade.

"For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?" asked David Gee, chairman of the 2008 International Geological Congress' science committee.

That's an excellent question for President-elect Barack Obama, who promised mandatory caps on carbon emissions and a new international global warming treaty. After meeting with Gore recently, Obama proclaimed: "The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over. We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years."

Which scientists? Does Obama believe more than 650 current and former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who are now publicly questioning the non-scientist Gore's major premise? Or Norwegian Nobel physicist Ivar Giaever, who declared himself a global warming skeptic, as did Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology? Or the scientists who point out that "100 percent" of the 20th century global warming signal comes from man-made "adjustments" made to a computer model at NASA's Goddard Institute?

There is no scientific consensus that human activity is causing global warming. The IPCC's own climate change models predicted rising temperatures for this year, but those actually recorded fall short of the predictions.

Yet Gore and his fellow global warming zealots apparently think the rest of us are sufficiently gullible to believe that the current cooling trend "actually illustrates how fast the world is warming," as an AP reporter put it recently.

In the absence of credible scientific evidence of global warming as a man-made problem, Obama's plans to impose draconian climate control measures like those found in the failed Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade proposal are not only unnecessary, they're likely to leave millions of Americans out in the cold.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your excellent blog. It's made this puzzling and fascinating phenomena of freaque waves more accessible to the public.

I am puzzled by your article on global warming/cooling though. I always understood that global "warming" referred to an small increase in globally averaged temperatures. And, that as a consequence, this increase causes local weather swings away from what we usually expect. Some parts of the world may be much colder at times, or much warmer at times.

So, the article's observation of a decrease in extreme low temperatures over some parts of NA seems to agree with this viewpoint. This viewpoint also explains the sudden and alarming breakaway of large ice shelfs in Antartica and the increasingly clear northwest passage and Arctic sea (temperatures there are on the rise), facts that the "cooling/stasis" point of view seems to be silent about.

Perhaps the real point of contention is whether the warming is man made or naturally cyclic? But I feel that while it is easy to believe in naturally cyclic local temperature changes, a globally averaged increase seems to point to a global change, like someone turning on the thermostat. Man made greenhouse emmissions seem to be the only cause that fits the bill.

Have I misunderstood global warming or have I missed your point?

FreaqueWaves said...

Thank you so much for your kind comment on this blog. I regret that we can not all see things the same way. Everyone entitles to understand the global warming phenomenon differently, since there is no scientific substantiation one way or the other. You deemed "Man made greenhouse emmissions seem to be the only cause" while I liked the article's contention that there is "the absence of credible scientific evidence of global warming as a man-made problem." It would not be a problem if it's just a matter of difference in opinion. But there should be no ambiguity in science. What appears alarming to me, however, is to quote Thomas Jefferson's mob rule that "fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine" since November 5, 2008.