Posted on 02/25/2008 7:37:41 AM PST by Uncledave
Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, February 25, 2008
Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
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.
And remember the Arctic Sea ice? 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.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
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.
And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
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.
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.
It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.
lgunter@shaw.ca
So, a couple of days ago I’m reading something about some area of the US getting snowed under, and some areas in the Middle East getting snow... and I made a smart-assed crack outloud.... I said, “Well, there’s that damned global warming causing snow”.
A friend who apparently is a strong believer starts saying, “Well, certainly global warming is causing that. It causes bad weather, and worse-than-normal weather, and things aren’t right any more.”
I said, “Ummm Bull$h!+, so-called man-made global warming should be producing massive amounts of CO2 and CO which is a ‘greenhouse gas’ and in turn that will help hold IN heat from the sun, which in turn is supposed to drive UP global temperatures. Where did you come up with this new twist on global warming?”
Ack, you can’t win, they keep changing the story.
Check out the graph at the top...Ice ages beginning about every 100,000 years like clockwork. Guess where we are at.
http://www.nov55.com/gbwm.html
Let me guess - the way to avoid an ice age is to reduce our lifestyle and punish capitalism and implement global socialism...
Same solution to fix global warming...
Same solution offered for ANYTHING...
Here in the midwest we’ve gotten more snow than normal. There isn’t much on the ground right now but we’ve got a storm watch for tonight. In any case the ice fishing has been good this winter.
father gore and his people will tell you, will assure you, that global warming is responsible for any global cooling and the reason is the following;
the upper atmosphere, when confronted by the shimmering effects of warm air, tend to sink lower than the warm air, making for a cold surface on the earth which discombobulates the upper and lower layers, thereby causing the intermediate layers to mix between the upper and lower layers, which makes the cold air hug the earth, more and more until it gets to the point where carbon taxes must be passed and oil company profits must be confiscated for earth justice and normalization to occur for mother earth.
understand?
Checked the graph from peak to trough is about 50,000 years. You and I will be worm food when the next ice age is here.
Winter Storm WarningThis 'Global warming' stuff sucks. And I'm REALLY tired of shoveling it.
Rain is expected to develop early this afternoon... then change to snow and sleet from northwest to southeast during the course of the afternoon. Snow... heavy at times will then continue overnight..with total accumulations of 6 to 8 inches by Tuesday morning. The snow is expected to diminish to flurries Tuesday morning... however... strong north to northwest winds gusting to 35 mph will continue to cause considerable blowing and drifting snow.
We got a bit more snow here in Colorado than normal in some areas, and a bit less than normal in others. So... it’s average.
Over all, I’d say that folks who make statements that “hurricanes are worse than they’ve ever been” are full of it. At one point I looked up the stats on hurricanes as recorded for the past about 75 or so years. Looking at the size and destruction of hurricanes, you simply can NOT say that they are any worse NOW than they were “back then”.
People’s memories simply aren’t all they are cracked up to be.
Made up ‘scientific’ data doesn’t count and most of the global warming stuff is simply MADE UP.
No problem,
Global cooling, we’re at fault, Bush is at fault; Gore and Hillary will save us, save the planet, the universe, with a government program. It’s all Halliburton’s fault. It’s a conspiracy by the oil companies to sell more!
Energy released by one solar flare? Amount of energy released if all the earths nuclear weapons were detonated simultaneously? Not .1% of the solar flare. In the grand scheme, we’re insignificant, and our “global warming” fanatics are more or less the same people who years past put the earth in the center of the universe, because after all, in their self important mind, we matter so much that the entire universe revolves around us and the fact that my Jeep gets 18 MPG.
one month of sub 32 temps and snow/frost in vietnam highlands
This will really “frost” the dirty brown rice eating hippies!
Ha...tell that to Obama and his “followers.” THEY are the center of the UNIVERSE!!
The globull warming believers REALLY believe that globull waring causes it to get COLDER!
There is absolutely no way climate change will be blamed on the sun in popular culture. Even the environmentalists can not find a plausible sounding way of linking it to capitalism. And the MSM and Joe Average are either too intellectually lazy or to afraid to defy the environmental movement.
The “Little Ice Age” of recent history came about suddenly, in fact the year preceeding it was quite ordinary. I’m planting a raised bed garden this year! and getting a wood stove... and no wait I could burn COAL!!!
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