Monday, January 07, 2008

No Quibbling About Global Warming

A year ago 2007 was predicted to become the hottest year on record, surpassing 1998. One could quibble about 1998, since in the United States, land of the most thorough, modern, and intensive climate study and monitoring systems, 1998 was second to 1934, and six of the warmest years in the past 100 years occurred over 50 years ago.

You might quibble that worldwide temperature measurement has been highly suspect since the demise of the Soviet Union resulted in closure of thousands of weather stations in a massive, relatively cool part of the world.

You could also quibble about “hottest year on record,” since that actually may only be for the period since 1978, when weather satellite observations began, or perhaps since the end of the Little Ice Age circa 1850, when graduated and standardized thermometers came into widespread usage.

But who’s quibbling?

The bottom line on 2007 is in now, and if you lived in the Southern Hemisphere, you would have experienced bitter cold in many areas. Not to quibble, but global warming really loses some of the luster of its “global” label if half the planet goes the opposite way.

As Jeff Jacoby of the far-left leaning Boston Globe points out, Br-r-r! Where did global warming go?, January 6, 2008, “2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed.”

Before Al Gore and the rest of the true believers trot out their forecasts for 2008, I would like to make my own. On the evidence of the first week of 2008, global warming is not doing its job in northern California. It has been cold, windy, heavy snowfall in the Sierras, some flooding in the San Francisco Bay area, and not at all what I expected given that so many “experts” say it would be otherwise.

Frankly, I feel cheated.

A bit of warmer weather would be welcome.

Fortuitously, I bought a 12.5 kilowatt generator with automatic start and power transfer switch a couple of months ago, and its installation was finally completed at 2 pm this past Thursday. About eight hours later we lost power for a day and a half, and the generator performed flawlessly.

When I chide Liberal friends about the miserable weather, they tell me it is proof of global warming. In fact, they tell me that global warming will cause it to be wetter, drier, hotter, colder, stormier, calmer, more flooding, more droughts – anything and everything that happens, no matter what, is and will be proof of global warming.

When Alice mentioned that many parts of the southern hemisphere were experiencing unusual cold, a daughter told her that cooling in the Tropics was also part of global warming.

Not to quibble, but cooling in the Tropics will also, I’m sure, be part of global cooling.

Interestingly, a prominent Russian scientist predicts global cooling will begin in 2012.

"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."

Damn!

That’s not what I wanted to hear.

(Please click on one of the labels below to be magically transported to much of my recent commentary on the fallacies of claiming mankind is causing global warming. I'll be glad you did)

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