Tom Naughton

This week I read a breathless article in the newspaper recounting a survey that shows more and more Americans are having doubts about global warming.  The writer was clearly upset about the survey and suggested two possible causes for this disastrous swing in public opinion: 1) Republicans have gotten very good at spreading denialist propaganda, and 2) people are too worried about the economy to pay attention to the global-warming activists.

I think there’s another possible explanation.  I’d even call it the likely explanation:  people have actually stepped outside and noticed it’s friggin’ cold out there. Buried waaaaay deep in last week’s Washington Post was this little gem:

Something happened in Washington on Friday that had not occurred in 138 years of weather history: For the first time since the National Weather Service began compiling daily data here, the high temperature for Oct. 16 was below 50 degrees.

Coldest October 16th in at least 138 years.  Boy, that global warming is getting serious, all right.  (We also had a record cold day last week here in Tennessee, by the way.)

Naturally, the editors at the Washington Post couldn’t bring themselves to put this story anywhere near the front page — not when the Senate is about to debate a cap-and-tax bill that’s supposed to help us forestall the horrors of global warming.  No matter.  People tend to notice when they’re freezing their butts off — as they did in the Western states a couple of weeks ago:

An early-season snowstorm blanketed the U.S. West, dumping as much as 20 inches of snow on Wyoming and forcing the postponement of a Major League Baseball playoff game. Record low temperatures were set in at least three states.

Higher elevations in Wyoming had snow accumulations of 20 inches (50 centimeters), while areas around Casper had 10 inches from a storm that swept through yesterday and this morning, said Mike Pigott, a meteorologist with AccuWeather.com in State College, Pennsylvania. Casper normally has an inch and a half of snowfall by this point in October, he said.

“The story here isn’t so much the snow, but the record-smashing cold,” Pigott said in a telephone interview.

Denver posted a record low of 17 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 8 degrees Celsius) this morning, breaking the old mark of 25 degrees, Pigott said. Casper, Wyoming, touched a low of 12 degrees this morning, shattering the old record of 21 degrees, he said.

The downturn in temperatures didn’t begin this year, either.  A year ago, London was blanketed with snow in October for the first time since 1922 — just as the House of Commons was set to debate global-warming legislation.  What a pickle:  the alarmists want to ram fat new taxes disguised as global-warming prevention down our throats, but the freakin’ weather just won’t cooperate.

The drop in temperatures has been so dramatic over the past few years, even the global-warming alarmists at the BBC finally had to admit it’s happening:

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated. The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down. These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years. So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles. Professor Easterbrook says: “The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.”

This is stunning news.  Not the stuff about the oceans — I already knew about that — but the willingness of a BBC reporter to note that there was global cooling from 1945 to 1977.  In case your history is a little rusty, that would be the era in which the automobile became hugely popular and industrialization grew at a monstrous rate after World War Two. 

The same reporter even cited an inconvenient but well-established and verifiable fact:  there’s been no global warming whatsoever since 1998.  This puts the alarmists in the embarrassing position of trying to convince us that a 21-year warming span that ended a decade ago proves that humans are heating up the planet, but a previous 32-year cooling span and the current 11-year cooling span are both meaningless — even though they occurred while CO2 was rising. I guess at some point, media reporters finally conclude that maintaining a shred of credibility with the public outweighs the need to push an agenda.

Of course, those are just small, recent cycles.  Lately I’ve been reading Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth, which is so full of citations, they take up nearly a third of each page.  I don’t recommend tackling the book unless you really like jumping into heavy-duty science, but here are some highlights: 

• The earth has been warming and cooling in cycles pretty much forever. 
• Nobody knows all the factors that influence the warming and cooling trends, but the computer models based on CO2 concentrations are utter failures.  Sunspots and naturally-occurring changes in the oceans seem to be the biggest factors.
• During our last warming trend, Mars was also getting warmer.  (Gee, that sounds like the sun might have something to do with it.)
• The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been many times higher than it is today.  During some of those high-concentration periods, it was cold, not warm.
• A thousand years ago, it was warmer than it is now.  (The polar bears survived, in case you’re wondering.)  The Vikings formed colonies in Greenland and grew crops that don’t grow there today — it’s too cold.  This is just one of several long periods in human history that were warmer than the 20th century.
• The cold periods have been the worst for humans.  It was long cooling periods, not hot ones, that turned fertile lands into deserts and led to crop failures, famines, rampant diseases, forced migrations, and wars over fertile lands.  The warm periods have been relative nirvanas.

Naturally, everyone who still depends on global-warming hysteria for grants or fund-raising is busy cranking out press releases to explain away the recent cooling trend or trooping up onto Capitol Hill to predict disaster — from all that non-existent warming. 

I suppose if they’re smart, they’ll check the forecast and try to schedule an appearance on a day when there’s no risk of another record-cold temperature being set.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Media Nonsense, People Are Nuts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.