ShareThisWinter officially arrives with Sunday's solstice. But for many Americans, autumn 2008's final days already feel like deepest, coldest January.
New Englanders still lack electricity after a December 11 ice storm snapped power lines. Up to eight inches of snow struck New Orleans and southern Louisiana that day and didn't melt for 48 hours in some neighborhoods.
In southern California Wednesday, a half-inch of snow brightened Malibu's hills while a half-foot barricaded highways and marooned commuters in desert towns east of Los Angeles. Three inches of the white stuff shuttered Las Vegas' McCarren Airport that day and dusted the Strip's hotels and casinos.
What are the odds of that?
Actually, the odds are rising that snow, ice, and cold will grow increasingly common. As serious scientists repeatedly explain, global cooling is here. It is chilling temperatures and so-called "global-warming."
According to the National Climatic Data Center, 2008 will be America's coldest year since 1997, thanks to La Nina and precipitation in the central and eastern states. Solar quietude also may underlie global cooling. This year's sunspots and solar radiation approach the minimum in the Sun's cycle, corresponding with lower Earth temperatures. This echoes Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas' belief that solar variability, much more than CO2, sways global temperatures.
Meanwhile, the National Weather Service reports that last summer was Anchorage's third coldest on record. "Not since 1980 has there been a summer less reflective of global warming," Craig Medred wrote in the Anchorage Daily News. Consequently, Alaska's glaciers are thickening in the middle. "It's been a long time on most glaciers where they've actually had positive mass balance," U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia told Medred October 13. Similarly, the National Snow and Ice Data Center found that Arctic sea ice expanded 13.2 percent this year, or a Texas-sized 270,000 square miles.
Across the equator, Brazil endured an especially cold September. Snow graced its southern provinces that month.
"Global Warming is over, and Global Warming Theory has failed. There is no evidence that CO2 drives world temperatures or any consequent climate change," Imperial College London astrophysicist and long-range forecaster Piers Corbyn wrote British Members of Parliament on October 28. "According to official data in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been colder than that year, yet CO2 has been rising rapidly." That evening, as the House of Commons debated legislation on so-called "global-warming," October snow fell in London for the first time since 1922.
These observations parallel those of five German researchers led by Professor Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences. "Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade," they concluded in last May's "Nature," "as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic (man-made) warming."
This "lull" should doom the 0.54 degree Fahrenheit average global temperature rise predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Vatican of so-called "global warming." Incidentally, the IPCC's computer models factor in neither El Nino nor the Gulf Stream. Excluding such major climate variables would be like ESPN ignoring baseball and basketball.
So, is this all just propaganda concocted by Chevron-funded, right-wing, flat-Earthers? Ask Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a physical chemist and retired Navy meteorologist.
"As a scientist and life-long liberal Democrat, I find the constant regurgitation of the anecdotal, fear mongering clap-trap about human-caused global warming to be a disservice to science," Hertzberg wrote in September 26's USA Today. "From the El Nino year of 1998 until Jan., 2007, the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere near its surface decreased some 0.25 C (0.45 F). From Jan., 2007 until the spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping 0.75 C (1.35 F)."
As global cooling becomes more widely recognized, Americans from Maine to Malibu should feel comfortable dreaming of a white Christmas.
(Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at deroy.Murdock(at)gmail.com)
COLUMN
Global warming the New religen!
Back in the early 1800 it was global cooling then in late 1890s and early 1900 it was global warming. In the 1930’s to 1970s it was global cooling. Then from the lat 1990s to recent it was global warming again now it Global cooling. Is this not a pattern? The respecting pattern. I few years ago I was reading an article that talked about global temperature patterns. In this article it was saying that there are patterns in the 200k year, 18k to 20k year, 1500 to 2000 year, a 400 year, a 200 year, a 40 year, 20 year, and a 4 year cycles where you can go back and see the temperature flux. They were saying that we were at the end of the 18k to 20k year cycle, the 400 yr cycle the 200 yr cycle, the 40 yr cycle, and 4 yr cycle. Now to be at the end of all the cycles and the end of the solar cycle does that not mean something? It was also saying that the larger 18k to 20k could end any time in the next 50 year. 18k years ago Chicago, IL was under one mile of Ice.
With this recent warming there have been the uncovering of mines and farm in places like Alaska, Canada, and Green Land that have been covered with Ice for over 200 years. Tool were stowed for the winter but never were returned to.
Global Warming has become a new religion by environmentalist and those that want to take your freedoms away by laying guilt on you for destroying the environment. They don’t want you to be free to travel when you want, or to drive what you want. They want to say were and how you can live and at what temperature you can heat or cool your house. What lights you can use. Incandescent light don’t use that much electricity any the don’t hurt the environment when you throw them in the trash I dare you to brake a florescent bulb on the steps of the capital or city hall and watch the ferry or environmental hoops they got to jump threw to get it cleaned up. If you drop a one of each bulb in two rooms, one in one room, and call the health department and see what the process of clean up is and see what room you are allowed to go in to you will be amazed.
They green movement want to control every aspect of your life even what you eat, that sounds like Communism to me. You can be environmentally responsible with out someone telling you that you have to do it.
scoop
Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves in cold water and bubbles out of warm water. The equilibrium in seawater is very high, making seawater a great 'sink'; CO2 is 34 times more soluble in water than air is soluble in water.
Correlation is not causation to be sure. The causation has been studied, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome. As I understand it, the hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center goes as follows:
Quiet sun → reduced magnetic and thermal flux = reduced solar wind → geomagnetic shield drops → galactic cosmic ray flux → more low-level clouds and more snow → more albedo effect (more heat reflected) → colder climate
Active sun → enhanced magnetic and thermal flux = solar wind → geomagnetic shield response → less low-level clouds → less albedo (less heat reflected) → warmer climate
That is how the bulk of climate change might work, coupled with (modulated by) sunspot peak frequency there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, the planets cool.
Using a box of air in a Copenhagen lab, physicists traced the growth of clusters of molecules of the kind that build cloud condensation nuclei. These are specks of sulphuric acid on which cloud droplets form. High-energy particles driven through the laboratory ceiling by exploded stars far away in the Galaxy - the cosmic rays - liberate electrons in the air, which help the molecular clusters to form much faster than climate scientists have modeled in the atmosphere. That may explain the link between cosmic rays, cloudiness and climate change.
The ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that. In addition, although the post 60s warming period is over, it has allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with humidity, clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat. Check the web site of the Danish National Space Center.
http://www.space.dtu.dk/English/Research...
Keeping in mind that windmills are hazardous to birds, be wary of the unintended consequences of the all-knowing environmental lobby groups.
Everybody knows
"The nozzle of anthropogenic global warming, climate change, ACC (etc, etc, ad nauseum) funding has been spraying billions of dollars around for a couple of decades now and we still await some modern science that shows unequivically, preferably, that mankind’s CO2 “emissions” could, are, have or will significantly impact global climate or weather patterns.
I put it to you, members of the jury, that the “scientists” involved in the most massive, costly and fraudulent scam in human history know full well that CO2 is a good guy but finding him to be the enemy is lucrative, career enhancing and politically empowering."