Wednesday - April 23, 2008

Oh Noes, now we’re gonna freeze!

The scariest photo I have seen on the internet is spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.  What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

We cannot really know, but my guess is that the odds are at least 50-50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades.  The probability that we are witnessing the onset of a real ice age is much less, perhaps one in 500, but not totally negligible.  All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.

I guess this is what climatologists do when they aren’t pretty enough to be weathergirls on TV. They look at today’s weather and then argue about the climate. FoxNews also covers the story, even getting the date right this time. FoxNews stays true to their Glowball Worming roots, and devotes more ink to debunking this guys claims than they do reporting it. Plus they sidebar some links, one of which tells us how a warmer climate means harsher winters.

Hey, wait a second. Isn’t writing online about something somebody else said online and linking to it called blogging? What the heck does Fox think it’s doing? Damn journalists, blurring the lines again.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/23/2008 at 05:00 PM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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