Kowabunga

Global Warming: Natural Causes #8

February 25th, 2008 | by Sqotty |

The National Post is running a piece on global warming that has a wonderful headline: Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age. The leading paragraph reads:

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

It’s a fine article with some revealing facts that are new to me.

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.

I am not exactly surprised by the record snowfall in Toronto, however it is a good fact to have on hand when discussing global warming. The more interesting fact for me is the one on the Arctic Sea ice and that records of the ice levels have only been tracked since 1972. That’s a very short time for record keeping to use as a means to make claims as to the severity of a “problem,” especially when other evidence, such as ice bore and sediment cores show more significant changes over thousands of years.

The cry of imminent doom due to global warming and citing the Arctic Sea ice melts as a major symptom when records have only been kept for less than four decades is rather disingenuous. Add to that that the global warming loons have yet been able to explain where all the ice on the Greenland ice sheet came from over the 50 year period from 1943 to 1993 when efforts to recover WW2 aircraft forced done on the ice sheet had to bore through nearly 300 feet of ice that had formed over the site.

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.

That’s a lot of ice. I especially like the next two paragraphs:

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.

It won’t stop the loons from crying “wolf,” but Gunter is right on the money. Everytime they begin screaming that “the sky is falling” because of a picture of a couple of polar bears stuck on the ice floe, or that the Antarctic Ice sheet is shrinking due to measurements taken on the Antarctic Western peninsula, which extends outside of the polar region into temperate regions, and only accounts for 3% of the Antarctic ice sheet, then it is only fair to use the current winter trend as an example that the exact opposite is true.

The piece then covers some of the other discussions that have been made as of late, including the fact that solar activity is at its lowest point and if it doesn’t start getting activity, we could well be in for another Little Ice Age. That would be bad.

It’s a good piece, and worth reading for both the new material and a refresher of other recent news on the global warming front.

For the record, my geothermal system is still on the blink, so we could use a little “global warming” now. Meanwhile, I am increasing my “carbon footprint” by burning wood in my fire place to heat the house. My wife prefers it when the house is at 75 degrees rather than 60 degrees.

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Climate Change Snowfall Solar Activity