Little Ice Age? Cold Snap Sparks Cooling Debate:
There’s snow in Baghdad, and global temperatures have seen their biggest one-year change—in this case, downward—in recorded history. So is global warming kaput?
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It’s cooler outside the beltway.Cooler weather has the blogosphere alight with speculation about the climate’s real changes. Short-term temperature moves fire up both camps. From Planet Gore:
Hopefully this will cool the hysteria in the U.S. Congress and parliaments around the world so that we can understand the science of our climate before we pursue policies that could wreck our economy and quality of life.
Environmental Defense says one month does not a trend make:
Global warming is a process that occurs over decades. It can’t be proven or disproven by a single month’s temperature.
There are theories for all tastes. Daily Tech started it all, arguing that last year’s nippy weather “wipes out a century of warming.” Energy Outlook pored through the data and points at the sea. Maybe it’s the sun? Environmental Economics did the heavy lifting, parsed all the sunspot data from Goddard, and concluded that’s not to blame:
The current downturn in temperatures may be caused by a valley in the sunspot cycle. But that doesn’t mean that global cooling is taking place. It just means that temperatures are likely to be more variable until sunspot activity increases again.
Whether it’s sunspots, La Nina, or something else altogether, the timing couldn’t be better for the Heartland Institute, set to host a global warming skeptics powow Monday on Broadway. Friends in high places?
Items like this (almost) make me want to kill this blog, scream, “To hell with the morons!”, and go find something more worthwhile to do.
One freaking cold season and people are screaming it disproves global warming? I suppose the fact that the bloody Northwest Passage melted completely for the first time in recorded history, just a few months ago, suddenly means nothing? And those 30,000+ people who died in Europe in the summer of 2003 mysteriously don’t count? And the worst of this example is that the Wall Street Journal, of all places, an outlet that’s done very good work on its blog, falls back on the old faux balance shtick of “some people say A and some people say B, so who knows who’s right?”
If you dare to look, click through to the posting and check the reader comments, which are stupefyingly worse.
Honestly, I should have seen this coming. If you want to peg the needle on your cynicism meter, set a Google alert for “global warming”, and see what kind of insanity shows up in your mail box every day. I dare you.
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March 1st, 2008 at 11:27 am
Hello, Lou. I have enjoyed reading your blog for some time now, but this is my first comment. Please continue your work here, there are others like me who reall enjoy it.
Although I find it pretty clear that peak oil/gas is real and relatively immediate, global warming is a much different beast. In many respects, global warming depends on the continuation of long term trends, one with respect to forces outside mankind’s control and the other anthroprogenic. It seems to me that the global warming crowd assumes that the trends of the last half century will continue indefinitely, specifically with respect to mankinds contributions.
Some things like solar cycles, currents, forest fires and volcanic eruptions are beyond our control. Sure, we might influence/encourage some of these things marginally, but we remain at their mercy. On the other hand, fossil fuel extraction and consumption, aquifer depletion, mineral mining and forest clearing are completely manmade trends - and those trends can not continue. Indeed, the peak oil/gas/water plateau will probably drive different sectors in different directions, but in general one might expect for overall economic expansion (talking real goods) to plateau as well. Once we arrive at an anthroprogenic plateau (and initial decline), then the global warming hoopla will be confined to nature once again.
March 1st, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Wow, those comments are incredible in that WSJ article. It appears that people around here (Ontario) believe in Global Warming but what surprises me is that pretty much ALL of those comments are from deniers. I feel bad for the USA.
P
March 1st, 2008 at 2:34 pm
AG: Thanks for contributing. I wish I could get more of you lurkers out into the open. This could be a much more fun place.
Anyway, I think the basic issue with GW is that the people sounding the alarm (like me) aren’t really assuming a continuation, in the long run, of current practices. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a very long time, and the evidence shows very clearly that the planet has yet to completely adapt to the CO2 we’ve already emitted. And by “adapt” I mean “get warmer.” The world is still seeking a thermal equilibrium in response to the shock we’ve delivered, just as the economies of the world are just beginning to adjust to the shock of much higher oil prices.
The alarm also comes from the knowledge that even a very focused effort to reduce CO2 emissions will still mean we’re dumping a lot of it into the air for decades. And that new CO2, combined with the old stuff already released, will put us even further out of equilibrium and lead to more warming.
You’re right that there are other factors beyond our control, like volcanoes and weather patterns, that influence warming. But can we afford to stick to business as usual and hope that we get a few Pinatubos blowing their top to help mitigate temperature rises? Eventually our luck runs out, and the weather patterns won’t shift the heat in a desirable way or we won’t get help from a volcano, and then we’re in some serious trouble.
Stoner: Yeah, I feel bad for the USA, too. I dearly love my country, but there are times I want to slap a significant portion of the people who live here with the salmon of enlightenment.
March 2nd, 2008 at 6:58 am
The warming is not based on trends. The IPCC Climate Scientists (Lou, I decided since Inhofe recruits engineers as scientists, I should differentiate) ran several sophisticated models given various starting points, and influencing factors, and arrived at pretty much the same point, starting way back in history. See the report, for the details, cause I cannot remember everything. Some of these models show things not getting too bad for the near term, but all of them show big problems, with business as usual, at the very best case, meaning the least warming, 50 years out, and that the CO2 in the atmosphere now will continue to influence, meaning cause, warming for thirty to fifty years, no matter what we do in the meantime. Further, what they call positive feedback loops, meaning that these influences will cause greater warming, were NOT considered, even though we are seeing these loops develop at the present time - thawing tundra, methane releases, full absorption of the oceans with CO2, etc. - which will make the warming either worse or faster, or both.
The “warming trends” are evidence that their projections were accurate, not the basis for their projections.