I Told You So (Part 2)

In the Knoxville News-Sentinel on December 2, 2007 I had the temerity to question global warming (that article is posted below as an "older post"). It evoked a firestorm of criticism. The one that I remember best said that I might be right but the world could not take the chance that I was wrong. My sin? I simply questioned the global warming models. Indeed, one climate scientist remarked that it was as likely to have global cooling or no climate change as was likely to have global warming. As one who makes his living constructing and testing models, a model that yields equally conflicting results is of no value at all. What I learned from my heresy was that no evidence can change the minds of the proponents of global warming. It has become like a religion and is now an article of faith rather than fact. What is interesting that when I started thinking about global warming I had a completely open mind - although I was naturally suspicious about any issue backed by Al Gore. As my students know, my philosophy is "if you prove me wrong, I will adopt your position." Well my readings have led me to the position that global warming is a hoax. Isn't it interesting that the same alarmists who twenty years ago were warning about global cooling are now warning about global warming? As one of my students remarked, given the recent evidence which some go so far as saying have invalidated global warming to where no self respecting scientist would now embrace it, it is now fashionable to now warn against climate change. So now comes the report that 2008 was the coldest year in the past decade. Of course, the global warming crowd will say that although 2008 was cold, it would have still been warm to Dickens (presuming that Dickens could be still around at a robust age of 196 - see http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/05/climate-change-weather). However, for the rest of us was the following article in the Boston Globe (how apt) by Jeff Jacoby.

JEFF JACOBY

Br-r-r! Where did global warming go?

Email|Print|Single Page| Text size – +By Jeff Jacoby

Globe Columnist / January 6, 2008

THE STARK headline appeared just over a year ago. "2007 to be 'warmest on record,' " BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that "the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007," surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.

In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, "a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption." In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country's 24 provinces. In August, Chile's agriculture minister lamented "the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years," which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.

Latin Americans weren't the only ones shivering.

University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that "unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007." Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand's vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperaturesdropped to record lows.

Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years.

Now all of these may be short-lived weather anomalies, mere blips in the path of the global climatic warming that Al Gore and a host of alarmists proclaim the deadliest threat we face. But what if the frigid conditions that have caused so much distress in recent months signal an impending era of global cooling?

"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity - sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time - as having the greatest effect on climate.

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write.

Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO₂ is the cause of climate change.

Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: "The debate in the scientific community is over."

But it isn't. Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, "the current UN approach of CO₂ reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it."

Climate science isn't a religion, and those who dispute its leading theory are not heretics. Much remains to be learned about how and why climate changes, and there is neither virtue nor wisdom in an emotional rush to counter global warming - especially if what's coming is a global Big Chill.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.