Global Warming

I try not to get caught up in the hysteria that calls itself Global Warming.

I'm the first to admit that the Earth's climate is not stable. In fact, when alarmists changed the term to "Climate Change" I was much more comfortable talking about it. You see, that describes what's happening on Earth, as a matter of course, every day. We don't, and never have lived, in a static, stable environment.

And we never will. And it's MORE than possible that none of us, even acting in concert, have absolutely ANY effect, long-term or otherwise, on that environment.

So why am I talking about this today? A couple of reasons. The first is that the Twins got slaughtered last night and because of that I don't really want to talk about baseball. The second reason is a series of news reports that came out this week is now showing that we may have now entered a trend of global cooling. A trend that nearly ALL climatologists never saw coming.

A few years back (2007) a large group (the ones we hear from regularly on all the major news channels and media sources) of climatologists were convinced that by the end of THIS summer that the arctic ice would be COMPLETELY, TOTALLY melted. The buzz reached a fever pitch last summer when it was discovered that arctic ice was down to 1.3 million square miles. (That's about half of the last 30-year average.) Many thought that this WOULD be the year that the rest of the arctic ice cap would melt and that that the prediction of 6 years ago would come true.

But something weird happened THIS year. Arctic ice GREW. And not just a little bit, but by 60%!!!

In other words, arctic ice is back to within a couple standard deviations of normal 30-year averages.

At the same time, and this is the most puzzling part for all of those "experts" in climatology, it's also been acknowledged that global temperatures have pretty much stabilized worldwide for the last 15 years or so.

Alarmists are still saying that the substantial new ice means nothing, but more conservative and moderate climatologists (the ones that up until now no news services were listening to) are saying that a cooling tend is now developing and that we should expect slightly cooler temperatures over the next decade and a half.

A little MORE research, one that I don't see anyone discussing right now, has shown me that ANTARCTIC ice, you know the ice on the other pole, is at all-time recorded HIGHS. In fact, ice at the Antarctic is much higher than ever recorded for the last several years. Do you know what that means? We may have more total ice at the poles combined than we have had in the past several hundred years!

What does all of this mean? For me it means the same thing as I've always said, climatologists are not "real" scientists. There simply is not enough measurable data, in the few years we have been taking data, to make any kind of reasonable guess as to what's coming next. We may NEVER have enough data because we simply can't witness it or record it long enough.

And we can't point to mankind burning fossil fuels as a primary mover and shaker as the reason temperatures and climates change.

By my reckoning, there have been at least two major volcanic eruptions in the last three years. The ash spewed into the Earth's atmosphere disrupted world travel for weeks on both of those occasions. But let's not forget that there are always several more smaller volcanos going off around the world regularly. These volcanos put more "stuff" in the air every single year than mankind could ever hope to produce from burning carbon fuels. I don't have the numbers right now, but if you're interested, start looking this information up yourself. It's all available on the web. And it's not hard to find.

It reminds me of how we banned chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) worldwide a few years back because they were causing a gaping hole in our ozone layer at the arctic circle. And then we discovered that volcanos IN ONE YEAR, and oceans IN ONE DAY produced more CFCs than mankind had produced in their entire civilized existence. Think about that. It would be like a single child's allowance being used to pay off our $15 trillion national debt. But we banned them anyway and have not brought them back.

In much the same way that meteorologists can't successfully predict weather more than a day or two out, climatologists can not and never will be able to predict climate a few years or decades out. There are too many variables, and those variables lead to pointless guessing. Guessing used as scare tactics to change behavior.

I think there's an explanation as to why people get more conservative as they grow older. They SEE and EXPERIENCE these same type of alarmist attitudes by self proclaimed "experts" often enough throughout their lives to recognize it when it happens again.

Don't believe "experts" who are just guessing. Even their best guesses are no better than yours or mine. And always realize their jobs, their very livelihoods, are dependent on government grant money and the continual study of impending disaster. They wouldn't have jobs if everything was going to be all right.