It's All in the Paradigm

I have to give a shout out to the Drudge Report (http://www.drudgereport.com/) for this one.

Anybody with at least slight misgivings about all the fuss regarding global warming might be interested to know that, according to a column by Lorne Gunter in the NationalPost.com on February 25th (http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=332289), the northern hemisphere is currently experiencing an uncharacteristically cold winter. The article reports that based on data from the US National Climatic Data Center, the average temperature for American cities in January '08 was three tenths of a degree Fahrenheit cooler than the average of that month for the twentieth century.

Whats more, Toronto was smashed with seventy centimeters of snow two weeks into this month, breaking the record of 66.6 cm. That record dates back to 1950, and was the total for the entire month - not just the first half.

Asia has been hit hard, as well. China is experiencing the worst winter there in a century, and the article says cities there have been brought to a standstill. Power lines were brought down by snow and ice, and conditions were too harsh to hazard any repairs, leaving residents with out power for as long as several weeks. According to the article, with all things considered, Siberia, Mongolia, China, in addition to northern North America, are covered in more snow than those continents had been since 1966.

Finally, the most notable and important tidbit concerns that arctic sea ice that we hear so much about. Records indicate that substantial amounts of that ice have been lost due to global-warming-induced melting. In fact, melting has caused the reduction of the ice to the lowest point on record. However, you might be intrigued to learn that these records only date back to 1972. Surely, thirty-six years is nowhere near an adequate amount of time to determine a trend for as grand a system as global climate.

Of course, somebody is going to tell me that after the warming, there's going to be cooling. After all, that's how it happened in The Day After Tomorrow. But according to Bernard Goldberg, author of Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right (HarperCollins, 2007), the debate over global warming hasn't always been about global warming. In fact, in regards to the "global climate change" debate, as you may have noticed it is increasingly called as of late, a study by the Business and Media Institute shows that the New York Times and Time magazine have interchangeably run stories about global cooling and global warming for more than a century, beginning with cooling in 1895, warming in 1933, back to cooling as late as 1975, and back to the warming paradigm, which we are currently hearing about (see pages 67-69). In short, they don't know what they are talking about, and there is no way for anyone to be sure. Earth's weather makes up such a complicated system that it is folly to believe that any trends could be identified in a thirty-year sample, despite the argument from some.

My point isn't that we're about to tumble head first into an ice age. It's that Mother Nature has far more up her sleeve than we can correctly evaluate in such a short time span. Before we make stupid decisions regarding the need to reduce our carbon footprint (and how to do so), following the example of a man who buys "carbon credits" from his own company, we need to realize that there are much larger natural forces at work. Surely, it would be egotistical folly to say that our understanding of said forces can be derived from slivers of time, taken as samples that are supposedly representative of the entire climatic history of our planet.