Br-r-r! Where Did Global Warming Go? [Tom Gross]
As snow blanketed the deserts of Iran for the first time in living memory yesterday and Iranian motorists froze to death in their cars, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby asks Where did all the Global Warming go?
Was Al Gore too busy collecting prizes in 2007 to notice?
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... The death toll for the 10-day cold wave was the highest for any single weather event in Argentina in recent history." 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 temperatures dropped 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.
... Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter to [U.N. Sec.-Gen.] Ban 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 US 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.
See also:
Weather Channel boss calls global warming "the greatest scam in history"
Al Gore's inconvenient judgment
Al Gore's Nobel Prize speech
media.nationalreview.com
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