It's Official: September the Eleventh Has Been Forgotten

Let me explain.

The first clue was when Al Gore took time out from freezing his butt off to deliver The Great Beacon Theater Address last week on the subject of "global warming".

Now, as I'm sure you remember, "global warming" was all the craze until September 10, 2001: the UN was pushing it, governments were pushing it, newspapers and magazines were pushing it. All the people were pushing it who think they know better than we do how to live our lives and who want, therefore, to be able to force us to live they way they want us to live. (Especially interesting were those driving around in their gas-guzzling SUVs to gatherings at which the driving around of gas-guzzling SUVs was condemned. But... like... well... that's different from ordinary people doing it.)

Then — KABOOM! September 11, 2001.

Suddenly, the threat of terroristic attacks tomorrow seemed a great deal more important than the supposed threat from what warmer weather five or seven or nine decades from now might possibly do.

"Global warming" pretty much vanished from the news. Not entirely, but pretty much.

Now, it seems that the "global warming" push is making a comeback. Al Gore's speech was a pretty big clue. Here are two more.

First, this Knight Ridder article at The Oklahoma Daily, Jan. 16:

It's cold comfort to people shivering in much of the United States right now, but 2003 tied for the world's second hottest year, according to new federal government data released Thursday.

In what meteorologists say is new evidence that global warming is real and worsening, the world's average temperature last year was 58.03 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. That's 1.03 degrees warmer than the 124-year world average.

Going into December, it looked as though 2003 would rank only third hottest, but a toasty last month tied the year with 2002 for second place since record-keeping began on Jan. 1, 1880, said Jay Lawrimore, the global data center's climate monitoring chief. The hottest year was 1998, with an average temperature of 58.14.

The five hottest years on record all have occurred since 1997, and the 10 hottest since 1990. It's been 221 months since the world recorded a colder-than-normal month.

The consensus of climate scientists is that the world is warming and will continue to get hotter because gases emitted from burning fossil fuels are trapping heat from the sun, causing the atmosphere to get warmer, as happens in a greenhouse....

Got that? It's been 221 months since the world recorded a colder-than-normal month. Which is much more important, we are supposed to understand, than It's been 29 months since any terrorists have been able to kill more 3,000 innocent civilians in one day.

Now, we have a Reuters story at Yahoo! News, yesterday, which my friend Paul called to my attention:

Parts of Europe and North America could get drastically colder if warming Atlantic ocean currents are halted by a surprise side-effect of global warming, scientists said on Wednesday.

The possible shut-down of the Gulf Stream is one of several catastrophic changes -- ranging from collapses of fish stocks to more frequent forest fires -- that could be triggered by human activities, they said in a book launched in Sweden.

"In the worst case it (the Gulf Stream) could shut down... it might even happen this century," said Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. "This would trigger a regional cooling, but not an Ice Age."

Climate models indicated a surge of fresh water into the North Atlantic from a melting of northern glaciers caused by global warming could stop the current that sweeps warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico toward Europe....

Do you see what's going on here? Folks in politically / socially / culturally significant areas — like NYC and DC — have been experiencing very cold, wet winter weather — so they are inclined to (rightly) laugh out loud at the whole idea that human activity is causing the Earth to heat up and parboil us and/or all our descendants.

So, what do The Folks Who Want To Run Our Lives have to do? Why, they have to come up with some way to get around peoples' common sense. And how do they try to do that? Why, they feed the "right" data into the "right" software and — voila! even cold weather proves "global warming"!

Neato, keeno, no?

I haven't quoted those articles in their entirety, so take my word for it that neither contains any hint that many scientists vigorously dispute the notion that human activity is causing "global warming".

Happily, The Oklahoma Daily ran a column yesterday in response to the Jan. 16 article.

In a recent article published in your paper entitled "What was hot in 2003? Weather," author Seth Borenstein correctly notes that the thermometer-based global temperature record has shown a warming of approximately 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 124 years. We also learn that 2003 was the second-warmest year on record and that recent years have been unusually warm when compared to the entire time series. The article makes the case that the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases is the culprit, and that a continued warm-up is in the cards for the rest of our lifetimes.

As a long-time participant in the greenhouse debate, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a professor of climatology at Arizona State University and an author of multiple books and articles on the subject, I am writing to point out the following facts:

(1) The global thermometer record is anything but global. We certainly have quality long-term records from the United States and Europe (adding up to less than 3 percent of the Earth’s surface), but there are massive areas of the Earth with no records whatsoever. Furthermore, imagine how many places had quality temperature measurements 124 years ago? To make matters worse, many of the long-term records come from airport and urban locations full of microclimatic effects associated with concrete, the lack of soil moisture and often the hottest place in the area.

(2) Polar-orbiting satellites carry equipment to far more accurately measure true global temperatures with full coverage of the planet. Those records exist for only 25 years, and indeed, they show 2003 to be a warm year, second only to 1998. However, the trend in the satellite-based record is only a fraction of the trend in the thermometer-based measurements.

(3) The temperature of the Earth has risen and fallen throughout the 5-billion-year history of the planet. Only 15,000 years ago, Canada was buried under a mile of ice—has warming since then been a bad thing? Approximately 500 years ago, the Earth plunged into the Little Ice Age with catastrophic consequences in Europe and elsewhere. Fortunately, the recovery started at about the same time the thermometer-based temperature record began—quite coincident with the 124-year timeframe mentioned in the Borenstein article. The observed warming may have occurred even without any interference from human activities.

I agree that the buildup of greenhouse gases undoubtedly had a warming effect over the past century, but climate scientists cannot quantify the effect with much confidence. Over this same period, the sun has become brighter, and believe it or not, a warming sun probably helped to warm the Earth. Climate scientists can list dozens of human-related activities that have warmed or cooled towns, regions, hemispheres or the globe, and they must disentagle the greenhouse fingerprint in a very complicated environment.

It is ironic that your article ran the very day many U.S. residents were experiencing record-breaking cold temperature. From my outpost in Arizona and your home base in Florida, it is painfully apparent that life in warmer climates is desirable by the bulk of the population. The fastest growing areas of our country curiously coincide with the warmest locations. There will be winners and losers should the world continue to warm, but the winners would far exceed the losers.

Climate change is a natural and to-be-expected part of winding-up on this planet—in the long history of human existence, no one has been exempt from this reality. In the mid-to-late 1970s, we all feared global cooling, and now the fear has shifted to warming. The 1-degree-Fahrenheit warming over the past century is trivial in a longer context, not out of the bounds of natural variability, and possibly not such a bad thing.

I am grateful that no human 15,000 years ago did anything to stop the warming that has made our planet such a wonderful place to spend a lifetime.

— Dr. Robert C. Balling Jr. is the director of the Office of Climatology and an associate professor of geography at Arizona State University. He is the author of The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air on Global Warming (2000). He can be reached at robert.balling@asu.edu.

So, how long do you think it will take for "global warming" to vanish from the news again?

KABOOM?

See also Announcing NPRPS: The National Press-Release Publication Service and A Tale of Three Doctors: And What it Tells Us About the Environmental Movement.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 01/22/04 08:10:01 PM
Categorized as Most Notable & Social/Cultural.