Okay, I’m being simplistic with the post title but the point I’m attempting to make is that there is a rather ridiculous expectation that the climate should remain basically static. Why should it? Everything else in science is subject to change, and there are cycles for… well, pretty much everything in nature. The difference is that in recent history – since the NY Times started it in 1895 – we’ve gotten hysterical about it.
We may finally be seeing a return to sanity on the part of the media with this article:
Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess – WSJ.com
The fear of a sudden loss of ice from Greenland also makes a lot of news. A year ago, radio and television were ablaze with the discovery of “Warming Island,” a piece of land thought to be part of Greenland. But when the ice receded in the last few years, it turned out that there was open water. Hence Warming Island, which some said hadn’t been uncovered for thousands of years. CNN, ABC and the BBC made field trips to the island.But every climatologist must know that Greenland’s last decade was no warmer than several decades in the early and mid-20th century. In fact, the period from 1970-1995 was the coldest one since the late 19th century, meaning that Greenland’s ice anomalously expanded right about the time climate change scientists decided to look at it.
Warming Island has a very distinctive shape, and it lies off of Carlsbad Fjord, in eastern Greenland. My colleague Chip Knappenberger found an inconvenient book, “Arctic Riviera,” published in 1957 (near the end of the previous warm period) by aerial photographer Ernst Hofer. Hofer did reconnaissance for expeditions and was surprised by how pleasant the summers had become. There’s a map in his book: It shows Warming Island.
That book was published right about the time this show was made:
Of course, at the same time that there are signs of rationality returning on the global warming front, we’re seeing the global cooling scare start up again, just as it has twice before – at the turn of the century and in the 1970s. What’s interesting is how much of a religion it seems to have become this time. “Scientists” are protecting their belief system with the same zeal that some Christians protect their young-earth creationist beliefs:
Government scientists using taxpayer money to develop the GISS temperature data base at taxpayer expense refuse to publicly release their temperature adjustment algorithms or software (In much the same way Michael Mann refused to release the details for scrutiny of his methodology behind the hockey stick). Using the data, though, McIntyre made a compelling case that the GISS data base had systematic discontinuities that bore all the hallmarks of a software bug. Today, the GISS admitted that McIntyre was correct, and has started to republish its data with the bug fixed.
How the religion is going to adjust to the fact that we’re not warming but cooling (as we have many times before) is going to be very interesting. Like offering a panhandler exactly what they ask for and then seeing how their story changes, the alarmists will simply switch sides. Al Gore knows exactly what he’s doing with this and like any good capitalist is adjusting to a changing market:
“Live Earth was phenomenal”, Gore reports. “My only concern is that it worked too well. According to my most recent numbers, we’re beginning to see global cooling emerge as a legitimate threat.”
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Photo credit: Uploaded on February 25, 2006 by pratt
