Has Global Cooling Started?

Christopher S. Bentley
JBS
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

In the past two weeks, there have been fishing boats stranded in sea ice in the Arctic, fire hydrants have popped out of the ground in unseasonably cold Anchorage, Alaska, frost and cold temperatures have devastated peach and apple orchards in the midwest and south, and parts of the upper midwest are under a late-season winter storm warning with major accumulations of snow expected in the next 24 hours.

What's going on? Isn't the world literally on fire, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)?

Well, Mother Nature has doused the flames. According to Agweb.com, last week's temperatures over much of the nation were the coldest in 15 years and this week is shaping up as more of the same. According to the Agweb weather summary, "It will very likely be the coldest in 10 years and the wettest in three." And next week looks like more of the same. As a result of all of the cold, Agweb notes: "April is currently tracking as the coldest April in 113 years."

We'd make the case that this was evidence of the onset of dangerous global cooling, except that, unlike the global warming crowd, we know that it is not possible to extrapolate accurately long-term forecasts from short-term trends. All the cold weather proves is that climate, being impacted by a wide variety of factors, exhibits a wide range of natural variability.

In fact, there hasn't been a hint of global warming anywhere on the globe for years, a fact pointed out by Australian climate scientist Bob Carter in London's Sunday Telegraph a few days ago. According to Carter, who is a research professor at Australia's James Cook University, satellite "measurements indicate an absence of significant global warming since 1979 — that is, over the very period that human carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing rapidly. The satellite data signal not only the absence of substantial human-induced warming, by recording similar temperatures in 1980 and 2006, but also provide an empirical test of the greenhouse hypothesis as understood by the public — a test that the hypothesis fails."

As I sit here typing this in my Appleton, Wisconsin office, we had some two inches of snow fall on Monday April 9, and another snowstorm is currently swirling fiercely just outside my window. There is a winter storm watch that has been extended through 10:00 a.m. tomorrow, and we could end up getting eight inches when this is all done. And we are well into spring.

So much for global warming. Now, where did I pack away that snow shovel?

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