Way cool. Some global warmists had been getting uneasy with data showing no measurable warming since the year 2000, and now temperature monitors are showing significant global cooling in the past year. This should send them into a panic to hurry up and degrade the economies of the developed countries before it's too late.
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
More from the National Post:
Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Turns out the sun has a lot to do with the warming of the earth.
Then there's this from a commenter at a post I linked yesterday at QandO:
According to NASA, each year 168 billion metric tons (BMT) of CO2 are deposited in the atmosphere. 100 BMT come from the oceans, 30 BMT from decaying biomass, another 30 BMT from respiration. 8 BMT are man made. Of that amount, only 6 BMT are as the result of burning fossil fuels. If we stopped using all fossil fuels, CO2 emissions would only decline by 3.6%.In terms of the green house effect, water vapor is by far the most abundant and most effective green house gas - a thousand times more effective than CO2.
I had been familiar with the idea that we are just tinkering around the edges of the greenhouse gas issue, at best only affecting some 3% of the total. And if I'm reading right, breathing by humans and other animals on the planet produces about ten times the C02 produced by the burning of all fossil fuels. I have long wondered why we are seriously contemplating trashing our economies in an attempt to shave some fraction off of the 3% of total greenhouse gases represented by all fossil fuel use, in the conceit that we can/should impact global temperature. As it stands today, cold-related deaths far outnumber heat-related ones, the implication being that global warming may be a net life-saver, in the short run at least.
Does this mean the debate is not over?
Posted by dan at February 27, 2008 2:28 PM