Global Warming

After the coldest winter in decades, I find it amusing that global warming proponents are coming up with ever crazier theories to support their claims. And while one cold year is not enough evidence to base any theories on, or disprove any theories, the best thing to come out of this winter is the fact that we are finally putting an end to all of the global warming talk, and we are finally getting some major media outlets reporting the other side of the story without fear of ridicule. Honestly, I don't know how reliable this newspaper is, but the do claim to be "Britain's No.1 quality newspaper website."

Now there has been so much B.S. on both sides of this issue in recent years, that trying to wade through it and get to the truth has been quite a chore. But this article had some very interesting things to say:

The most dramatic evidence, however, emerged last week with an announcement
by Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that an immense slow-cycling movement of
water in the Pacific, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), had
unexpectedly shifted into its cool phase, something which only happens every 30
years or so, ultimately affecting climate all over the globe.

Discussion of this on the invaluable Watts Up With
That website, run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts, shows how the
alternations of the PDO between warm and cool coincided with each of the major
temperature shifts of the 20th century - warming after 1905, cooling after 1946,
warming again after 1977 - and how the new shift to a cool phase could have
repercussions for decades to come.

It is notable that the German computer predictions published last week
by Nature forecast a decade of cooling due to deep-ocean movements in the
Atlantic, without taking account of how this may now be reinforced by a similar,
even greater movement in the Pacific.

And maybe it's just me, but NASA has a little more credibility to me than politicians. And since politicians have been at the forefront of the global warming debate, that has been one of the main reason's I've found it difficult to buy into any of their arguments or dubious data. And that's one of the reasons that these few paragraphs really struck a chord with me.

On one hand our politicians are committing us to spending unimaginable sums
on wind farms, emissions trading schemes, absurdly ambitious biofuel targets,
and every kind of tax and regulation designed to reduce our "carbon footprint" -
all based on blindly accepting the predictions of computer models that the
planet is overheating due to our output of greenhouse gases.

On the other hand, a growing number of scientists are producing ever
more evidence to show how those computer models are based on wholly inadequate
data and assumptions - as is being confirmed by the behaviour of nature itself
(not least the continuing non-arrival of sunspot cycle 24).

The fact is that what has been happening to the world's climate in
recent years, since global temperatures ceased to rise after 1998, was not
predicted by any of those officially-sponsored models. The discrepancy between
their predictions and observable data becomes more glaring with every month that
passes.

It won't do for believers in warmist orthodoxy to claim that, although
temperatures may be falling, this is only because they are "masking an
underlying warming trend that is still continuing" - nor to fob us off with
assurances that the "German model shows that higher temperatures than 1998, the
warmest year on record, are likely to return after 2015".

In view of what is now at stake, such quasi-religious incantations
masquerading as science are something we can no longer afford. We should get
back to proper science before it is too late.

I wouldn't go so far to say that we shouldn't be spending money on reducing emissions and researching alternative fuels, but I would like to see less reactionary policies from the government, and more thought and research in general before committing public funds. I don't know if the cold winter is a signal of the start of a cooling trend, or if it is merely an aberration, but if it will put a damper on all of the Chicken Little "the sky is falling" overly dramatic propaganda coming from the likes of Al Gore in recent years, then the heating bill was worthwhile.