Snow
cover over North America and much of
The
U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities
and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February.
According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F
cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."
There
have been so many snow and ice storms in
In
just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing
the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto,
pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
And
remember the
The
ice is back.
Gilles
Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice
Service in
OK,
so one winter does not a climate make. It would be
premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our
most brutal winters in decades.
But
if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about
the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on
Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this
winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad
premature.
And
it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change
dogma.
According
to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid
Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen
Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of
Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the
computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the
circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering
another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.
"We
missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not
ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from
the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the
wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by
over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.
But when Profs. Toggweiler
and Russell rejigged their model to include the
40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters
to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
Last
month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the
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.
It's
way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers,
too.
lgunter@shaw.ca
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=332289