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Where's global warming?
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | March 8, 2009

SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:

Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were ice-free. Not a single Canadian province had had a white Christmas. There was a new study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures - a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists admitted that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.

If all that were happening on the climate-change front, do you think you'd be hearing about it on the news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they'd thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming "deniers" for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?

No doubt.

But it isn't such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Just the opposite.

The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn't happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes - Erie, Superior, and Huron - almost completely frozen over. In Washington, D.C., what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which paralyzed the capital.

Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles - an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling "is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade - global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide that human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.

None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.

But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn't the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn't it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth's ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests "do not begin to describe the real world that we live in," says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. "The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand."

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren't the tools we need.

Cooling my ass - it was hot as shit outside today.

Any person that denies that the earth is actually getting warmer is an outright nut; they belong in the same box as the people who think that the Grand Canyon was made in a couple thousand years.  Look at the chart I posted.

The only real debate is whether or not the warming is natural, or man-made.

anyone who blindly trusts what information they're being fed about a potential trillion dollar industry is the actual nut i think

here's a bunch more "nut jobs" who happen to have PhDs all agreeing with "nutty" studies and facts and such

http://www.petitionproject.org/

This has nothing to do with Dan's statement. These people do not refute the warming of the Earth according to what I see in the link. They refute the manmade aspect of it which he admits is up for debate.

anyone who blindly trusts what information they're being fed about a potential trillion dollar industry is the actual nut i think

here's a bunch more "nut jobs" who happen to have PhDs all agreeing with "nutty" studies and facts and such

http://www.petitionproject.org/

yep i saw that .. my bad ..

as far as ignoring the trillion dollar fossil fuel industry .. what bearing does that have on anything ?

You claim that the data is being distorted by those who potentially stand to profit from green energy in the future.
There is an equal-or-greater probability that the data is being distorted by those who currently profit from non-green energy sources.

Yes, 2008 was the coolest year of the last decade.  It was also the ninth hottest year recorded since 1880

Is there conflicting data on the temperature of the Earth or something?  Why are we so skeptical about NASA's data all of a sudden?  Are we skeptical about all of the other things that NASA measures?

I don't want to get involved in the discussion, other than to point out this statement, which I'm guessing is just a typo, since the "fact" contained within it is impossible.

If 2008 was the coolest year out of the past 10, then the prior 9 years (1999-2007)would have all had to have been hotter than 2008.

the reason we're skeptical about nasa's data is because the guy in charge of doing the math at nasa who has been pushing the idea of global warming had pretty huge errors in his math pointed out last year .. and those errors were part of the basis on which projections and computer models were made ..

While your statement is factually accurate, your beef should be with the original poster

The original poster did not write the article.  He merely posted it because he thought it was interesting and enjoys the hysterical answers from those who react as if their religion is under attack.

So wait... I'm confused.

Fau, just to get this point clear: do you or do you not agree that the Earth is getting warmer?

If not, I'd like to see your evidence.

So you posted with the intent to troll instead of trying to spark intellectual debate?