Windy…chilly…50 degrees…May 29th?! What is going on here?! Oh, right…it’s global warming. I forgot. Well, it’s not my fault. They gave this dramatic, dangerous climate change a name like global warming when it keeps getting colder. I hope you can forgive my honest confusion.
After 1998, temperatures stopped rising and since 2002 have been falling now into the seventh year. Meanwhile, CO2 has continued to rise (2.6%). Now that’s just weird. It must be a freak occurrence or something. By the way, CO2, the element that was good for the environment when I was in school, is now responsible for the earth’s soon destruction. Pretty scary, huh? Carbon dioxide is a global traitor.
I’m a believer of capitalism. If you work hard, you should be rewarded. So, I find no fault with the global warming alarmists. They are working hard to make good money. But I also believe you should work smart, not hard. Remember that mid-century cold period, well established as many cold and snow records were set in the 1960s into the 1970s? This small fact has become a thorn in the side of the alarmists when combined with the apparent current cooling of recent. It might imply cyclical behavior which is kind of hard to explain away.
“Uh, well…you see, it’s all how you look at the data. For instance, if you look at this graph comparing temperature and carbon emissions while squinting your eyes and tilting your head to the left, you’ll clearly see the correlation between them.”
- John D. Treehugger, climatolgist
I repeat: Work smart, not hard. It’s really difficult to convince reasonable people to believe the earth is warming when all we have to do is walk outside, look at the thermometer, and see that it’s not. When winter weather lasts more than six months, people are bound to think, Maybe this global warming stuff isn’t entirely true. You need to change your game plan.
I know ice and cold are not nearly as scary as fire and heat (fire and heat have that whole image-of-hell thing going for it), but we have to work with what we’ve got. If you need a global catastrophe to scare millions out of their minds, I suggest going with global cooling. I know that was tried back in the seventies and wasn’t quite as effective as global warming today, but it’s still worth a shot. I mean, it’s a bit more believable at this point. Plus, they waited until the earth started warming up before promoting global cooling. If you start promoting global cooling now while it’s actually getting colder, you have a good chance of persuading the multitudes.
Think about it.
Have you seen this new article in Nature that claims to explain the temperature drop observed in the time period that you mentioned in this post?
“A large discontinuity in the mid-twentieth century in observed global-mean surface temperature,” Nature 453, 646-649 (29 May 2008)
David W. J. Thompson, John J. Kennedy, John M. Wallace & Phil D. Jones
From the abstract:
“Data sets used to monitor the Earth’s climate indicate that the surface of the Earth warmed from approx1910 to 1940, cooled slightly from approx1940 to 1970, and then warmed markedly from approx1970 onward1. The weak cooling apparent in the middle part of the century has been interpreted in the context of a variety of physical factors, such as atmosphere–ocean interactions and anthropogenic emissions of sulphate aerosols2.”
…
“We argue that the abrupt temperature drop of approx0.3 °C in 1945 is the apparent result of uncorrected instrumental biases in the sea surface temperature record. Corrections for the discontinuity are expected to alter the character of mid-twentieth century temperature variability but not estimates of the century-long trend in global-mean temperatures.”
Unfortunately, I can’t access the whole paper. Apparently, the method of measuring the ocean’s temperature was changed from pulling up a bucket of water up to the deck and measuring it, to measuring the water temperature at the ships’ cooling water intake line. The problem apparently is that as the water is pulled up to the deck, it cools off a bit adding a systematic bias to the measurements. From what I read, this isn’t particularly a new idea. A paper was published nearly 20 years ago that brought up this concern (Long-Term Trends in Surface Temperature over the Oceans, T.P. Barnett,Monthly Weather Review, Volume 112, Issue 2, pp. 303–312 (February 1984))
It’ll probably be a while before someone tries to correct for these biases in the data to produce a more accurate temperature time series.
Wow. Thanks for sharing that Chad. (deep sigh) I don’t know what else to say.
There is an abundance of solid evidence indicating that it makes no sense that AGW ever existed in the first place, and it also makes absolutely no sense that ANYONE is still clinging to the idea that there is currently ANY global warming at all. But don’t say that to the wrong person. It’s like insulting their religion. It’s a cult.