Over the past few months, evidence has been accumulating that temperatures declined sharply this past year (especially in the last four months), over the entire globe. Several readers sent me this link to a very recent report, with evidence that January 2008 was the coldest since 1966; however, when I went there this morning, the web site wasn't working properly.
Do you remember just a few months ago (last fall), when the news was full of dire predictions from climatologists? They predicted (amongst other things): low snowfall in the northern hemisphere, the warmest winter on record, further receding of the Arctic ice pack, and further retreat of glaciers in Canada, Alaska, and Greenland. They warned us that we were about to be shown the awful consequences of anthropmorphic global warming.
How are those predictions holding up? Well, lets see. Low snowfall? Nope. The western U.S. has unusually high snow accumulations this year, in some places (especially Colorado) the highest on record, and the area covered with snow in North America is the highest since satellites first starting tracking this in the 1960s. I haven't read about Scandanavia. Warmest winter on record? Uh, nope. Not even in the top 10. Or top 50. Or top 100. In fact, this winter is already distinctly colder than the average winter for the past 400 years – and February is shaping up to be even colder. Further Arctic ice pack recession? Nope. The ice pack is expanding, and in many places has already expanded beyond the average winter extents. Polar bear habitat has expanded uncomfortably close to some inhabited areas, and some biologists are alarmed now about how far south polar bears are roaming. Glaciers retreating further in norther areas? Oops -- the darned things are expanding again. Some research outposts in Greenland have been greatly inconvenienced as the roads to their shelters have been overrun by the “shrinking” glaciers.
My readers know that I've long been convinced that the climatologists' models, full of fudge-factors and hand-fitting to back-testing data, are unreliable as predictors of anything other than winning grants. This year's cooling trend just confirms the notion. Just a few months ago, confident climatologists told us how their models were predicting an unusually warm winter (and active hurricane season, but that's another story). Their predictions were wrong – not just in degree, but in direction. In nearly any other branch of science, such results would immediately lead to (a) caution about further predictions based on those models, and (b) active and contentious debates amongst the scientists about the basis of those models. In climatology, sadly, neither seems to be occurring with much vigor. I blame corruption – corruption in the form of scientists suckling from the teat of
public funding awarded on a political basis.
I wouldn't be very concerned about this phenomenon if it weren't for the vast sums of public money (read: my tax dollars) politicians of almost every stripe are proposing to spend on global warming mitigation. In addition to my skepticism about the need for such mitigation, the schemes being proposed range from merely ineffective to totally hare-brained. About the only thing we can say for sure about any of them is that they would be incredibly expensive – so expensive that they risk economic development all around the world...
