Wednesday, February 27, 2008
There are many good reasons to seek alternatives to foreign oil, but global warming isn't one of them...
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously...
...A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans — and most of the crops and animals we depend on — prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.
Maybe ethanol wasn't such a hot idea.
Many 'green' innovations, like solar and wind power, hybrids, cellulosic biomass, etc. are useful, not because they supposedly fight global warming, but because they're an improvement over old, inefficient products. They were viable on their own, without the dopey threat of global warming. Unfortunately, since they hitched themselves to that bandwagon, if the temperatures go south, so do their profits.
Speaking of going south, Al Gore may no longer be the Left's Vanilla Jesus.
I hope we're not going to have to deal with 'global cooling' hysterics now. Things change, they always have. We're living on a ball of rock that's blasting around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour, while spinning at the speed of 1000 mph. The ride is bound to be a little bumpy.
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