By Deroy Murdock
Monday, July 13, 2009
As cap-and-trade advocates tie their knickers in knots over so-called “global warming,” Mother Nature refuses to cooperate. Earth’s temperatures continue a chilling trend that began eleven years ago. As global cooling accelerates, global-warmists kick, scream, and push their pet theory — just like little kids who cover their ears and stomp their feet when older children tell them not to bother waiting up for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
Consider how the globe cooled last month:
- June in Manhattan averaged 67.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.7 degrees below normal — the coldest average since 1958. The National Weather Service stated on July 1: “The last time that Central Park hit 85 in May . . . but not in June was back in 1903.”
- In Phoenix, June’s high temperatures were below 100 degrees for 15 days straight, the first such June since 1913. In California’s desert, Yucca Valley’s June average was 83.5, 8.5 degrees below normal. Not far away, downtown Los Angeles averaged 74.5 degrees, five below normal.
- Boston saw temperatures 4.7 degrees below normal. “This is the second coldest average high temp since 1872,” veteran meteorologist and Weather Channel alumnus Joseph D’Aleo reports at Icecap.com. “1903 is the record.” D’Aleo told me, “It has been so cool and so cloudy that trees in northern New England are starting to show colors that normally first appear in September.” Looking abroad, D’Aleo noted: “Southern Brazil had one of the coldest Junes in decades, and New Zealand has had unusual cold and snow again this year.”
- New Zealand’s National Climate Centre issued a June 2 press release headlined, “TEMPERATURE: LOWEST EVER FOR MAY FOR MANY AREAS, COLDER THAN NORMAL FOR ALL.”
- South African officials say cold weather killed two vagrants in the Eastern Cape. Both slept outdoors the evening of June 26 and froze to death.
- July also has been more than a bit brisk.
“FREAK SUMMER STORM DUMPS SNOW ON YONKERS,” the New York Post blared after a July 8 storm brought a wintry mix to that city just north of Gotham. That same day, the high temperature reached 65 degrees at O’Hare International Airport, making it Chicago’s coldest July 8 since 1891. Meanwhile, in Melbourne, Australia, temperatures have been 10 degrees below average, while frost has covered lawns and windshields. On July 13, Albert Gore will appear in Melbourne to explain to Australians that they are shivering due to warming.
Simmer down, global-warmists retort. These are mere anecdotes, handpicked to make us look silly.
Well, one would be foolish to challenge space-borne satellites that gauge Earth’s mean temperatures — cold, hot, and average. Here again, evidence of global cooling piles up like snow drifts.
“There has been no significant global warming since 1995, no warming since 1998, and global cooling for the past few years,” former U.S. Senate Environment Committee spokesman Marc Morano writes at ClimateDepot.com. Citing metrics gathered by University of Alabama–Huntsville’s Dr. Roy Spencer, Morano adds: “The latest global averaged satellite temperature data for June 2009 reveal yet another drop in Earth’s temperature. . . . Despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled 0.74 degrees F since former Vice President Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth in 2006.”
Earth’s temperatures fall even as the planet spins within what global-warmists consider a thickening cloud of toxic carbon dioxide. (Never mind that fauna exhale it, and flora devour it.)
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, consistently and reliably has measured CO2 for the last 50 years. CO2 concentrations have risen steadily for a half century.
For December 1958, the laboratory reported an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 314.67 parts per million (PPM). Flash forward to December 1998, about when global cooling reappeared. CO2 already had increased to 366.87 PPM. By December 2008, CO2 had advanced to 385.54 PPM, a significant 5.088 percent growth in one decade.
This capsizes the carbon-phobic global-warmist argument. For Earth’s temperatures to sink while CO2 rises contradicts global-warmism as thoroughly as learning that firefighters can battle blazes by spraying them with gasoline.
So, to defeat so-called “global warming,” there is no need for the $864 billion Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, a Kyoto successor treaty, elaborate new regulations, or United Nations guidelines. Instead, let the cold times roll.
Alan Carlin, a Caltech-trained physicist and 35-year-veteran Environmental Protection Agency analyst, recently raised some of these issues in a 98-page paper he and a colleague co-authored. “We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA,” they wrote.
As the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel detailed July 6, the Obama administration ordered Carlin to clam up.
His boss, Al McGartland, e-mailed Carlin to prohibit “any direct communication” on his paper with anyone outside his office. McGartland later told Carlin: “You need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc., at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.”
It is one thing to have a national debate about a serious problem, with adults differing over which solution might work best. Reasonable people, for instance, can dispute whether growing federal involvement would heal or inflame our health-care system’s serious maladies.
But as so-called “global warming” proves fictional, those who would shackle the economy with taxes and regulations to fight mythology increasingly resemble deinstitutionalized derelicts on an urban street corner, wildly swatting at their own imaginary monsters.
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