Monday, February 25, 2008

Do I feel a chill in the air?

Lorne Gunter of The National Post up north in Canada writes: Welcome to the new Ice Age

As Don Surber of the Charleston Daily Mail (West by God Virginia) points out, “Now Gunter writes for the National Post and Canadians are not exactly known for their opposition to global warming. When you live in a land where people store their adult beverages in a beer fridge to keep the beer from getting too cold in the outdoors, you tend to consider global warming differently than say those who live in Hollywood.”

I figure if there’s one thing a Canadian should know about (or is that “aboot”) it’s ice…and snow, too, eh?

From Gunter’s article:

it's not just anecdotal evidence [he's talking about the freakin' huge amounts of snow that have fallen all around the Northern Hemisphere this winter--even in the not so far northern parts] that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.


To recap: the models used by the IPCC did NOT take into account the wind pattern shifts in the atmosphere. Winds that are known to drive ocean currents and waves—and, as a result OVER-EMPHASIZED “the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.” I so totally blame the Polar Bears for this.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.



Again:

Manmade actions were over-emphasized in the Nobel Prize winning report because no one accounted for the wind. Additionally, a shift in the wind patterns (that had not been considered in any of the previous models) can cause the warmer waters of the ocean to be pushed northward and thereby melt the ice. (It’s a cause-and-affect thing which they just happen to have had bass-ackwards all this time.) (BTW the ice is back to its former extents and at even greater thicknesses in many places. Go figure.)

Oh, and that melted ice then cools the North Atlantic while also leaving the Arctic open for evaporation resulting in more snowfall around the Arctic Circle. That produces Ice Ages.

Furthermore:

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.


The Sun has conspired against us. It has gone to sleep (or at least is resting with its eyes closed) and reduced the solar output as witnessed by the lack of sun-spot and solar magnetic activity at the surface.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.


Like I said, though, if there’s anything a Canadian should know about, it’s ice.

I expect you’ll be able to turn off your air conditioner this summer. And don’t forget to bundle up for those mid to late September baseball games. I expect that the last games of the year in Milwaukee could be a lot like the Giants-Packers playoff game in January—you know, 6 below F.

Ah, I love the smell of "consensus" being roasted. Just remember that the terms "consensus" and "science" linked together are terribly unscientific.

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