Thread: ALARMIST'S WARMING PREDICTIONS WRONG, AGAIN

ALARMIST'S WARMING PREDICTIONS WRONG, AGAIN

By Dr. Michael S. Coffman Ph. D.
November 15, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

You may remember newspaper headlines and TV news stories last spring that the Arctic Ice Cap would likely disappear in 2008 for the first time in recorded history. The entire global warming community was abuzz with excitement and waited with bated breath for the certain event to occur. They were salivating in the blogosphere at the prospect of having another bombshell to drop on the world when the ice would disappear in the Arctic. However, like an increasing number of their doom and gloom prophecies, they were wrong. It never happened.

The Arctic Ice Cap has been gradually retreating every year since 1979 when satellite technology could finally measure it accurately. By the winters of 2005 and 2006, the Arctic Ice Cap had retreated by almost 23 percent from 1979. Then, in 2007, the bottom fell out. The Arctic Ice Cap retreated by over 50 percent (down to 2.85 million square miles) from 1979. This led to the wild predictions that 2008 would see the Arctic Ice Cap disappear altogether.

Unquestionably, the retreating ice cap did not follow the alarmists’ predictions for 2008. It retreated to 4.52 million square miles, which is 9.5 percent less than the record retreat of 2007. That is not great improvement, and one year does not make a trend. Yet the ice started reforming in early September 2008, weeks before it did in 2007, and reformed at a much faster rate during September and October than even the 1979-2000 average. The same is occurring in 2009. By the end of September 2009, the re-growth of the polar ice greatly exceeded that of 2008. If you recall, during October-November 2008, snow piled up to 8 feet deep in the Midwest and snow fell on London for the first time in decades. This was followed by approximately 8 inches of snow falling on December 11 in Southern Louisiana and Mississippi – the earliest and the most snow on record. Blizzards unheard of for decades swept across the northern plains in December, and Europe had record snowfalls.

The Arctic is not the only place that was showing signs of intensifying cold. While the Arctic Ice Cap showed record retreat in 2007, the Antarctic showed record growth of sea ice, called extent, surrounding the continent the same year. Even the volcanically active Antarctic Peninsula was nearly completely ice-bound. The 2008 ice extent was nearly the same as the 2007 record. 2009 is heading for another record ice extent. The ice also lasted longer than usual into the spring of 2007, which starts in September. That year, the cruise ship Explorer struck submerged ice just off the northwest tip of the Antarctic Peninsula on November 23, long after the point in the year when the larger icebergs have typically melted. While none of the 156 passengers and crew were injured, it represented yet another sign of a cooling earth.

As most readers understand, the earth has not warmed statistically since 1998 and, in truth, began cooling in 2001. It cooled dramatically in 2007 and early 2008, but warmed slightly early in 2009 and then cooled again during the summer. This variability illustrates the difficult nature of climate forecasting. If the warming continues, then the cooling since 2001 is merely a perturbation in the relentless increase in earth’s temperature resulting from unsustainable human use of fossil fuel. That is what the global warming alarmists would have us believe. Their rhetoric has become increasingly shrill this past year as prediction after prediction has proven false. That the temperature has begun to warm in early 2009, they claim, merely proves their point. However, as the earth began to cool again during the summer of 2009, these alarmists were once again mute.

In spite of the told-you-so proclamations of late-year warming by the alarmists, 2008 was still the coldest since 2000. Unbiased observers are beginning to ask why it is that the alarmists claim that every change in the weather, even earthquakes, is caused by global warming. If the earth warms to near record levels in one year, as occurred in 2005, alarmists claim it is proof of global warming. If the earth cools and it snows in places that have not seen snow for several decades, this too is somehow caused by global warming. Alarmists cannot have it both ways. Global cooling cannot be caused by man-caused global warming. Yet, that is exactly what the alarmists are trying to convince us is happening – so far they have been successful!

The theory of man-caused global warming is also incongruent with the fact that the earth cooled while CO2 continued to increase between 1935 and 1975. As a result, there is a very poor statistical correlation between CO2 and temperature from 1905 to 1995. The statistical correlation between CO2 and temperature since 1998 is even worse; it is near zero. Likewise, when it snowed in places that have not seen snow in decades, as has repeatedly occurred in 2007 and 2008, the phenomenon is not likely caused by global warming. While such inconsistencies do not faze alarmists, more rational people are increasingly questioning the theory of greenhouse-caused global warming.

No one, not even the alarmists, knows what is going to happen in the months and years ahead. However, an increasing number of scientists are saying man is not responsible for the warming during the last half of the twentieth century. Over 31,000 scientists in the U.S. signed a petition in May of 2008 affirming that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.â€

That is why people protested when Al Gore spoke in Boca Raton last night.