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By Phil Brennan: Trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute, Editor of Wednesday
on the Web
"Extreme cold gripped the Northeast with wind chill readings well below zero, forcing even the hardiest New Englanders to think twice before venturing outside. In New York, the wind chill reached minus 26 degrees in one city."
According to weather service meteorologist Charlie Foley in Taunton, Mass. "The real meat of the cold is here in New England. This cold is coming right from the North Pole."
Global warming will cause a massive extinction of the earth's biota, researcher Chris Thomas told the Washington Post "we're talking about 1.25 million species. It's a massive number."
Am I missing something here? It's ears-dropping-off cold - temperature records falling all over the place - and 19 researchers writing in the January 8 issue of Nature are telling is that by 2050 - just 46 years from now, one and a quarter million "species" will have gone the way of the dinosaurs thanks to global warming.
This off-the-wall prediction actually was treated by the media as a dire warning worth reporting that the world is turning into an oven that will bake a lot of species into extinction. Even Nature, the respected science journal thought the notion worth publishing.
The folks at Frontiers of Freedom took a close look at the claim and dismissed it as scientifically unsupportable, but that misses the point. To be worth noting, one has to accept the idea that global warming exists.
Look at it this way. The Marxists promoting the global warming scam as a dandy way to create a world socialist order through UN sponsored action allegedly designed to prevent mankind from being roasted have been telling the world through the New York Times, Dan Rather and a lot of other global warming propagandists that the polar ice cap is melting and the polar regions are on their way to becoming a tropical paradise.
There's a little problem with this; if the North Pole is warming up, how can it continue to send record breaking cold fronts south to plunge the Northern U.S. into the deep freeze again and again?
Remember what meteorologist Charlie Foley said: "This cold is coming right from the North Pole."
You don't have to be a climatologist to understand what's going on here. Simple common sense, not in abundance in the ranks of the global warming propagandists, should tell us that if the polar regions are warming up, cold fronts originating from the polar regions should be moderately cold - not icy, bone-chilling cold such as what we've been seeing over recent winters.
Cold fronts come from the polar regions, as Foley remarked. The colder it is around the North Pole, the colder the fronts it sends south will be. If the polar regions are in the process of getting warmer, they can't send the kind of bone chilling cold fronts south which the northern U.S. is now experiencing. Period.
Now unlike the experts who recently explained the record breaking cold as the result of global warming, real, genuine climatologists call the notion tommyrot. It's getting so the global warming propagandists tend to blame everything that goes wrong on global warming. I'm sorry the idea wasn't around 65 years ago when I was still in school - I could have blamed those bad report cards on global warming.
In February of 2001, Joe D'Aleo, Chief meteorologist at WSI/INTELLICAST, had this to say about warming at the poles.
"Last August the IPCC [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] talked about the Arctic ice thinning as further evidence of global warming. There were reports in the last two years that the Arctic ice cap has thinned in the last few decades. Then in August of 2000, IPCC scientists aboard a Russian icebreaker found broken ice with some open water near the North Pole. Pictures appeared in a headline story titled "The North Pole Is Melting" in the New York Times. The story was later retracted when scientists and others familiar with the Arctic environment shouted back that open stretches of water are common in summer even at the North Pole.
"The IPCC stuck by their story about the thinning as evidence of global warming. So that brings us to the question - is the Polar Region really warming and is the ice cap really thinning?
"It is true that a greenhouse effect would produce the greatest warming in the Polar Regions because CO2 is a selective absorber with the greatest effect at very cold temperatures found in the Polar Regions. However, a look at temperatures over the past five decades in the Arctic region shows very little change."
So is the polar ice cap melting? "The extent of Arctic ice, and not its thickness may be a better measurement of the temperatures in the Polar Region. The coverage of ice in the Northern Hemisphere Arctic has been virtually unchanged since 1979 (USGCRP, June 2000), while that in the Antarctic regions has actually increased 2.6% since 1979. (Cavalieri, Science, November 1997)."
In 1997, I wrote a report "Global Warming or Globaloney?" in which I made the case that we are undergoing a climate change, not toward warming, but cooling. There is substantial evidence that the iceman cometh.
"The idea that an ice age was approaching was based on history, not hysteria -- the motivating force behind global warming studies," I wrote then. "And what history taught paleoclimatological scientists engaged in what is known as quaternary research, is the incontrovertible fact that the earth has experienced a long series of ice ages occurring as regular as clockwork -- 100,000 years of glaciation followed by 10-to-12,000 years of interglaciation.
"There is, they maintained, no reason to believe that what appears to be an immutable law of nature has somehow been miraculously repealed and the cycle of glaciation and interglaciation ended.
"No reason, except for political expediency."
According to the National Academy of Sciences -Understanding Climate Change, published in 1975:
"The present interglacial interval -- which has now lasted for about 10,000 years -- represents a climatic regime that is relatively rare during the past million years, most of which has been occupied by colder, glacial regimes. Only during about 8 percent of the past 700,000 years has the earth experienced climates as warm or warmer than the present.
"The penultimate interglacial age began about 125,000 years ago, and lasted for approximately 10,000 years. Similar interglacial ages -- each lasting 10,000 plus or minus 2000 years and each followed by a glacial maximum -- have occurred on the average every 100,000 years during at least the past half-million years.
"During this period, fluctuations of the northern hemisphere ice sheets caused sea level variations of the order of 100 meters."
The question was asked: "When will the present interglacial [period] end?
"Few paleoclimatoligists would dispute that the prominent warm periods (or interglacials) that have followed each of the terminations of the major glaciations have had durations of 10,000 plus or minus 2000 years. In each case, a period of considerably colder climate has followed immediately after the interglacial interval.
Since about 10,000 years have passed since the onset of the present period of prominent warmth, the question naturally arises as to whether we are indeed on the brink of a period of colder climate."
"The question remains unsolved. If the end of the interglacial is episodic in character, we are moving toward a rather sudden climatic change of unknown timing ... if on the other hand, these changes are more sinusoidal in character, then the climate should decline gradually over a period of a thousand years."
A study prepared for the 95th Congress in 1978 agreed with the National Academy of Sciences position as explained in the above-quoted study. The document Weather Modification: Programs, Problems, Policy and Potential warned:
"In geological prospective, the case for cooling is strong ... If this interglacial age lasts no longer than a dozen earlier ones in the past million years, as recorded in deep sea sediments, we may reasonably suppose the world is about due to slide into the next ice age."
That was the prevailing opinion among paleoclimatologists; it was a case of the past being prologue. If the earth underwent regular cycles of glaciation and interglacial periods, and the geological record proved that to be the case, then obviously we are at the end of the present between-ice-ages period.
I have seen nothing to disabuse me of the idea that sometime in the future the world will undergo a new ice age. The cycle of 90,000 years of glaciation followed by 10,000 to 12,000 years of interglaciation has been going on for at least a half-million years and I can't see how this process has suddenly been repealed.
In the case of recurring ice ages, there's not a damn thing mankind can do to prevent its recurrence. But in the case of global warming, the Marxists such as Mikhail Gorbachev insist that government action imposing all sorts of socialist restrictions such as the Kyoto treaty can fend off the imagined climatological disaster. It's worth noting that the great majority of climatologists back in the 1970s accepted the idea that the iceman cometh. Then a lot of the more politically inclined scientists on government payrolls suddenly did a 180 degree shift and switched to the global warming theory.
In the report I quoted former government scientist, futurist and psychologist -- and the real historian of the global warming/global cooling dispute, Dr. George Kaplan, as saying that the majority of climatologists subscribed to the belief that the world was approaching the onset of glaciation.
Kaplan wondered exactly what was behind this refusal of the powers-that-be even to consider the overwhelming evidence that the climate was cooling and that we are in the final days of an interglacial. He then asked a question that is yet to be answered.
"Has the warming theory 'campaign' been the last stand of an arrant scientific ideology? Such a hypothesis can be acceptable to some, but the obvious failing of the theory in the face of global catastrophe argues for a more substantial motivation.
"It would pay to investigate this motivation further to consider whether politics has been responsive to poor science or whether economics and politics have made false tools out of science for narrow interest.
"If the latter is true the manipulation and subversion of the truth seeking apparatus by political and private interests is, in the present situation, of such extreme malevolence that it ranks as the greatest malfeasance in history. "
Writing for the Cato Institute"s publication " Regulation", January 12, Richard S. Lindzen the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology quoted Aaron Wildavsky, professor of political science at Berkeley, as quipping, "global warming'' is the mother of all environmental scares. Wildavsky's view is worth quoting. "Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realizing the environmentalist's dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population's eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally."
That's called Marxism, and that's what it's all about.
In the meantime, don't count on heading for the North Pole for a tropical vacation. It's COLD up there.
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