Carey Roberts
Climate conference meltdown as Obama returns to Washington winter wonderland
By Carey Roberts
Following two weeks of intense negotiations, the Copenhagen global warming conference has now ended. By all accounts it was a bust. Warding off fatigue, snow, and sub-zero temperatures, the best leaders from 193 nations could do was issue a vague commitment to limit global warming to two degrees.
Hoping to avoid any comparisons to his earlier failed attempt to bring the Olympics to Chicago, Obama departed the conference early, noting he needed to return to Washington before airports were closed by a record-breaking snowfall.
For observers with a keen appetite for delicious irony, the UN conference offered up ample doses of Holiday cheer.
The previous weekend Seth Borenstein, global warming Alarmist-in-Chief for the Associated Press, was forced to stand in near-freezing temperatures for over seven hours while his credentials were processed. "It was crazy. You couldn't leave the line. You couldn't go to the bathroom." Departing from the standard global warming script, Borenstein then admitted, "Then snowflakes started falling."
It appears the globe did experience modest global warming for a number of years, although the exact reasons remain unclear. But that trend reversed itself around 1998, and we have now entered a period of global cooling.
Some believe we are approaching a new Ice Age. That's the view of Victor Velasco Herrera at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who predicted the onset of a "little ice age" in about 10 years.
What's the science behind that startling claim?
Dr. Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville operates the only satellite-based temperature dataset in the world that verifies its information with independent studies. These satellite readings reveal global temperatures have been dropping since 2000 at a rate of 1.3 degrees per century. One degree in 100 years won't cause heartburn to most.
But in the United States, Spencer's projected decline is more worrisome — nearly 9 degrees by the beginning of the 22nd century: www.c3headlines.com/global-cooling-dataevidencetrends/
Mojib Latif, renowned climatologist at the University of Kiel in Germany, doesn't foresee a full-blown ice age, but does expect global cooling will continue for the next 10-20 years. That prediction may not sit well with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but "we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves, or other people will do it," Latif warns.
Common citizens recognize the cooling trend, as well. In northern China where winter temperatures can reach -40 degrees, coal-burning has been banned in some towns. So villagers have resorted to burning corn stalks left over from the harvest to stay warm.
Recently the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported, "For the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record...Two major snow storms hit the contiguous United States." And last week the Midwest and New England were brutalized by a winter storm that dumped over a foot of snow across the region.
This isn't the first time Americans have been faced with the chilling specter of a global temperature drop.
On April 28, 1975, Newsweek magazine published a doomsday editorial, "The Cooling World," that bespoke of an impeding calamity: "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production...The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."
For readers unmoved by that scenario, Newsweek went on to declare, "Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras — and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average."
How to avert the imminent global cooling apocalypse? Apart from a national stockpiling of foodstuffs, Newsweek hinted we might need to resort to "melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers."
Back in Washington, President Obama hunkered down for a record-setting snowstorm that shut down the nation's capital and snarled traffic across the Mid-Atlantic region.
Yet there is no need to relinquish hope of the eco-socialist utopia. All the well-meaning politicos, tree-huggers, media enablers, green lobbyists, and carbon-offset entrepreneurs can begin prepare for the next UN climate conference, slated to be held a year from now in the warmer climes of Mexico City.
Come to think about it, where we're going to find those tons of black soot, and how are we going to redirect the arctic rivers?
© Carey Roberts
December 22, 2009
Following two weeks of intense negotiations, the Copenhagen global warming conference has now ended. By all accounts it was a bust. Warding off fatigue, snow, and sub-zero temperatures, the best leaders from 193 nations could do was issue a vague commitment to limit global warming to two degrees.
Hoping to avoid any comparisons to his earlier failed attempt to bring the Olympics to Chicago, Obama departed the conference early, noting he needed to return to Washington before airports were closed by a record-breaking snowfall.
For observers with a keen appetite for delicious irony, the UN conference offered up ample doses of Holiday cheer.
The previous weekend Seth Borenstein, global warming Alarmist-in-Chief for the Associated Press, was forced to stand in near-freezing temperatures for over seven hours while his credentials were processed. "It was crazy. You couldn't leave the line. You couldn't go to the bathroom." Departing from the standard global warming script, Borenstein then admitted, "Then snowflakes started falling."
It appears the globe did experience modest global warming for a number of years, although the exact reasons remain unclear. But that trend reversed itself around 1998, and we have now entered a period of global cooling.
Some believe we are approaching a new Ice Age. That's the view of Victor Velasco Herrera at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who predicted the onset of a "little ice age" in about 10 years.
What's the science behind that startling claim?
Dr. Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville operates the only satellite-based temperature dataset in the world that verifies its information with independent studies. These satellite readings reveal global temperatures have been dropping since 2000 at a rate of 1.3 degrees per century. One degree in 100 years won't cause heartburn to most.
But in the United States, Spencer's projected decline is more worrisome — nearly 9 degrees by the beginning of the 22nd century: www.c3headlines.com/global-cooling-dataevidencetrends/
Mojib Latif, renowned climatologist at the University of Kiel in Germany, doesn't foresee a full-blown ice age, but does expect global cooling will continue for the next 10-20 years. That prediction may not sit well with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but "we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves, or other people will do it," Latif warns.
Common citizens recognize the cooling trend, as well. In northern China where winter temperatures can reach -40 degrees, coal-burning has been banned in some towns. So villagers have resorted to burning corn stalks left over from the harvest to stay warm.
Recently the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported, "For the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record...Two major snow storms hit the contiguous United States." And last week the Midwest and New England were brutalized by a winter storm that dumped over a foot of snow across the region.
This isn't the first time Americans have been faced with the chilling specter of a global temperature drop.
On April 28, 1975, Newsweek magazine published a doomsday editorial, "The Cooling World," that bespoke of an impeding calamity: "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production...The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."
For readers unmoved by that scenario, Newsweek went on to declare, "Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras — and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average."
How to avert the imminent global cooling apocalypse? Apart from a national stockpiling of foodstuffs, Newsweek hinted we might need to resort to "melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers."
Back in Washington, President Obama hunkered down for a record-setting snowstorm that shut down the nation's capital and snarled traffic across the Mid-Atlantic region.
Yet there is no need to relinquish hope of the eco-socialist utopia. All the well-meaning politicos, tree-huggers, media enablers, green lobbyists, and carbon-offset entrepreneurs can begin prepare for the next UN climate conference, slated to be held a year from now in the warmer climes of Mexico City.
Come to think about it, where we're going to find those tons of black soot, and how are we going to redirect the arctic rivers?
© Carey Roberts
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