by Trevor Sides
Feel that?
That’s ice-delaying flights in Tampa, Fla. That’s -40 wind chills in the Dakotas and other parts of the Midwest. That’s Arctic cold from Maine to Montana that hasn’t been experienced since 1985. That’s Britain shutting down due to the “iciest winter in a century.”
That, as it turns out, is global warming at its finest.
A breakthrough in “climate change” science shows the earth is warming even though temperatures world-wide are plummeting. It’s a butane world: warming without warming.
According to professors Orrin H. Pikey and Rob Young, the proof in the climate change pudding isn’t rising temperatures. It’s in the “many physical and biological characteristics” that show the earth is warming. In their Jan. 7 USA Today piece “Doubt Global Warming? The Planet Won’t Tell a Lie,” Pikey and Young throw data to the wind and ignore the significance of temperature readings in determining climate change.
“One can argue for hours whether this year was warmer or colder than last,” they quip. “To us, it doesn’t matter. We should be reading the earth, not thermometers.”
Actually, it wouldn’t take hours, and the earth stopped warming around 1998. And according to eminent climate guru Professor Mojib Latif, a global-cooling spell “may well last” another 20-30 years. Don’t tell Pikey and Young. They’re too busy not reading the thermometers and still believing the East Anglia CRU.
One of the “physical and biological characteristics” that “proves” the earth is warming is the disappearance of glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park. The Park only has 26 named glaciers, down from 150 going back to 1850. At this rate, Pikey and Young expect the Park to be glacierless by 2020.
They tell only half the story. For starters, 1850 was the year North America exited the Little Ice Age. According to the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, Glacier’s glaciers “have receded rapidly” due to “dramatic climate variability that includes record winter and summer droughts, near record summertime temperatures, as well as near-record winter snowfall.”
But the NRMSC admits it’s unclear how these “dramatic fluctuations” in weather and climate have affected glacier recession. Studies of glacial shrinkage in the Park have only focused on area size, not on measurements of glacier volume. “Measurements of area alone can be misleading; changes in mass and/or ice flux can result in significant changes to the glacier . . .” George Costanza can attest to this. Perhaps the glaciers have been in the pool?
Pikey and Young also whine about the loss of Arctic sea ice. “The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover is shrinking and could disappear,” they write. Well, yeah, the ice could disappear, but it won’t: Arctic summer sea ice increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26%, since 2007.
As Prof. Latif said in the UK Daily Mail, “The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused . . .”
Why has the warming paused? Three words: “multi-decadal oscillations,” or MDOs.
MDOs are “massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather, and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries,” says Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group.
A strong warm mode lasted from 1915 to 1940, when the earth warmed; and a brutal cold mode endured from 1940 to the late 1970’s, when the earth cooled – even though atmospheric-Co2 levels rose drastically. Latif and Tsonis say we’re in a cold-mode era now. Welcome to the new Ice Age.
The earth may not tell a lie, but agenda-driven, power-hungry alarmists always will.
Trevor Sides, former editor of the Akron News-Reporter, is a Liberty Features Syndicate writer for Americans for Limited Government.
