Interesting updates on Global Warming

[Tigermike 3,674]

Evidence that global warming isn’t happening?

The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat

by Richard Harris

March 19, 2008 · Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on.

That becomes clear when you consider what's happening to global sea level. Sea level rises when the oceans get warm because warmer water expands. This accounts for about half of global sea level rise. So with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That's a lot.

Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

"But in fact there's a little bit of a mystery. We can't account for all of the sea level increase we've seen over the last three or four years," he says.

One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.

But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?

Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.

That can't be directly measured at the moment, however.

"Unfortunately, we don't have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they've been playing during this period," Trenberth says.

It's also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it's possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don't know about. It's an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate.

"I suspect that we'll able to put this together with a little bit more perspective and further analysis," Trenberth says. "But what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board."

Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...toryId=88520025

Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations "Totally Wrong"

New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals "runaway warming" impossible

link

[RunInRed 18,225]

Interesting that there was no mention in this article or anywhere on this conservative board about the recent collaspes of the glacial ice shelfs in Antartica.

[AFTiger 282]

Interesting that there was no mention in this article or anywhere on this conservative board about the recent collaspes of the glacial ice shelfs in Antartica.

Or the increase of the snow pack elsewhere in Anartica

[DKW 86 7,886]

Seems that the rest of the world is figuring it out now. Can you imagine the humiliation if this stuff is ever proved wrong?

http://www.aunation.net/forums/index.php?s...st&p=366348

The Nation | Unconventional Wisdom Since 1865 America's oldest and most widely read weekly journal of progressive political and cultural news, opinion and analysis.

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=...&s=cockburn

Is Global Warming a Sin?

[from the May 14, 2007 issue]

In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others less virtuous than themselves.

The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind's sinful contribution--and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed.

Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slow arc. The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. It starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e., 1.1 billion metric tons), and peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, plummets into the Great Depression and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 percent drop. Then, in 1933, the line climbs slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.

And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That's the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it's at 380. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 percent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn't even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere's CO2. It is thus impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil fuels.

I met Martin Hertzberg, PhD, the man who drew that graph and those conclusions, on a Nation cruise back in 2001. He remarked that while he shared many of The Nation's editorial positions, he approved of my reservations on the question of human contributions to global warming, as outlined in columns I wrote around that time. Hertzberg was a meteorologist for three years in the Navy, an occupation that gave him a lifelong mistrust of climate modeling. Trained in chemistry and physics, a combustion research scientist for most of his career, he's retired now in Copper Mountain, Colorado, but still consults from time to time.

Not so long ago, Hertzberg sent me some of his recent papers on the global warming hypothesis, a thesis now accepted by many progressives as infallible as Papal dogma on matters of faith. Among them was the graph described above, so devastating to the hypothesis.

As Hertzberg readily acknowledges, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased about 21 percent in the past century. The world has also been getting just a little warmer. The not-very-reliable data on the world's average temperature (which omit data from most of the world's oceans and remote regions, while overrepresenting urban areas) show about a 0.5 degree Celsius increase between 1880 and 1980, and still rising. But is CO2, at 380 ppm in the atmosphere, playing a significant role in retaining the 94 percent of solar radiation that the atmosphere absorbs, as against water vapor, also a powerful heat absorber, whose content in a humid tropical atmosphere can be as high as 20,000 ppm? As Hertzberg says, water in the form of oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor "is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the Earth and the sun.... Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane." And water is exactly that component of the Earth's heat balance that the global warming computer models fail to account for.

It's a notorious inconvenience for the Greenhousers that data also show CO2 concentrations from the Eocene period, 20 million years before Henry Ford trundled out his first Model T, 300 to 400 percent higher than current concentrations. The Greenhousers deal with other difficulties, like the medieval warming period's higher-than-today temperatures, by straightforward chicanery, misrepresenting tree ring data (themselves an unreliable guide) and claiming the warming was a local European affair.

We're warmer now because today's world is in the thaw following the recent ice age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive, all due to predictable changes in the Earth's elliptical orbit round the sun and in the Earth's tilt. As Hertzberg explains, the clinical heat effect of all of these variables was worked out in great detail between 1915 and 1940 by Milutin Milankovitch, a giant of twentieth-century astrophysics. In past post-glacial cycles, as now, the Earth's orbit and tilt give us more and longer summer days between the equinoxes.

Water covers 71 percent of Earth's surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there's 100 times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. "The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards," Hertzberg concludes. "It is the warming of the Earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse." In vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that for the last 750,000 years, CO2 changes have always lagged behind global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.

It looks like Poseidon should go hunting for carbon credits. The human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces and volumes, not to mention the role of the giant reactor beneath our feet: the Earth's increasingly hot molten core.

Next: Who are the hoaxers, and what are they after?

[Tigermike 3,674]

Interesting that there was no mention in this article or anywhere on this conservative board about the recent collaspes of the glacial ice shelfs in Antartica.

Interesting that you were so lazy that you didn't bother to post that information yourself. Then try and make a halfassed point.

Interesting that it never occurred to you that it is the end of summer in Antarctica and as usual there are huge ice berg calving on a daily basis.

[RunInRed 18,225]

Oh I forgot...the shelves always collaspe at the end of summer

Scientists are citing "rapid climate change in a fast-warming region of Antarctica" as the cause of an initial collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf. The damage got started at the end of February when an iceberg dropped off and triggered the "runaway disintegration" of a 160-square-mile portion of the 5,282-square-mile shelf.

The ice shelf, which scientists speculate has floated in the Antarctic region for hundreds of years, is succumbing to recent rises in temperature in the area--an average of 0.9 degree Fahrenheit every 10 years for the last 50 years.

http://www.news.com/2300-11395_3-6235636-1.html

A crumbling ice shelf along the West Antarctic Peninsula has become the latest polar poster child for global warming.

This week, researchers in the United States, Britain, and Taiwan released images of long stretches of ice shearing away from the shelf. What started with the loss of a relatively thin, 26-mile-long iceberg at the end of February cascaded into the loss of 160 square miles of ice by the end of last week.

Its erosion won't affect sea levels. Like an ice cube in a filled cup, it's already in the water. And the handful of glaciers that feed into the shelf, called the Wilkins Ice Shelf, are small. Still, researchers say, the event represents a marker. The region has seen unprecedented rates of warming during the past 50 years. Two of the 10 shelves along the peninsula have vanished within the past 30 years. Another five have lost between 60 percent and 92 percent of their original extent. Of the 10, Wilkins is the southernmost shelf in the area to start buckling under global warming's effects.

"Wilkins is a stepping stone in a larger process," says Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., who discovered the breakup in satellite images. "It's really a story of what's yet to come if the mainland of Antarctica begins to warm."

So far, the shelf has lost about 3 percent of its total extent, which covers an area more than twice the size of Rhode Island and is up to 820 feet thick. But all that sits between the shelf's new seaward edge and a vast expanse of much weaker shelf ice is what researchers dub a "thread" of strong ice. And Wilkins's erosion is happening faster than researchers projected.

"In 1993, we predicted that this was going to be a vulnerable ice shelf," says David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. "But we got the time scales completely wrong. We were saying 30 years at that time, and now it's happened within 15."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0328/p25s10-wogi.html

Scientists said they are not concerned about a rise in sea level from the latest event, but say it's a sign of worsening global warming.

Such occurrences are "more indicative of a tipping point or trigger in the climate system," said Sarah Das, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,341428,00.html

[AUloggerhead 2,509]

Interesting that there was no mention in this article or anywhere on this conservative board about the recent collaspes of the glacial ice shelfs in Antartica.

That's probably because the article was directed at the topic of lack of temperature data supporting the hypothesis that the oceans are warming & exapnding as a result of "global warming." The article did make this point:

... That becomes clear when you consider what's happening to global sea level. Sea level rises when the oceans get warm because warmer water expands. This accounts for about half of global sea level rise. So with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That's a lot.

Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. ...

So, if you were paying attention, it did refer to the melting of Antarctica glaciers indirectly. If anything, this article should be proof that the global temperature/climate is far more convoluted & complex than what any computer can be programmed to model. We simply do not have all the scientific data available for analysis to come to a definitive conclusion, one way or another. And if a definitive conclusion can't be reached, then how is it possible that anyone can prescribe a "solution?" If that's a "conservative" viewpoint, than so be it.

[pensacola tiger 0]

Some of you engineers or other math wizards help me out here.

Avg. of +0.9 degrees every 10 years for the past 50 years = appx. +50 degrees, correct?

Penguins must need A/C by now.

Or I could be wrong.

[AFTiger 282]

all about glaciers here.

[RunInRed 18,225]

Some of you engineers or other math wizards help me out here.

Avg. of +0.9 degrees every 10 years for the past 50 years = appx. +50 degrees, correct?

Penguins must need A/C by now.

Or I could be wrong.

.09*5 = 4.5 degrees....no?

[pensacola tiger 0]

Some of you engineers or other math wizards help me out here.

Avg. of +0.9 degrees every 10 years for the past 50 years = appx. +50 degrees, correct?

Penguins must need A/C by now.

Or I could be wrong.

.09*5 = 4.5 degrees....no?

First to admit when I'm stupid. I stand corrected.

[MDM4AU 337]

Interesting that there was no mention in this article or anywhere on this conservative board about the recent collaspes of the glacial ice shelfs in Antartica.

There are credible scientists that say this was possibly caused by volcanic activity or an earthquake due to the activity. There was an earthquake registered at the site you speak of as recently as March 17th that registered a 5.6.

Here is an article speaking of a heat-generating fault.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m120...159/ai_71569342

Here is an article on a massive volcano beneath Antarctica:

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1810

John Lyman of NASA in 2006 sent underwater robots to Antarctica to measure the temperature and concluded there is no ocean temperature rise. It was recently repeated by scientists from NOAA that stated the oceans have not warmed over the last five or six years at all. There has been some local warming in the region of Antarctica where this ice shelf is but that local warming is probably volcanic. It doesn't seem to fit in with any of the normal ocean currents or any other pattern. The oceans are, in fact, if anything slightly cooling.

Some scientists even claim for the last seven years temperatures globally have been falling at a main rate of around not .4 celsius, that's nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit per decade.

And while the West sheet may be melting due to what ever reason anyone believes, A recent study using altimeter data suggested the much larger east Antarctic sheet is getting thicker, by about 1.8cm/yr; another, using the gravity satellite mission Grace indicates its mass remains stable. LINK

But could rising temperatures in time drain the ice away?

"It is not going to happen on any realistic human timescale," says David Vaughan.

"It's so cold that you could raise temperatures by 5-10C without having much of an impact; it's on rock above sea level, so warming in the ocean can't affect it."

Largely insulated from global trends and so big as to generate its own climatic systems, most of Antarctica appears to be immune to the big melt for now, though answers to what is happening in the west are eagerly awaited.

Here you will find a list of Climate change deniers:

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=...96a6d71&k=0

To name few others that don't buy into the Global Warming Scare are Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT, Shunichi Aksofu, one of the two most cited scientists in the world in Japan, Roy Spencer (former senior climate scientist for NASA) and John Christy (Alabama State Climatologist) who do all the atmospheric measurements using balloons, radio signs and satellite, Fred Singer who established the U.S. satellite weather service. I could list more.

And it's not we don't think the climate is changing, we just don't buy the load of crap coming form the Global Warming alarmists.

[Tigermike 3,674]

Interesting that there was no mention in this article or anywhere on this conservative board about the recent collaspes of the glacial ice shelfs in Antartica.

There are credible scientists that say this was possibly caused by volcanic activity or an earthquake due to the activity. There was an earthquake registered at the site you speak of as recently as March 17th that registered a 5.6.

Here is an article speaking of a heat-generating fault.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m120...159/ai_71569342

Here is an article on a massive volcano beneath Antarctica:

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1810

John Lyman of NASA in 2006 sent underwater robots to Antarctica to measure the temperature and concluded there is no ocean temperature rise. It was recently repeated by scientists from NOAA that stated the oceans have not warmed over the last five or six years at all. There has been some local warming in the region of Antarctica where this ice shelf is but that local warming is probably volcanic. It doesn't seem to fit in with any of the normal ocean currents or any other pattern. The oceans are, in fact, if anything slightly cooling.

Some scientists even claim for the last seven years temperatures globally have been falling at a main rate of around not .4 celsius, that's nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit per decade.

And while the West sheet may be melting due to what ever reason anyone believes, A recent study using altimeter data suggested the much larger east Antarctic sheet is getting thicker, by about 1.8cm/yr; another, using the gravity satellite mission Grace indicates its mass remains stable. LINK

But could rising temperatures in time drain the ice away?

"It is not going to happen on any realistic human timescale," says David Vaughan.

"It's so cold that you could raise temperatures by 5-10C without having much of an impact; it's on rock above sea level, so warming in the ocean can't affect it."

Largely insulated from global trends and so big as to generate its own climatic systems, most of Antarctica appears to be immune to the big melt for now, though answers to what is happening in the west are eagerly awaited.

Here you will find a list of Climate change deniers:

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=...96a6d71&k=0

To name few others that don't buy into the Global Warming Scare are Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT, Shunichi Aksofu, one of the two most cited scientists in the world in Japan, Roy Spencer (former senior climate scientist for NASA) and John Christy (Alabama State Climatologist) who do all the atmospheric measurements using balloons, radio signs and satellite, Fred Singer who established the U.S. satellite weather service. I could list more.

And it's not we don't think the climate is changing, we just don't buy the load of crap coming form the Global Warming alarmists.

MDM, don't confuse the little guy with factual alternatives to his theories handed down to him from Algore.

[RunInRed 18,225]

Don't confuse TM with possible realistic alternatives...he still thinks all the shelves collaspe at "the end of summer"

BTW - you can't prove that volcanic activity caused this anymore than the other side can prove global warming has occured....well of course, besides that 4.5 degree thing

[Tigermike 3,674]

Don't confuse TM with possible realistic alternatives...he still thinks all the shelves collaspe at "the end of summer"

BTW - you can't prove that volcanic activity caused this anymore than the other side can prove global warming has occured....well of course, besides that 4.5 degree thing

You haven't provided realistic alternatives. Just more propaganda from the Algore crew.

So you are saying that glaciers don't calve during the summer and at the end of summer?

[MDM4AU 337]

BTW - you can't prove that volcanic activity caused this anymore than the other side can prove global warming has occured....well of course, besides that 4.5 degree thing

That's part of my problem. The whacked out left and that bloated wind bag Al Gore are the ones ramming it down people's throats and basically branding those that don't drink of the kool-aid, Holocaust Deniers.

You're the one trying to get us to buy into the idea on this board. Your the one claiming conservatives and Global Warming deniers are hiding from this story. You are the one quoting Fox News to back you up, yet had they gone the other way you would have blown it off as some sort of Right-Wing defense.

To start trying to legislate and create carbon taxes, etc. because Al Gore said so is ludicrous. And as for the 4.5 degree thing, I guess Global Cooling explains the eastern side getting colder.

[BamaGrad03 0]

Did anyone see Al Gore on 60 Minutes sunday?

The interviewer asked him "what about the people who don't think a drastic climate change can be attributed human influences"...he paused and looked at her very condescendingly...and went "that's such a small fraction of people, it's insignificant" and went on to suggest those people are like those who believed the moon landing was a hollywood film stunt and never happened...and those who believed the world was flat.

[TitanTiger 21,163]

Has it occurred to any of these folks that the earth might have been made to compensate for things like this all by itself? For instance, the temps warm up, which warm the oceans. This warming also causes ice chunks and glaciers in the poles to break loose and fall into the water. This in turn cools the oceans, which in turn cools the earth and creates increased ice packs and such at the poles. Rinse. Repeat.

[BamaGrad03 0]

Has it occurred to any of these folks that the earth might have been made to compensate for things like this all by itself? For instance, the temps warm up, which warm the oceans. This warming also causes ice chunks and glaciers in the poles to break loose and fall into the water. This in turn cools the oceans, which in turn cools the earth and creates increased ice packs and such at the poles. Rinse. Repeat.

No no no...it has to be the humans who's entire carbon footprint makes up 3% of the earth's carbon footprint.

If the earth has a way of balancing itself, then climate scientists lose money and socialist earthies lose their audience for judgement.

[RunInRed 18,225]

I don't necessarily have much of a dog in this fight but I will say it makes all the sense in the world to me to try to limit finite energy consumption, find ways to quit putting "gook" into our environment, and to find ways to generally be environmentally friendly. I mean, what's so wrong with that notion? What makes that a liberal or conservative philosophy? Again, hyper-partisanship at its best. Perfect example of why nothing ever gets done.

[AUJarhead 70]

I don't necessarily have much of a dog in this fight but I will say it makes all the sense in the world to me to try to limit finite energy consumption, find ways to quit putting "gook" into our environment, and to find ways to generally be environmentally friendly. I mean, what's so wrong with that notion? What makes that a liberal or conservative philosophy? Again, hyper-partisanship at its best. Perfect example of why nothing ever gets done.

I agree totally, it's not a bad thing to not pollute. It would be a great thing if my car would run on Hydrogen, or water. My beef comes up with people like Al Gore that say that because I have doubt in how much of global warming is caused by man, I'm basically in the same boat as someone that believe the Earth is flat, or that the Apollo Missions didn't take place. I've got my opinions, and I'm not opposed to changing my view points based on facts, but I haven't seen enough from the Al Gore crowd that makes me change my mind.

[BamaGrad03 0]

I don't necessarily have much of a dog in this fight but I will say it makes all the sense in the world to me to try to limit finite energy consumption, find ways to quit putting "gook" into our environment, and to find ways to generally be environmentally friendly. I mean, what's so wrong with that notion? What makes that a liberal or conservative philosophy? Again, hyper-partisanship at its best. Perfect example of why nothing ever gets done.

There's nothing wrong with that. But I don't like getting cussed at because I throw a plastic bottle in the trash (has happened before). I don't like the self-important pretense that goes along with the ENTIRE CITY of San Francisco. Basically people who gain their self worth from the fact that they "care" more than you or I about the environment.

I don't like the fact that BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS of dollars are now poured into climate science research...only because the climate scientists want to scare everyone.

And I don't like the fact that the UN wants to levvy taxes against countries and cripple entire economies for a socialist driven eco agenda.

There is NOTHING wrong with alternative fuel research, recycling, keeping the world clean, etc. Nothing at all. There's everything wrong with people berating others for not driving a Prius...or taxing me because you think the world is going to be unlivable in 10 years because of some scare science.

[MDM4AU 337]

I don't necessarily have much of a dog in this fight but I will say it makes all the sense in the world to me to try to limit finite energy consumption, find ways to quit putting "gook" into our environment, and to find ways to generally be environmentally friendly. I mean, what's so wrong with that notion? What makes that a liberal or conservative philosophy? Again, hyper-partisanship at its best. Perfect example of why nothing ever gets done.

Nothing wrong at all with that notion. It's not a liberal or conservative philosophy. The scare tactics, taxes, stigmatizing the "deniers" and blind allegiance to the global warming religion seems to be a "liberal" thing in that 99.99999% of the lunatics on the global warming train come from the whack-job liberal fringe.

[otterinbham 0]

Interesting that there was no mention in this article or anywhere on this conservative board about the recent collaspes of the glacial ice shelfs in Antartica.

Or the fact that the pack ice surrounding Antarctica reached the furthest extent recorded in over a century.

Or that the Southern hemisphere suffered through their coldest winter in a century.

Or the fact that Australia, New Zealand and South Africa all recorded icebergs within sight of their respective coastlines, the first time that has happened since the infamous 1816 "Year Without a Summer."

[otterinbham 0]

I don't necessarily have much of a dog in this fight but I will say it makes all the sense in the world to me to try to limit finite energy consumption, find ways to quit putting "gook" into our environment, and to find ways to generally be environmentally friendly. I mean, what's so wrong with that notion? What makes that a liberal or conservative philosophy? Again, hyper-partisanship at its best. Perfect example of why nothing ever gets done.

No question. At the same time, it's important to actually have an honest discussion of the issues, not the scaremongering ginned up by Gore and Company. Essentially what we have is a backdoor attempt to outlaw the internal combustion engine, without any compelling reason to do so, and without any true viable alternative to it.

So, as a result, when the global warming issue goes bust (which it will), the environmentalists will have painted themselves into a corner, depicting themselves yet again as shrill chicken littles who sound the alarm without any foundation, causing a lot of pointless hand-wringing in the process. Remember spotted owls? Environmentalists raised the roof over those as well, camping out in tree branches, spiking tree likely-looking tree trunks in the attempt to destroy chainsaws and possibly injure loggers, and devoting a lot of air time to how that species only nested in old growth forests. Well, that theory was pretty much exploded when a nesting pair was found setting up housekeeping in the sign of a Wal Mart in a suburban shopping area.

The same is true of global warming, especially when it's being found that global temperatures have leveled off, and that the warmest year on record occurred a decade ago--not exactly a ringing affirmation of the hockey stick graph (Probably the most notorious example of a scientist cooking the books without any kind of rigorous checking of data by the scientific community).

And, somehow, CNN and the rest of mainstream journalism missed the story that the global warming computer models somehow overestimated the temperatures of the upper Antarctic atmosphere by a whopping 30 degrees. Of course, refuting End of The World stories such as Global Warming doesn't boost viewership, but you'd think they'd sneak this pertinent factoid in somewhere in their wall-to-wall coverage.

How can we forget the archetypal photo of the polar bear on the ice floe, and the sober discussion of how Global Warming was causing a massive die-off of the species? This of course, was refuted by the Canadians, whose latest census shows that the polar bear population has increased markedly, not decreased. The main threat to polar bears, as it turns out, were Inuit hunters. That causes a true quandary for blind liberalism. Do you stand up for an unproven theory of global warming, or do you stand up for the rights of an indigenous population to drive a species into extinction?

So, while our energy consumption is an important issue, and should be discussed for a number of reasons--ecological, economic, and strategic--it's important to do so in an atmosphere of reason and logic, not shrill hysteria that seems unbothered by the facts.