Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
The
U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American
cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early
February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January
"was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."
China
is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the
normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized
cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power
lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There
have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past
two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home
buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new
houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received
70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set
back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
And
remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last
fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those
records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological
and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
The ice is back.
Gilles
Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa,
says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only
recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at
this time last year.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make.
It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we
have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
But if
environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking
about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin
shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game
to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are
being a tad premature.
And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
According
to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at
Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of
biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent
climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt
cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water
to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie
The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.
"We missed what was right
in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather
wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics.
Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's
effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by
over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.
But
when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the
40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it
again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the
north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
Last month, Oleg
Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences,
shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing
that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin
advised people to "stock up on fur coats."
He is not alone.
Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a
giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a
long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick
up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered
the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850.
Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war
were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
It's
way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's
way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.
