Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

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.

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=d7c7fcce-d248-4e97-ab72...

Mr. 101

http://www.myspace.com/greenxmas