ScrippsNews | Deroy Murdock | May. 1, 2008
Australia, the land where sinks drain the other way, has alerted Americans that we see Earth’s climate upside down: We’re not warming. We’re cooling.
“Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.” Dr. Phil Chapman wrote in The Australian on April 23. “All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.”
Chapman neither can be caricatured as a greedy oil-company lobbyist nor dismissed as a flat-Earther. He was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology staff physicist, NASA’s first Australian-born astronaut, and Apollo 14’s Mission Scientist.
Chapman believes reduced sunspot activity is curbing temperatures. As he elaborates, “there is a close correlation between variations on the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate.” Anecdotally, last winter brought record cold to Florida, Mexico, and Greece, and rare snow to Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad. China endured brutal ice and snow.
NASA satellites found that last winter’s Arctic Sea ice covered 2 million square kilometers (772,000 square miles) more than the last three years’ average. It also was 10 to 20 centimeters (about 4-8 inches) thicker than in 2007. The ice between Canada and southwest Greenland also spread dramatically. “We have to go back 15 years to find ice expansion so far south,” Denmark’s Meteorological Institute stated.
“Snows Return to Mount Kilimanjaro,” cheered a January 21 International Herald Tribune headline, as Africa also defies the “warming” narrative.
While neither anecdotes nor one year’s statistics confirm global cooling, a decade of data contradicts the “melting planet” rhetoric that heats Capitol Hill and America’s newsrooms.
“The University of Alabama-Huntsville’s analysis of data from satellites launched in 1979 showed a warming trend of 0.14 degrees Centigrade (0.25 Fahrenheit) per decade,” Joseph D’Aleo, the Weather Channel’s first Director of Meteorology, told me. “This warmth peaked in 1998, and the temperature trend the last decade has been flat, even as CO2 has increased 5.5 percent. Cooling began in 2002. Over the last six years, global temperatures from satellite and land-temperature gauges have cooled (-0.14 F and -0.22 F, respectively). Ocean buoys have echoed that slight cooling since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deployed them in 2003.”
These researchers are not alone. They are among a rising tide of scientists who question the so-called “global warming” theory. Some further argue that global cooling merits urgent concern.
“In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is ‘settled,’ significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming,” 100 prestigious geologists, physicists, meteorologists, and other scientists wrote United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon last December. They also noted “today’s computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998.”
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