Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Welcome aboard, Mr. Thornley   [Edward John Craig]

Drew Thornley, a policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for Economic Freedom and Center for Natural Resources — and a new Planet Gore contributor — chimes in on the inconvenient truth of global cooling (and solar variability).

Al Gore won an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. He should be grateful that neither committee has provisions for a recount.

New data from all four of the major global temperature tracking outlets show that world temperatures last year dropped between 0.65 and 0.75 degrees Celsius. That’s the largest one-year temperature change ever recorded — up or down — and is large enough to wipe out virtually an entire century of warming.

Multiple researchers have linked global temperatures to levels of solar activity, and the sun has been very active over the last 60 years. But the project director for Canada’s National Research Council says that the sun’s magnetic field has gone quiet and that sunspots have virtually disappeared. The last time that happened, the ice in New York Harbor was thick enough you could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.

Hopefully this will cool the hysteria in the U.S. Congress and parliaments around the world so that we can understand the science of our climate before we pursue policies that could wreck our economy and quality of life.

[Clarification: By writing that last year’s temperature drop was “the largest one-year temperature change ever recorded — up or down — and is large enough to wipe out virtually an entire century of warming,” I meant to highlight the minimal warming of the past century (only about 1 degree C). 

Last year’s drop of about three quarters of 1 degree C certainly does not mean that warming has not occurred over the last 100 years. But the fact that last year’s drop is just one data point along a 100-year trend line, does not take away from the fact that the drop, strictly degree-wise, is almost equivalent to the average rise in temps over the last 100 years.

This year, we might see an equivalent rise in temps, or we could see more cooling.  Time will tell.  But one thing is for sure: Temperatures will continue to fluctuate, as they always have.]

02/26 05:04 PMShare