The Other Side of Kim du Toit
From some smart guys:
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile—the list goes on and on.
”But what a minute, Kim,” you say. “You’re always going on about how the plural of anecdote is not data. What gives?”
This:
But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C—a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year’s time. For all four sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
OMG we’re all gonna diiiiiieeeeeeeeee!!!! Quick: fire up the SUVs, tell China to build more coal-burning power stations, and send Al Gore to the Sahara!
Errrr wait a minute…
Sorry. I went away to a warm and wonderful place there, for just a moment.
So: is it Glowball KoooolingTM now? Apparently so—quite literally:
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Quick question for the climate boffins: if the reduced solar activity can cool the planet so quicky, is it not possible that increased solar activity can have the opposite effect? And if that is the case, there’s not a whole bunch we, as humans, can do to affect this, one way or the other?
Way I see it, we should ship Al Gore off to the Sahara immediately, just in case.
You can never be too careful when it comes to the weather.