Just over 30 years ago, in the late 1970s, scientists were warning the world of a coming ice age.  This was heralded by record worldwide cold and snowstorms in 1976 and 1977 that haven’t been seen since — until now that is.

This year, Arctic air has poured out of the Canadian plains into the United States, bringing bone-chilling temperatures and heavy snowfall across the Plains and freezing temperatures all the way down to the Gulf Coast and Florida.  We are potentially seeing but a taste of what may be coming in the future as we swing back toward a glacial period from an inter-glacial one.  Basically, we’ve been rather lucky it’s been as warm as it has.

At least one forecaster at Accuweather is bold enough to address the science directly instead of jumping on the global warming band wagon. His name is Joe Bastardi, and you can see a video he made here.  That’s exactly what we need — more unbiased science and less politics and scare tactics.

Yet another article is out today with an alternate explanation for an event that had been attributed to global warming. Swiss scientists reported that alpine glaciers in their country experienced the greatest recorded melting in the 1940s (even more than now) due to increased solar radiation during that period.

I’m not surprised by that finding, since I don’t believe the earth is warming as much as they say we are, and warming is occurring is certainly not attributable to people.  But what I do find interesting is that, later in the article, the scientists involved in this report still cling to their ideas about global warming.  Despite the mounting evidence that there are other things that have a bigger impact on the climate than mankind, they aren’t swayed from their dogmatic beliefs.

I can’t speak to their motivations.  Maybe it’s the only way for them to get the grants that will allow them to pursue their research.  Maybe they believe it that fervently, but then they couldn’t be called scientists — instead they would be something like priests in this new global religion of climate change.  Either way, the world population is waking up, aided by the leaked e-mails recently, aka “Climategate,” and becoming less trusting of scientists and their conclusions.

And I say it’s about time.

It’s hard to know what to believe a lot of the time. There is so much money and power to be gained by the global warming hysteria that the experts we should be able to rely on for impartial discovery and reporting of the scientific truths are at best blinded by their own beliefs, and at worst trying to fabricate or twist the data to fit their own agendas. Whether or not it’s verifiable, some hackers found data and e-mails between climate scientists regarding tricks to make the data appear to support rising temperatures.

Then, too, you have the poor countries trying to strengthen themselves by their claims of damage from climate change caused by the rich, developed countries. I remember reading somewhere that a small island country in the Indian Ocean was trying to sue the United States because of sea level rises caused by global warming.

Then there’s the recent report by Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA) that poor women in countries like the Philippines would be driven to prostitution by climate change. Seriously?

Who knows what’s coming next? But it’s a pretty scary time when politicians use something like this to gain power. If the science and the dangers are that clear, you would think everyone would want to come together to do their part. Then there wouldn’t be any need for new regulations. The natural cycles of supply and demand would drive developments in alternative energy and energy efficient products, while gradually phasing out the inefficient and dirty processes and products we’ve been using.

I find it all very transparent when you look at things with an open mind and an unbiased perspective. World leaders just want to use this fabricated crisis to grab power and push us toward a world government. Or in the words of Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s chief of staff,

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Update: I found two new analysis articles here and here after I made this post, and you can even search the hacked documents and decide for yourself!

The preliminary data is in, and October 2009 came in with an average temperature of 50.8°F for the United States, 4.0°F below the average for the past 100 years.  That makes it the 3rd coolest October on record.  Several individual states (Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma) also had their coldest October on record.  Sure sounds like we’re having catastrophic global warming.

Here’s a graph of the temperatures from 1895-2009, showing brief periods ofwarmer or cooler temperatures, but overall much the same:

Thankfully, it seems the UN climate treaty will take 6 months to 1 year longer to iron out the details.  We can only hope that some sense will prevail in that time.

One of the “roadblocks” mentioned in the article is the fact that the United States’ cap-and-trade bill has not yet made it through Congress.  A bill had made it out of committee, but I haven’t been able to find out if it has actually passed the Senate.  Even so, it scares me how close we’re getting and how much power the government is gaining over our lives with no one putting up any serious resistance.

The science pointing to global warming is far from concrete, but if it was, would we really want to give up so much of our personal and collective liberty to avert it?  Do we really think we have that much of an impact on the globe either way?  Don’t get me wrong, I think we should be good stewards of this planet that God has given us and be able to pass on a good world to our children and their children.  But such actions should be left to individuals and their own sense of responsibility.  Government has no business mandating such behaviors.

In just 41 days, world leaders will attend the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, including President Obama.  With this innocuous-sounding name, and the supposedly noble goal of reducing or eliminating global warming, the treaty many country leaders are likely to sign will instead create a government that will control the world.  And not just any government, but a Socialist government on an immense scale.  Instead of limited wealth-redistribution from wealthy individuals to poor individuals, this treaty will transfer wealth from developed nations to developing nations, in the name of “carbon debt.”  This idea is that developed nations are the ones that have put the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so they owe a debt to other countries since they were the ones that caused this global warming crisis.

Much of this information comes from Lord Christopher Monckton, who was the science policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister of the UK.  He made several warnings in a speech to the Minnesota Free Market Institute, attempting to educate the public on the danger of this upcoming treaty and the consequences for our nation and the world if it is ratified.  I think it is very interesting that the mainstream media is not reporting on this much at all, positively or negatively.  The only place I’ve heard about it is WorldNetDaily, my daily dose of reality.  At least there are some people out there who don’t gloss over or sugarcoat the dire situation this nation and the world are in.  If you need any more support, Chuck Norris feels the same way I do about this treaty and our future.

I don’t really know if anything can be done to stop this.  President Obama is almost certain to sign this treaty, in contrast to President Bush who refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol because of its threats to our national sovereignty.  Then it would usually need a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate to be ratified, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see them push it through as an amendment to the cap-and-trade bill already in progress through the Senate, which would only need a 50% vote to pass.  That’s an entirely different, and nearly as scary, piece of legislation that would limit many of our personal freedoms and tax us for many of the things we do daily.

After all of this, I certainly don’t need any more evidence that the global warming “crisis” is, primarily, a scheme to seize greater government control over our lives and push us further toward the path toward socialism.  Now I see that we’re talking a global scale, too, not merely national.  If you’ve read any of my prior posts, you already know that I fervently doubt whether global warming is even occurring, and completely convinced that mankind is not causing it.  The world has actually been cooling since 1998, which was one of the hottest on record.  I just hope we can see some reason before it’s too late.

That’s the first sentence of an article I came across on McClatchy.  You can read the whole article at this link.

It says that the high in 1998 (the warmest year in recent history) was 0.76 degrees Celsius above the 20-year average, while so far this year the high has only been 0.42 degrees Celsius above the average.  So that’s giving global warming critics some added fuel for their arguments.

I find a couple of things interesting in this article.  First, we’re talking about a mere 0.34 degree Celsius difference between the average global temperature between this year and 1998, and both years are less than a degree above the average.  Granted we’re talking the average over the entire globe, where even small differences can have a bigger impact.  But we’re still talking about minuscule changes in a very complex pattern, while climate change alarmists are advocating huge and costly changes and regulation in our lives.

The other interesting thing is that the believers in global warming can have their cake and eat it too.  No matter what the temperature averages do, they say that there are complex forces at work and are not dissuaded from their dogma.  Skeptics, however, are not allowed to use the same arguments.  They are laughed at for not using sound science.  It really confuses me.  When did we move from trying to prove a hypothesis and changing it if the evidence doesn’t support it to blindly following a belief and trying to engineer the evidence to match?  I don’t know, sounds a lot like a religion to me.

Carbon dioxide — the current devil in the global warming debate — where does it really fit in?  The doomsayers call it a greenhouse gas and warn that the amounts of CO2 added by human activity will cause global chaos.  Let’s take a look at this gas.

First: CO2 occurs naturally in our atmosphere.  Here are the average percentages of the most abundant gases the make up the atmosphere:

• Nitrogen — 78.08%
• Oxygen — 20.95%
• Water vapor — 0-4%
• Argon — 0.93%
• Carbon dioxide — 0.036%
• Neon — 0.0018%
• Helium — 0.0005%

And so on.  A discussion of the atmosphere and a more complete list can be found here (the list is at the bottom of the page).  Does it seem rational that our activities could really add that much to the entire global atmosphere, and could it really make that much difference to a gas in such low overall concentration?  Sure I know that everything about this earth is very delicately balanced (too much for random chance, but I’ll save that for another discussion), but it’s still arrogant to think that we could have that much effect on such a large system that we know so little about.

Next: cause and effect.  Those on the global warming bandwagon would have us believe that increasing carbon dioxide increases the global temperature.  From Arctic ice cores, we can see a definite correlation, but which comes first?  You have to look closely, but this graph shows that the peaks of CO2 actually tend to follow the peaks in temperature, instead of the other way around. That makes sense — an increase in global average temperature leads to warmer oceans, which retain less CO2 and thus increase the atmospheric concentration.

But are more CO2 and warmer average temperatures necessarily such a bad thing?  Plants breathe CO2 and emit oxygen, so we humans, and all other oxygen-breathing animals, share a reciprocal relationship with plants.  More CO2 would create a better environment for lush plant growth and so more oxygen for us.

Warmer average temperatures would also be beneficial for humans.  The ice caps might undergo some melting, which could lead to higher sea levels and flood some low-lying areas, but almost certainly not to the degree global warming alarmists would have us believe.  This world is an incredible machine, balancing itself and transporting heat from one place to another in ways we still don’t fully understand.  It also has relief valves to avoid too much instability.  This world will survive; it’s set up that way.  An increase in the global average will cause a more survivable environment for humans, longer growing seasons, etc.

The world as we know it will probably change, assuming that global warming is even a reality, but the science there is far from conclusive.  But, then, it always has changed and we’ve adapted.  No need to try futilely to keep things the way they are…who’s to say whatever is to come won’t be better?

I just found an article on the Daily Telegraph website that sums up a lot of my feelings about global warming.  Titled, “2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved,” makes several clear points without getting bogged down in a lot of esoteric science.

The author, Christopher Booker, lists three big ways the hysteria over global warming has changed this year:

1. global temperatures have been dropping instead of rising
2. there is no scientific consensus in favor of global warming
3. the global economy can’t support politicians’ schemes to combat global warming

I think it’s interesting to note that the global warming apologists are trying harder and harder to get people to buy into the idea, and that anyone who even questions the “consensus” is ridiculed or even blackballed.  If your argument is sound and backed by solid science, shouldn’t it be able to stand on its own without propping it up and defending it at every turn?

Another thing I noticed within the last year or two is that they rarely call it “global warming” anymore — it’s “climate change.”  Aside from avoiding the embarrassing headlines like “Global warming conference canceled due to blizzard,” it puts the global warming crowd in the enviable, however artificial, position of being able to always be right.  Record-breaking snowfall and cold snaps can be as easily attributed to climate change as summer heat waves, in the alternate world these guys live in.

The truth of the matter is, though, that 2008 has been one of the coldest years in recent history.  I’ve only lived in the Omaha area for 5 years now, but the past summer seemed particularly cool and short, while this winter has already had a brutally cold spell the like of which I don’t recall this early in the winter.  Last week we had a morning that the wind chill was -28F, and several mornings that started below 0F to reach highs only in the single digits.  Personally, I think we could use some global warming right about now.

I’ve had a personal blog going now for a little over a year, where I talk about family life and such, but what about my personal interests?  A friend of mine has a blog where he reviews different computer gear and talks about how to do different things on the computer.  That kind of thing I could share with anyone who stumbles across it, instead of keeping it to friends and family like my personal blog.

So here goes.  I’m starting a new endeavor here and we’ll see how long it lasts.  You probably noticed from the title that this will be (at least partly) about weather.  I am a meteorologist, so that’s a given.  I’ve also been following the whole global warming hysteria and this can be a venue for refuting some of that as a weather scientist, though, granted, not a climatologist.

I will admit that I don’t delve into the science of the atmosphere much, but to do my job I have been trained and understand how the atmosphere operates somewhat better than the average layperson.

That’s the basis of where I expect this will go, but we all know that time has a way of changing our best plans.  Thanks for visiting!