Posted on 03/19/2003 11:54:25 AM PST by Mike Darancette
A whole town is frozen solid in Newfoundland, the Great Lakes are sheets of ice, snow is still piled up on Toronto streets, Britain has been caught in a deep freeze, Europeans shivered through January, thousands died in Russia from the cold, rice paddies have turned into skating rinks in Southeast Asia, people are dying from the cold in Bangladesh, parts of China's Yellow River have frozen over.
What's going on? Nothing much, actually. It's just the weather. But these days the weather, hot and cold, is a political issue, and that means you can't let erratic weather go by without running it through the filter of climate change.
Through a long, grim winter in Eastern Canada, the first question raised on elevators and in coffee shops has been "Whatever happened to global warming?" In the strip of territory that runs from the Great Lakes along the St. Lawrence River through to the Maritimes, below-normal temperatures have sunk spirits, raised heating costs and caused untold extra hardship and irritation for more than 20 million Canadians. It's miserable.
So let's check in with Environment Canada, propaganda central for the global warming scare, to see how bad it's been. Guess what? The cold gets hardly a mention. In fact, the first words in Environment Canada's recent report on climate trends take the opposite tack: "Most of Canada had above normal temperatures this winter. As a whole, Canada experienced its 9th warmest winter (since nationwide records began in 1948) at 2.3 degrees Centigrade above normal."
If that doesn't coincide with the majority Canadian experience of the past winter, that's because Environment Canada doesn't present the weather that Canadians experience.
Who the hell cares about the average national temperature? Nobody lives there! Nor do many Canadians live in the areas of Canada, such as the Yukon and the far northwest, where average temperatures were higher than normal and pulled the national average higher.
Never mind the weather Canadians actually live through. Ottawa's climate-change bureaucracy is more interested in convincing us that global warming is a deadly real problem that requires $2-billion in new federal funding to meet the senseless Kyoto targets adopted by the Prime Minister. While two-thirds of Canadians are freezing and dismal, Environment Canada is monitoring and tracking the weather for wild elk. About 29,000 people were warmer than normal in the Yukon, while 20 million were colder than normal in Eastern Canada, but Ottawa reports it was a warmer than normal winter across Canada.
Environment Canada also has a unique, if warped, value system: Warming is bad for us, cold is good. Last October, when the department issued its long-range winter forecast, it warned that a new El Niño was expected to bring milder winter to most parts of southern Canada. And mild means bad: "This could mean less snow and an increase in insect pests and diseases that are normally kept in check by lengthy cold spells. Milder weather may also have a negative effect on the winter recreation industries in Canada, and could contribute to the melting of ice roads in Northern Canada, restricting access to remote communities."
Environment Canada didn't quite get the Ontario, Quebec and Maritime forecast right, which means it failed to alert us to the looming hardship of cold, which is a lot tougher to deal with than heat. A hotter Canada would be a more hospitable environment for living than a Canada covered in expanding glaciers.
This winter's cold isn't just a Canadian phenomenon. Most of the Northern Hemisphere -- Europe, Russia, Asia -- has been trapped in cold through much of the past three months. Headline after headline tells of killer cold.
How do global warming activists explain this politically tricky winter weather? There are two main gambits, although nobody is all that keen on them. The first is to dismiss the global freeze-up as nothing unusual. The weather, after all, is continuously changing and these bouts of extreme weather are just a natural characteristic of the global climate. Intense variability is normal.
The trouble with this argument is that it casts a bit of a shadow over the global warming propaganda operation, which has been feeding off a succession of El Niños and extreme warm weather to dramatize the existence of global warming. Carbon and other emissions are causing a buildup of greenhouse gases, driving temperatures higher. But if cold extreme weather is normal, then why shouldn't we treat unusually warm weather as also possibly just another natural development?
The second response to colder weather is to argue that it is actually part of the global warming crisis. Climate change theorists have been toying with the theme for years. Now they may have to use it.
A story in The Guardian last January explained how global warming will bring colder winters to Britain. "The amount of ice melting from the surface of the Greenland ice sheet broke all known records last year, threatening a rapid rise in sea levels and a return to very cold winters to Britain because of a slowing down of the Gulf Stream."
So there's the global warming theory to end all climate debate. If it gets cold, it means global warming is setting in.
© Copyright 2003 National Post
Weather Warmer = Global Warming.
Weather Colder = Global warming.
Global Warming = rising sea levels
Global Warming = falling sea levels
I'm not one to buy into this whole global warming business, but the above statement does not reflect well on the author's intelligence. To determine whether global warming is real, you have to take readings, well, GLOBALLY. Just taking readings where people live isn't going to provide you with much of a scientific sample.
That kinda reminds me of the antitrust law:
If your prices are higher than the others, it's price gouging
If your prices are lower, it's cutthroat
If your prices are the same, it's collusion
I think that they started taking readings in the late 80s.
Either way, we should be alarmed. Of course, it would be warming or cooling or both all the time anyway, so we should be in a perpetual state of alarm. Would it help to light a candle?
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