Global cooling ... what is your opinion?

Question

I came across an article from the Washington Times about the Year of the global cooling.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071219/COMMENTARY/10575140&template=printart

What is your view of this last 12 months of world wide global cooling?

For me where I live in the Northeast of North America, we just had the total amount of snowfall in the first two weeks of February which exceeds the average yearly snowfall in my area. Also the weather is much colder than usual even the past 30 something years with more lower than average temperature days than usual.

What is your views about the current global cooling?

Answer 1

Trying to determine shifts in the climate on one year's records is equivalent to trying to determine which way the stock market is heading on one day's price change.  

Measuring global warming or cooling is relatively easy:  Walk up to the edge of your neighborhood glacier.  Drive a stake in the ground against the edge of it.  Come back 12 months later.  Record one of 3 things:  Glacier backed away from stake, glacier didn't move, glacier buried stake.  Repeat for a decade.  Compile your list and compare with everyone else driving sticks in the ground.  You now can reasonably determine whether the planet has been warming or cooling.  

This is as accurate a method as anything else presented to date.  It doesn't attempt to point fingers at the cause, it simply determines where we are in the planet's natural climate cycle.

Answer 2

well,it is known that the planet goes through ice ages like once every 80 000 years or so...so maybe we are nearing another ice age..hopefully it wont be so bad

Answer 3

Now Al Gore can make another movie and win another Nobel peace prize!

Answer 4

not uncommon then if its reported in the papers

it wont be pleasant  though ....it might happen ...what with all this global warming and all.......global cooling.....not bad

Answer 5

The article is really poorly written.  It looks at a few isolated locations that had a few isolated cold spells in 2007.  That's called weather, not climate.

Overall, 2007 was the 3rd warmest year on record, according to NASA.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

He's arguing that the 3rd warmest year in thousands of years is the "Year of Global Cooling"?  Wow.

Coincidentally, the author of this opinion article (David Demming) is an Adjunct Scholar of the National Center for Policy Analysis, which has received at least $465,900 from Exxon since 1998, including $75,000 per year for the last several years.

http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/exxon...

There is no "current global cooling".  January 2007 was the hottest single month ever on record.  Most of 2007 varied between 0.4-0.6°C above the baseline 1951-1980 average global temperature.  It was very stable.  Then January 2008 was a very cold month because we hit the peak of the current La Nina cycle.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabled...

Basically we've had one cold month, and it was still 0.12°C warmer than the 1951-1980 average.  That's not global cooling, that's one cold month due to a strong La Nina cycle, as you can see here:

http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/klaus.wol...

Just like the record hot month of January 2007 didn't mean global warming had suddenly accelerated, the relatively cool month of January 2008 doesn't mean we're suddenly in a period of global cooling.  There are always weather variations making individual days, months, and years hotter or cooler.  The overall trend continues upward because the CO2 we're emitting into the atmosphere isn't going anywhere.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

Answer 6

The earths going to do what the earths going to do...it's out of our hands

Answer 7

Ironically this may be a matter of global warming causing global cooling.  

It's a long La Nina.    

Some of the AGW proponents appear to consider it as a brief, natural interruption of an otherwise long and steady man-made warming trend - i.e., it will necessarily go away soon, possibly we will then swing into an El Nino, and we will resume the path back to, and beyond, 1998 temps, either shortly or eventually, depending upon whether we swing into an El Nino.

I don't see it that way.

There's an old joke my children tell about a man whose head is in a sauna and whose feet are in an icebox, who is just fine on average.

If you consider what's going on with the regional sub-climates in addition to the global average, relative to what happened during the MWP, there are stark similarities.   Droughts in Africa and the American Southwest are more pronounced and getting steadily worse.    The Northeast US and Canada are getting more snow again.   Southern Europe is drier, Northern Europe is wetter.    

This is what started to occur about 130-140 years into the MWP, which we know to have been 100% natural but cannot fully explain, aside from a decline in volcanic activity, which actually usually has a cooling effect.

And we're about 120 years into the present warming phase.

I think the way you measure human effect is not to try to develop a computer model to incorporate every possible input to the climate because you have to know all the inputs, how each effects the climate and how each affects all the other inputs, to a precise degree.    We still haven't done that yet, and I think it's a wild goose chase.    It's like trying to pick the next season's World Series winner by going pitch by pitch through the season and guessing, based on the likely team lineups, how it will all go from the first pitch in April to the last pitch of the Series.

I think you take a broad view of "last time" and you compare this time to last.

We're tracking with the MWP, 1000 years ago.

EDIT - "3rd warmest year in thousands of years" is just a flat-out lie.   2007 wasn't even the 3rd warmest year in the 21st century to date.  

That's my problem with this.    Nobody seems to care about the facts.

Answer 8

it's good

Answer 9

global is the key word. it just mentions how there have been cold weather in a few places not the whole globe.

Answer 10

I think the article is dead wrong, and the author hasn't the foggiest idea what he's talking about. It's all fine and well to point to a few cool periods last year and say, "Hay gais, its gloebal cooling!" But it doesn't mean anything. According to NASA, 2007 was the second warmest year ever recorded. This despite cold-phase la Niña conditions prevailing throughout much of November through December.

You may also have noticed some denialists crowing about global cooling due to the anomalously cool January we experienced (due again to the la Niña conditions that prevailed all month). But this specious claim comes from the same faulty reasoning used above.