Snowbound in Seattle

So, I was listening to the radio when the weather reporter was talking about Seattle’s coldest and snowiest Winter, with people roaming aimlessly thinking that Captain Kirk had teleported them to Alaska.  I did not think much about it, but the next report came the Upper Midwest where sub-zero temperatures have frozen everything in sight including Santa’s sleigh.

I told my wife that the news must be wrong, after all the same news station has spent the last 10 years reporting on how all scientists agree that it’s rising manmade C02 levels which are the cause of global warming.   So how could temperatures be falling? How could snow be piling up in Seattle in December? Al Gore, Barack Obama and friends tell us that CO2 levels have been rising without interruption.   Yet, we have snow in Seattle……….and Malibu for that matter!

So, I thought I’d call a Seattle-resident friend of mine, a California transplant, to check it out “firsthand”.  To my surprise, indeed, it was, and still is, snowing in Seattle.  And alot of the powdery stuff is lying around with more to come.   But right on cue, as if she had just finished a tub of popcorn while watching “An Inconvenient Truth”, she said it was all due to global warming.

I expected that one to be sure; she was, and remains, a steadfast loyalist to the Gore mantra.   Yet even Al Gore has changed his tune – it’s no longer global warming, but global climate CHANGE.  Maybe that’s an attempt to blend in with Obama’s change message, but me thinks it’s brilliant crisis communications on his part.  After all it becomes most difficult to explain away global temperature drops, higher snowfall and increasing ice sheets unless you change the terminology – global climate CHANGE covers it all, no?

I could not resist the golden opportunity to present some cold hard facts…..

From the El Niño year of 1998 until Jan., 2007, the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere near its surface decreased some 0.25 C (0.45 F). From Jan., 2007 until the spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping 0.75 C (1.35 F).  All of this in the face of rising CO2 levels.

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service reports that last summer was Anchorage's third coldest on record. "Not since 1980 has there been a summer less reflective of global warming," Craig Medred wrote in the Anchorage Daily News.  All this in the face of rising CO2 levels.

Alaska's glaciers are thickening in the middle. "It's been a long time on most glaciers where they've actually had positive mass balance," U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia told Medred Oct. 13. Similarly, the National Snow and Ice Data Center found that Arctic sea ice expanded 13.2 percent this year, or a Texas-sized 270,000 square miles.  Yes, all of this in the face of rising CO2 levels.

So, armed with facts out the gazoo and with my friend glued to the Weather Channel, snowed in, you’d think I might have scored a point or two.  Maybe even a glint of light showing through a crack in the door.  Nope.

As if in the middle of a lengthy Gore lecture, she told me without missing a beat that what the news was not telling me is that “the snow is warmer……..not the same snow as in 1980”.   Now call me a skeptic.  Call me a heretic. Call me anything you want, but don’t call me stupid.   More snow, lower temperatures, frozen railways all explained away by warmer snow?  Give me a break.

I had news for her  - global temperatures have fallen, snow is falling, and solar cycles will continue to drive global temperatures from here into eternity.  No amount of politicization of what should be a scientific issue will change that inalterable fact.

It’s time for whatever brave scientists are left in this world to speak out.  It’s time for any professional journalists who might inhabit our soon-to-be “deserted” planet to shed their own politics and report facts. It’s time for those who call people such as me close-minded, to open up their own.

Now that is a very inconvenient truth!

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