Thursday, June 21, 2007

Forget Global Warming

The other day, I jokingly made a comment over on my blog buddy Myrhaf's site:
REPENT! THE END IS NEAR! WE ARE ENTERING THE NEXT ICE AGE!

I feel pretty safe making that prediction.

Sometimes, I can be downright omniscient, even in jest.

Today, I read an article over at Canada.com by Timothy Patterson (who is "professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University"). Apparently, Global Warming is NOT what we have to worry about:
"Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments."

Mind you, I am NOT hopping aboard the Global Cooling bandwagon yet, because, as Dr. Patterson says:
"Meantime, we need to continue research into [climate change]...and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change."

On a related note, Myrhaf's post, on which I commented, was about a website which is pointing out flaws in temperature measuring stations. One post by Anthony Watts at norcalblogs.com specifically compares two temperature measuring stations and their results. One station, which has seen a lot of human construction around it, including a parking lot, a cell tower, and even a barbecue grill, shows steady warming over the last century. The scary thing Watts points out about the station:
"The data from this station is part of the USHCN (US Historical Climatological Network) and is used in the computer modeling used to predict climate change."

The other station, which is out in the middle of nowhere and has been for the last century, shows an initial drop followed by relatively consistent temperatures.

In other words, the argument for man-made Global Warming does have some validity. Through human construction and activity, we are affecting the temperature measurements.

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