Sep 23 2008

Brrr.. a look back at the winter

Category: environment,global warmingharmonicminer @ 9:00 am

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Smile. Buy a nice warm coat. You may need it.

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One Response to “Brrr.. a look back at the winter”

  1. Sam says:

    We have some family who are very big into the Eco-Panic that’s going on and talk about it all the time. The thought that keeps coming back to me as they cry “Woe!” is how utterly self-important and arrogant it is to think that what is happening RIGHT NOW and TO US is so unique and has never happened in history and, of course, must be CAUSED BY US. Heaven forbid the natural world would even consider having fluctuation on its own and for its own purposes without it being directly caused by us.
    I’m reading the book “The Reason for God” by Timothy Keller and at one point he talks about how science and magic were on the rise at nearly the same time in history. They were both serving the same function: man trying to gain some control over his environment. Now, obviously science has proven to be superior to magic, but in many ways I think it still serves the same purpose. If we cannot explain what we are seeing in perfectly scientific and observable means (which we’ve only really had for a couple of centuries or so) we can’t handle it and are forced to create a reason. Modern man doesn’t like feeling like he’s not “in the know.”
    I think that if records manage to survive of this point in history and society people will look back at us and think we’re pretty silly and short-sighted.

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