It is the New Year and for many the changing of the calendar is symbolic of starting with a clean slate. Millions of people make New Years resolutions in the hopes that this year will be better than last, wether they intend to quit smoking, lose weight, or find a higher paying job, the start of a New Year is a time people look at with optimism and hope. Generally by around April or May most will have given up on their New Years resolutions and fall back into the same patterns which plagued them the prior year, leaving their lives effectively unchanged and their hopes unfulfilled.

Although I am optimistic in my personal life for 2008, politically speaking I cannot help but feel a sense of pessimism. I look back at some of the posts I have made here over the last year and realize that although I would like to believe otherwise, my words largely fall upon deaf ears. With no topic is this more true than Global Warming, as I continually witness the same individuals replying to my articles demanding I “get with consensus”, although they refuse to reply directly to any facts I cited. It would be easy to write off such comments as being uneducated, or at least closed minded if it were not for the sheer volume of them, as well as the fact that their ignorance is not self inflicted, it is fed to them by the mainstream media.

The BBC recently ran an article stating that 2007 data confirms warming trend, and this has been echoed by many others here in America. The “news article” starts off by saying

“The UK’s Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia conclude that globally, this year ranks as the seventh warmest.

The 11 warmest years in this set have all occurred within the last 13 years.”

Obviously someone reading this would consider it undeniable proof the earth is warming dramatically, but there is a word in that last sentence which needs to be explained. The article states that the 11 warmest years in this set, but exactly what set are they referring to? If you scroll down, you will see a small chart which shows the warmest years, and it indicates that this “set” begins in 1960. One has to wonder why they would choose such an arbitrary year, why 47 years ago as opposed to lets say 100 years ago? The answer lies in what is left out of this article, and that is the fact that prior to 1960 the earth was actually warmer than it has been in recent years.

After NASA corrected it’s erroneous numbers cited in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, it turns out that four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). It would be difficult to convince the average person of continued warming if at the same time you informed them that the 1930’s were warmer than today, so the BBC simply decided to use 1960 as its starting year.

The chart on this very same article which speaks of a warming “trend” also deserves more attention as it shows that 2007 was cooler than the years 2002 through 2006. If the previous 5 years have all been warmer than this past year, how exactly does that imply a warming “trend”?

To further push their alarmist viewpoints, the BBC closes the article by stating “The warmth of the years since 2000 is thought to be driving the thinning of Arctic sea-ice.” While it is true that at one time it was thought that warming temperatures were driving the thinning of Arctic sea-ice, it has since been reported (although not by any major media outlets), it is actually caused by unusual winds pushing the ice sheet into warmer waters. Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory stated:

“Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,” he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.

“The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century,”

Also ignored by the media is the fact that while the arctic ice is diminishing, the Antarctic is growing to record levels, currently 16 million square kilometers. If Global warming were occurring at the pace the alarmists say it is, it would be effecting the entire planet, not only certain geographical areas. South America would not have recently experienced their coldest winter in decades, with snowfall in Buenos Aries for the first time since 1918. Johannesburg, South Africa, also had it’s first significant snowfall in 26 years while Australia experienced the coldest June ever.

On a Global level, the Earth’s temperature has not changed significantly over the past century, with certain areas having above normal temperatures, while others experience below normal temperatures. I expect that for the year 2008, this will remain unchanged. Also unchanged will be the way the media continues to ignore any story which does not push the alarmist theory that the world will end unless we take drastic actions. In the meantime they will continue to cut down the trees that absorb the CO2 they are so worried about, in order to print newspapers which explain the importance of planting trees as a carbon offset.

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