Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Opposing view: Natural cycles trigger extremes in weather - USA TODAY

The argument that global warming is causing more extreme weather is problematic because it presumes the globe is warming.

  • As bad as the current drought is, the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s remains the worst. At its height in July 1934, almost 80% of the nation was enduring drought conditions, compared with about 55% today.

    AP

    As bad as the current drought is, the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s remains the worst. At its height in July 1934, almost 80% of the nation was enduring drought conditions, compared with about 55% today.

AP

As bad as the current drought is, the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s remains the worst. At its height in July 1934, almost 80% of the nation was enduring drought conditions, compared with about 55% today.

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In fact, the global temperature trend line has been stable for more than a dozen years, while carbon dioxide has increased 7%. If CO2 was the driver, then why have global temperatures stopped increasing?

Keep in mind that CO2 represents 0.0395% of the Earth's atmosphere. Arguing that CO2 is driving the small temperature variations in our climate as opposed to the oceans, which cover 70% of the planet and have 1,000 times the heat capacity of air, or the output of our sun, is scientifically disturbing.

Weather is more publicized nowadays because of its impact on society and the constant push of the global warming agenda. Increases in population result in more people being in the path of Mother Nature's fury.

Global warming activists attribute every major weather event to man because they are either uninformed about history, or choose to ignore it. The latest claims resulting from this series of hot and dry summers ignores the fact that more state heat records were set in the 1930s than all other decades of the last century combined. Anyone remember the Dust Bowl?

Seven major hurricanes hit the East Coast from 1954 to 1960. Now that we are in a pattern similar to the 1950s, the East Coast is vulnerable once again, and attributing events like Hurricane Irene to global warming is incorrect.

USATODAY OPINION

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All the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections for our climate have proved to be wrong. Global temperatures have stopped increasing and are nowhere near estimates made a decade ago. The IPCC incorrectly predicted Arctic sea ice would disappear by now.

After Katrina in 2005, more and stronger hurricanes were forecast to be the future. The Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index for the globe has instead declined to the lowest level in 30 years.

This does not mean we will not see warm weather and land-falling hurricanes. We are in a pattern similar to the 1950s when U.S. heat and drought as well as East Coast land-falling hurricanes were quite prevalent.

The real facts about man-made global warming can be found at real-science.com, wattsupwiththat.com and climatedepot.com. Perhaps when the Atlantic flips cold, we will be hearing Ice Age scares again as we did in the 1970s.

Joe Bastardi is chief forecaster at WeatherBELL Analytics, a meteorological consulting firm.

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