January 2008: Second Coolest January Worldwide in 15 Years

And according to data from Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa there has been a significant global drop in temperature of 0.63 degress Centigrade in the past 12 months. That goes a long way towards explaining the significant global winter weather events of the past year, including here in the Inland Northwest.

I have heard of the Sports Illustrated jinx. Is there a Nobel jinx?

National Weather Service: Winter 2007-2008 One for the Books

Think its snowed a lot in Eastern Washington this winter? You're right.

The National Weather Service says that we have not seen snows like this in 12 years, In fact, this January in Spokane was the 4th snowiest January since records have been kept. What's more, through January 31, this is the seventh snowiest winter EVER in Spokane. Even if it doesn't snow again this winter, it would be the 20th snowiest winter since 1881.

So much for the "hockey stick" (the 3rd and 6th all-time snowiest winters were in the Nineties.) Does anybody know how that global warming event went in Moscow yesterday? Or was it cancelled because of snow?

UDPATE: From yesterday's Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

Talk warming - The Palouse Clearwater Environmental Institute will sponsor a night of global warming information, discussion, and entertainment at 6 p.m. at Mikey's Gryos on Main Street in Moscow. The "Focus the Nation" event will include a forum on how things such as the media, denial, and technology can sometimes be obstacles to combating climate change. Kenton Bird, Fritz Fiedler and Heather Truelove will be on the panel. THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO THE WEATHER.

The Geographically Challenged

Let me get this straight. Hawkins, a development company from Boise, got a good deal on some Palouse farmland and wants to build a sprawl-mall there. However, because the land does not have all utilities and is distant from either Moscow or Pullman, Hawkins wants either the Whitman County taxpayers to underwrite this mall with a bond, or the Moscow taxpayers to underwrite this mall with utility access.

- Bill London, Moscow-Pullman Daily News, January 29, 2008.

The Hawkins development, of course, will be directly adjacent to Moscow, hard against the state line. Don't laugh. It's sad, really, that our no growth moonbats have been reduced to this level of intellectual bankruptcy. It's much more fun when they have a sporting chance.

Numerous conservative commentators in our own community find time to comment on their lack of faith in the environmental certainty of global warming, as well as their belief that there is a vast liberal conspiracy behind anything to do with environmental protection.

- Chuck "Mr. Civil Discourse" Pezeshki, Moscow-Pullman Daily News, January 29, 2008.

You have to forgive Chuckie Sandiego's poor timing on today's column. He's in Denmark at the moment, not shoveling a foot of snow out of his driveway like the rest of us in Pullman.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Timing is Everything

With nearly a foot of snow on the ground and several more inches due to fall today, Pullman continues to suffer through its snowiest winter in recent memory.

It's much more severe, however, in China, where the worst blizzards in 50 years have killed over 50 people, stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers, destroyed homes and crops, and caused widespread power blackouts that forced the Chinese premier to apologize.

However, the Alcolytes are preparing to sacrifice a goat to the God of the Boiling Planet on Thursday. According to yesterday's Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

University of Idaho professor Bruce Haglund believes global climate change is more of an issue than people give it credit.

"Ninety-nine percent of scientists agree that it's happening," Haglund said. "They've been telling us this since the mid-1980s, and now we're seeing some of the more extreme consequences."

To bring attention to the issue, the UI chapter of the American Institute of Architecture Students will take part in an event titled "Focus the Nation" on Wednesday and Thursday. Students and residents will be informed about the problems associated with carbon dioxide emissions from buildings and presented with viable solutions.

The weather forecast is calling for 5-12 inches of new snow on Thursday...

UPDATE: From the Janaury 30, 2008 edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

The snowpack on the Palouse is the highest it's been in years, and it's about to get worse.

Meteorologist John Livingston with the National Weather Service in Spokane said a winter storm warning has been issued for a storm that could bring 4-8 more inches of snow.

The storm should start today between 8 p.m. and midnight and continue through Thursday, Livingston said. There also will be 15-20 mph winds with some gusts up to 30 mph.

Another storm is expected Saturday, but it's unclear how much snow it will bring, he said. It will likely be less severe than Thursday's storm.

Livingston said there is about 18-30 inches of snowpack in Latah County lowlands, including the 8 inches that fell during the weekend.

He said it is the most snow on the ground since the winter of 1996-1997.

"Br-r-r! Where did global warming go?"

My fingers have finally thawed out and my heart has resumed a normal rhythm after shoveling my driveway and sidewalk this morning (official snowfall at Forbicite HQ: 7.5 inches.) I contemplate buying a snowblower from Russ and April. But why should I? Has not the Goracle promised Floridaesque weather for us here in the Arctic Northwest?

If Marion Jones had to give back her Olympic gold medals, will Algore have to return his Nobel Peace Prize in 5 or 10 years when all this global warming alarmism is proven to be untrue? Yet another columnist for yet another big-city newspaper has attacked Gore and the BS he is peddling. In the January 6 Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby wrote:

THE STARK headline appeared just over a year ago. "2007 to be 'warmest on record,' " BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that "the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007," surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.

In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, "a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption." In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country's 24 provinces. In August, Chile's agriculture minister lamented "the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years," which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.

Latin Americans weren't the only ones shivering.

University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that "unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007." Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand's vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.

Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years.

Now all of these may be short-lived weather anomalies, mere blips in the path of the global climatic warming that Al Gore and a host of alarmists proclaim the deadliest threat we face. But what if the frigid conditions that have caused so much distress in recent months signal an impending era of global cooling?

"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity - sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time - as having the greatest effect on climate.

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write.

Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO2 is the cause of climate change.

Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: "The debate in the scientific community is over."

But it isn't. Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, "the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it."

Climate science isn't a religion, and those who dispute its leading theory are not heretics. Much remains to be learned about how and why climate changes, and there is neither virtue nor wisdom in an emotional rush to counter global warming - especially if what's coming is a global Big Chill.

An Inconvenient Driveway

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change needs to meet in Pullman in December instead of Bali.

I have just returned home after spending almost two weeks in the Seattle area, which had its first white Christmas in over a decade.

What did I do first when I got home? Shovel several inches of crusty, heavy global warming off my driveway. The National Weather Service says it was the snowiest December in eastern Washington in some 40 years.

Going (for the) Green

If you think all the global warming nitwittery has been limited to Stockholm and Bali lately, read on.

A December 6 Seattle Times story detailed some possible legislation concerning global warming in Washington, such as:

Seattle leaders have been talking to lawmakers about a bill that would impose an added fee for license tabs that would be scaled based on fuel efficiency. Gas-hogging SUVs would pay more; hybrids and electric cars would pay less.

While the actual fee amount would be up to the Legislature, Ceis said a reasonable average would be $100, with gas guzzlers possibly going as high as $300.

Of course, people with families like myself drive those "gas guzzler" SUVs and minivans. As the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers stated, "It's really nothing more than an added tax on families and small-business owners who need larger vehicles."

And if you thought the Department of Ecology had killed business in Washington border counties with their ridiculous stormwater requirements, wait until this is implemented:

Meanwhile, the state is already preparing to order cities and counties to study what effects new projects, such as office buildings, will have on the climate. State environmental law probably already requires it, though it hasn't been done in the past, said Jay Manning, head of the state Department of Ecology.

As for environmentalists, one of the top priorities for this year will be trying to change state land-use laws so communities have to factor in climate change as they plan for growth.

They, along with the Ecology Department, also would like to start an accounting system for larger companies or governments to track their greenhouse-gas emissions. That would help set the stage for future regulations aimed at cutting the gases.

God help us.