You gotta wonder how soon Al Gore will turn up on SNL as a comic foil. In the past two years, global temperatures have reversed the warming of the past 30 years. In the past two quarters, Arctic sea ice is back to levels last seen in 1979. You can say two years is too short to generalize, but you can also say the blip from 1979-1998 is also too short to conclude that man-made carbon dioxide is about to result in runaway warming. In either event, spending untold $Trillions to prevent an uncertain calamity is now being seen as the colossal Folly it always was. Rather than saying the Polar Bears are now safe from an horrific lack of ice, better to say WE are now safe from this hysterical lack of common sense.
UPDATE: This news article generated enormous interest and alarm from the AGW advocates. The report is accurate, as indicated here with pictures, in that the extent of sea ice did match the 1979 extent, but this does not mean the ice itself is as thick as it was in 1979. A good analysis is here. The scientists' reaction the story is here. But then another shoe dropped: sensor drift from the satellite data had under-reported the polar ice extent by a huge 193,000 square miles (500,000 sq km), the size of Spain! This calls into question the purported rebuttals to the original story. Satellite data from Japan shows the ice in 2009 is running ahead of the polar sea ice of any of the past four years (2005-2008).

amen!
Posted by: Jack | Tuesday, January 06, 2009 at 03:49 PM