Weekend Global Warming Update

Surely they don't call it Pravda - Russian for "truth" - for nothing?

The former house organ for the supreme Soviet, now an interesting if not always reliable online newspaper, is reporting that Earth is "on the brink of an Ice Age."!

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Grab your parka. The report, citing an array of impressive scientific terms and other gibberish, is notable in that it puts forth the theory that CO2 levels rise and fall as a result of climate changes, not as a causal agent for them.

The reason that global CO2 levels rise and fall in response to the global temperature is because cold water is capable of retaining more CO2 than warm water. That is why carbonated beverages loose their carbonation, or CO2, when stored in a warm environment. We store our carbonated soft drinks, wine, and beer in a cool place to prevent them from loosing their ‘fizz’, which is a feature of their carbonation, or CO2 content. The earth is currently warming as a result of the natural Ice Age cycle, and as the oceans get warmer, they release increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Because the release of CO2 by the warming oceans lags behind the changes in the earth’s temperature, we should expect to see global CO2 levels continue to rise for another eight hundred years after the end of the earth’s current Interglacial warm period. We should already be eight hundred years into the coming Ice Age before global CO2 levels begin to drop in response to the increased chilling of the world’s oceans.

In other words, if this scenario is correct, the earth is pumping much more CO2 into the atmosphere than human activity could even begin to match.

An interesting idea, and I'm not sure I'm buying into all of it, especially since it's Pravda telling the tale, but there is no doubt that if you go beyond Archbishop Algore's flawed "hockey stick" model of the past 1,000 years (flawed because he had to ignore two significant climate events in order to make his model work), and look at a longer range of time, say oh the last million years, there is little doubt that ice ages come, stick around for 100,000 years, and then it warms up for 12,000 years, give or take a day or two.

The fascinating aspect of this article is that it sounds as scholarly, or perhaps more so, than any of Archbishop Algore's pontifications. Which should tell us that not only is the science not settled, but we shouldn't undertake any massive trillions-of-dollar carbon taxing/trading/offsetting schemes that are going to infringe on human freedom until we know a lot more about what is really going on.

REPORT NO. 2 -- Slovenia reports a minus 49 degrees Celsius! Citizens are being warned not to wear their metal piercing ornaments out of doors.

REPORT No. 3 -- Tok, Alaska, hit -79 F. a day or so ago.

REPORT No. 4 -- Oskkosh, by gosh, was darn chilly in December.