In the Midwest of the United States, wind chills plunged temperatures to minus 50 degrees. The Gulf Coast and Texas shuddered from brutal, freakish cold. Across Florida, freeze imperiled crops statewide, and the Palm Beach Post reported that “the 107-year-old record low for Jan. 7 in West Palm Beach has been broken, dropping to 37 degrees by 5:15 a.m. and it could fall further before the sun comes up.” AccuWeather, meanwhile, reported, “The last time severely low temperatures froze a large swath of the nation was in 1985.”
As in the U.S., so around the world. Blizzards blanketed Britain, paralyzing transportation and business infrastructure. And as the Guardian reported, “In Seoul [South Korea] a blizzard dumped more than 25cm of snow today — the heaviest snowfall since Korea began conducting meteorological surveys in 1937,” and “the punishing winter weather has brought transport chaos to China … and claimed at least 60 lives in northern and eastern India.” Yes, India, where the Punjab, Bihar, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh states were plunged into deadly frigidity.
People freezing to death in India. That is a manifestly strange state of affairs and might be expected to call into question the whole “global warming” thing. Not so fast, say the true believers, who assure us that isolated weather events need not be indicative of long-term global trends. Never mind that these same climate cultists consistently use any summer storm or hot day as “proof” of their warming fantasies.
Our recent cold spell comes at the end of a decade-long trend which has seen global temperatures flatline from their peak in 1998 … or fall. That’s right, the Earth is not warming — and hasn’t been for the past twelve years. But don’t take my word for it. In one of the hacked emails constituting the Climategate scandal, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, admits privately that he cannot explain the current cooler trends. “The fact is,” Trenberth writes, “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
The only “travesty” is that these scientists actually believed their own preposterous ravings, or that they placed such fervent apocalyptic faith in computer models. Did these overeducated ideologues miss the class in Geology 101 where you learn that on countless occasions over the last million millenia, great ice sheets covered much of the globe, only to recede for brief periods of interglacial warming? Did they plug that into their models? Or did they really believe this ancient cycle was discontinued because we started up our SUVs?
There are three reasons why these climate scientists — and their political and media enablers — need to be held to account:
1. They have used this junk science as leverage to pluck billions from the pockets of taxpayers in the United States and throughout the West, to subsidize everything from harebrained “green” technology that no one wants to gigantic wealth transfers to the Third World.
2. They have used their manufactured crisis to justify massive government power grabs at the expense of our liberty, such as the Environmental Protection Agency recently classifying CO2 emissions — literally our very breath — as a pollutant, and therefore under their purview of control.
3. They have dangerously distracted people from the real climate danger: the return of the ice.
This last is no small matter. If, as the warmists claim, the Earth’s temperature will rise a degree or two in the next century, it would be nothing but a blessing for humanity. Any possible downsides (oh my God, I might have to walk over a few feet to keep from drowning) would be vastly outweighed by the bounty of longer growing seasons and larger areas of cultivatable land. But a colder world would be something else entirely.
Imagine the ice sheets advancing over the Northern Hemisphere, locking up sea lanes and fishing fields, shortening the growing season, shrinking harvests, causing food shortages the world over. Imagine the glaciers coming down from the mountains, locking up fresh water, erasing habitable valleys from the map. Imagine the sun dimming; imagine snow in the middle of summer. Our ancestors did not have to imagine — they actually went through this exact scenario during what’s called the Big Ice Age.
The 2010 cold snap may or may not herald a return to such conditions. But sooner or later, the ancient wheel will turn and our civilization, and our species, will be endangered not by fire — but by ice.
Is anyone preparing for this monstrous certainty?
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