Hell Freezes Over

Hell Freezes Over

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, December 19, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: Sin City gets hit with almost 4 inches of snow as the white stuff even dusts Malibu, Calif. We don’t know what computer model global warmongers are using. A slot machine with three ice cubes, perhaps?

What happens in Vegas, they say, stays in Vegas. But as more evidence of the decade-long cooling trend is shoveled off the Strip, we hope that doesn’t apply to the truth about global warming.

On Friday, the Las Vegas Sun reported that eight inches of snow had hit the Las Vegas Valley. The 3.6 inches that had already fallen as of late Wednesday near McCarran Airport added up to the most snow recorded for the area in December since they began keeping records 70 years ago.

The white powder even dusted Malibu as a winter storm hit parts of California.

We commented recently on an Associated Press story claiming that, rather than being “evidence of some kind of cooling trend,” such events “actually illustrate how fast the world is warming.” But not everybody is convinced.

“If the issues weren’t so serious and the ramifications so profound, I would have to laugh at it,” said David Deming, a geology professor at the University of Oklahoma.

“The mean global temperature, at least measured by satellite, is the same as it was in the year 1980. In the last couple of years, sea level has stopped rising, hurricane and cyclone activity in the Northern Hemisphere is at a 24-year low and sea ice globally is also the same as it was in 1980.”

Speaking of rising sea levels, is Al Gore smarter than a fourth-grader? James O’Brien, emeritus professor at Florida State University who studies climate variability and the oceans, thinks not. “When the Arctic Ocean ice melts, it never raises sea level because floating ice is floating ice, because it’s displacing water,” he points out.

“When the ice melts, sea level actually goes down. I call it a fourth-grade science experiment: Take a glass, put some ice in it, put water in it, mark level where water is. . . . After the ice melts, the sea level didn’t go up in your glass of water. It’s called the Archimedes principle.”

Global temperatures stopped rising after 1998 and have plummeted in the last two years by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. The 2007-08 temperature drop was not predicted by global climate models. It was predictable by a decline in sunspot activity since 2000 and by a cyclical ocean-current phenomenon known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

On CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” recently, Jay Lehr, a senior fellow and science director at the Heartland Institute, was asked by the host what he considered the dominant influence on Earth’s climate.

“Well, clearly, Lou, it is the sun,” Lehr answered, adding that “if we go back in really recorded human history; in the 13th century, we were probably seven degrees Fahrenheit warmer than we are now.”

Lehr considers global cooling to be the real threat, part of a natural pattern as we continue coming out of a period known as the Little Ice Age. “If we go back to the Revolutionary War, 300 years ago,” he said, “it was very, very cold. We’ve been warming out of that cold spell from the Revolutionary War period. And now we’re back into a cooling cycle.”

The Associated Press claims that the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since Bill Clinton’s second inaugural. But after it was discovered that NASA’s James Hansen, Gore’s chief scientific ally, had been fudging the numbers, the agency was forced to correct its data. The 10 warmest years turn out to be, in descending order: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938 and 1939.

If there’s a trend there, we don’t see it. So is global warming man-made and an imminent danger? As the snow falls in Vegas, don’t bet on it.