Gerard Wynn, over at Reuters asks “What happened to Global Warming?”
It’s not just that it’s disappeared from media headlines this year - shoved off by the credit crunch and natural disasters, for example. It can’t be ignored that 2007 came and went as another very warm year - the 7th hottest on record since 1850 according to the World Meteorological Organization.
But it wasn’t a record. In fact that was 1998, a full 10 years ago - the year of an exceptional El Nino, a Pacific weather pattern which heats the whole globe. So is global warming not living up to the hype?
Two weeks ago Leibniz Institute’s Noel Keenlyside stirred an academic hornet’s
nest by saying that we may have to wait longer - a decade or more - for another
peak year, because a natural weakening in ocean currents may be cooling sea
temperatures.
Many scientists flatly rejected the idea, saying Keenlyside had over-estimated the effect. But some pointed out that a recent switch in a weather pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation could indeed cool temperatures globally.
Along with the gratuitous photograph of floating ice, this author actually covered a little of the other side. Well one paragraph anyway.
Meanwhile one or two doubters are already saying the present lull in warming
casts doubt on just how far manmade greenhouse gases are influencing the climate. MIT’s Richard Lindzen reckoned that if it was as bad as all that temperatures would be rising faster.
What do you think?
Well, what do you think? You could always comment here, there, or both.
Election 2008 is proving to be mildly entertaining and mostly painful. One can’t pass a television without the media showing some politician talking about change.
Well at least videos like this come around every so often to mask the pain with a little entertainment.
It sure seems like just about everything can be blamed on anthropogenic global warming these days. From acne or the end of beer as we know it, to psychiatric illness and smaller brains, it all can and has been attributed to that evil global warming. And of course it’s all our fault for improving our lives through the use of energy. More specifically it’s all or mostly America’s fault.
As crazy as the alleged effects are, the causes are getting pretty absurd as well. We all know that CO2 is the alleged culprit. 
We are also told that we have to make drastic changes to the way we live - even pay taxes on the CO2 we are responsible for. But now we can add research to the seemingly endless list of human activities contributing to global warming. According to Hervé Philippe, a Université de Montréal professor of biochemistry, his own research produces more than twice the amount of CO2 than the average American. (44 tons vs. 20 tons respectively).
I did my PhD on nucleotide sequencing in the hope of advancing our knowledge of biodiversity, but I never thought that the research itself could have a negative impact on biodiversity,
he said, during a recent biology department symposium.
The solution?
For universities, he recommends having less frequent international conferences, increasing the use of video-conferences, avoiding research on well explored topics, reducing publications and evaluating the amount of CO2 produced by research projects
So there you have it: Global Warming is official caused by hot air from the researchers themselves.
University of Montreal (2008, May 7). University Research Contributes To Global Warming, Professor Discovers. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 8, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/05/080507155305.htm
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