Global warming, or the Ice Age cometh?

A few weeks back I noted in my column that when times get tough, Americans will stop worrying about whether polar bears have enough ice and start asking whether those white, furry critters are edible.

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The squirming may commence sooner than later.  Apparently Mother Nature hasn't been influenced by the “we're-all-going-to-fry” doomsayers.  According to a column published this week in Canada's National Post:

    * Snow cover over North America, much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966;
    * The average temperature in January was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average;
    * China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century;
    * The Artic Sea ice that had melted to its lowest levels on record . . . is back and, according to the Canadian Ice Service, “is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year;”
    * Respected scientists from Canada and Russia are now predicting a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The author of the National Post column, Lorne Gunter, noted, “It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.  But if environmentalists and environmental reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmists are being a tad premature.”

~ from A Total Crock of Doo-Doo! ~



LAST month Australians endured our coldest June since 1950. Imagine that; all those trillions of tonnes of evil carbon we've horked up into the atmosphere over six decades of rampant industrialisation, and we're still getting the same icy weather we got during the Cold War.

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Other defining features of British life - screaming, inaccurate nonsense from the Guardian, for example - will never be farewelled. Cue wet Wimbledon, the coldest day for Test match cricket (7.4C) in English history, and this BBC online headline: "Where has the UK's summer gone?"

Maybe it migrated to Australia, like Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the American LSD enthusiast and manufacturer.

Possibly influenced by his product, Owsley moved to outback Queensland about twenty years ago, reportedly convinced that imminent global warming would cause - in the tradition of warm meaning cold - the whole Northern Hemisphere to be covered with ice.

~ from Fear of a global 'coldening' ~