Fire Or Ice?

Even as global warming orthodoxy reaches the level of blanket, hardline dogma, and conservatives are told to sit down, shut up, and surrender to Al Gore's hysterical hoax or face political extinction, evidence continues to pile up that all this "climate change" chicken-little-ism is just a load of hot - or should I say "cold" - air:

Are the world's ice caps melting because of climate change, or are the reports just a lot of scare mongering by the advocates of the global warming theory?

Scare mongering appears to be the case, according to reports from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that reveal that almost all the allegedly “lost” ice has come back. A NOAA report shows that ice levels which had shrunk from 5 million square miles in January 2007 to just 1.5 million square miles in October, are almost back to their original levels.

Moreover, a February 18 report in the London Daily Express showed that there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than usual, challenging the global warming crusaders and buttressing arguments of skeptics who deny that the world is undergoing global warming.

It also seems that this is the coldest, snowiest winter in forty-two years - and not just in the places you would expect:

Around the world, vast areas have been buried under some of the heaviest snowfalls in decades. Central and southern [Red] China, the United States, and Canada were hit hard by snowstorms. In [Red] China, snowfall was so heavy that over 100,000 houses collapsed under the weight of snow.

Jerusalem, Damascus, Amman, and northern Saudi Arabia report the heaviest falls in years and below-zero temperatures. In Afghanistan, snow and freezing weather killed 120 people. Even Baghdad had a snowstorm, the first in the memory of most residents....

An ongoing record-long spell of cold weather in Vietnam's northern region, which started on January 14, has killed nearly 60,000 cattle, mainly bull and buffalo calves, local press reported Monday. By February 17, the spell had killed a total of 59,962 cattle in the region, including 7,349 in the Ha Giang province, 6,400 in Lao Cai, and 5,571 in Bac Can province, said Hoang Kim Giao, director of the Animal Husbandry Department under the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, according to the Pioneer newspaper. [emphases added]

Of course, short-term anecdotal evidence such as the aforequoted isn't necessarily any more conclusive than eco-zealots seizing upon summer heat waves to argue the reverse.  That's why legitimate climatologists are zeroing in on the real driver of our planet's climate:

Not every scientist is part of Al Gore's mythical "consensus." Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.

To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.

And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.

According to Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, climate change long predates the Industrial Age, is tied to solar fluctuations, and has a correlational track record that is indisputable.  And that history may be about to repeat itself:

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.

Historically, global cooling has been a lot more "havocous" than global warming.  The possible onset of another "Maunder Minimum" suggests that, to the miniscule extent that human-based activities can add to atmospheric greenhouse gases, we should be pumping out as much CO2 as we possibly can.

Tapping's colleagues agree:

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."

Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."

Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."

"Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had." 

Those are the scientific facts, assembled by real scientists without a Marxist-Leninist ax to grind.  But global warming orthodoxy is not about facts, but about blind faith.  To the Gorebot, human activity - hell, human existence - is the sole cause of global warming, everything - hot weather, cold weather, winter, summer, snow, rain, fog, haze, sleet, and whatever else a postal courier isn't supposed to allow to get in the way of his/her appointed rounds - is evidence of global warming, and global warming is the cause of any and every real and potential meteorological and climatological catastrophe.  Even the super-freeze-death-ray-shooting "hypercane" from The Day After Tomorrow.  And we must do everything possible, make every sacrifice, up to, including, and especially marching backwards economically and technologically into voluntary embrace of disease-ridden primitivism at the behest of rank pagan superstition, all under the benevolent reign of a crypto-communist dictatorship, in order to avoid the "disasters" Fat Albert insists are inevitable if we don't submit to his dark vision.

In a way, I suppose that gives the ex-vice president something in common with Neo.  In the Matrix the "messiah" of the human remnant battling the machines that destroyed their civilization adopts the catch phrase, "There is no spoon".  Al Gore's motto could be, "There is no sun."

If he did, he'd be a lot closer to the real "inconvenient truth" than he is now.