Global Warming - Or Global Freezing...

Although most of my political opinions are pretty distant from American Conservatism, I was intrigued by a post on Jenn of the Jungle's blog over at Screw Liberals.

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling. Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming.

Now I'm not entirely sure what qualifications the journalists over at infotech site Daily Tech have to comment on a global phenomenon like global warming - but I will admit, the article initially impressed me.

While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Now although I'm a firm believer in global warming and man's devastating impact on the climate, I have bitched about how closed minded conservatives are and therefore, it would be very hypocritical to dismiss this evidence just because it doesn't agree with my predetermined opinion regarding climate change.

So yesterday, I very nearly abandoned my position on global warming and adopted the conservative consensus that mankind has nothing to do with rising world temperatures.

However, before I changed my mind - I peeked into the data Daily Tech had supplied. And you know what? It doesn't add up.

Because while the article is entirely accurate - the global temperature over the last year has plummeted by an astonishing amount - in the 'big picture' of global temperature measured across the entire last century, it's just a drop in the ocean.

In fact, the Daily Tech writers must have realised that, since their impressive looking graph only shows world temperatures back as far as 1988.

According to this graph, yes - the drop in temperature looks alarming (and would seem to disprove any notion of global warming.)

However, if you compare that chart - only going back as far as '88 - to a chart measuring global temperatures right back to the 1860s, the article's credibility vanishes like a melted iceberg.

When you look at the big picture, it's alarming. You can see that the world's temperature has steadily increased year on year, directly in relation to man's industrialisation and the burning of fossil fuels.

Sure, there are peaks and troughs. After the Second World War, there was an almost 40 year drop in world temperatures (which caused many people to think that the globe was actually cooling.) However, that drop soon reversed and then what happened? The temperatures actually climbed higher than before the 1940s - and steadily continued going up.

Some people suggest the rapid drop in the world's temperature after 1945 might have had something to do with the two nuclear bombs we dropped in Japan. Nuclear winter, anybody?

In any event, the authors of the Daily Tech article and the conservatives in general might celebrate a one year dip in global temperature - but it's a hollow victory.

The fact is, the world's temperature has increased dramatically since mankind started churning out the greenhouse gases. We might have occasional cool spells now and then - but they're getting rarer and less cool as time goes on.

Conservatives who tout the Daily Tech article as 'proof' that global warming does not exist are lying to themselves. By using an utterly misleading set of statistics, the conservative regime are doing what they always do - finding data to match their conclusion, instead of making their conclusion match the data.