THE LATEST ANSWERS TO 'GLOBAL COOLING' SKEPTICS
By Climatologist Cliff Harris
I’ve received numerous letters, phone calls
and e-mails lately asking me to give my reasons for believing that our
planet has cooled off a bit in the past decade. Why don’t I agree with the
an AP news reports claiming the ‘opposite’ position that "global warming
continues to bake the Earth." Well, according to the U.S. National Climate Data Center in Asheville,
North Carolina, in the 11 years since the last warm cycle peaked in 1998,
global temperatures have already dropped 0.6 degrees Celsius, or a bit more
than a full degree Fahrenheit. Half of that cooling has occurred since early
2007 when our Sun went ‘silent.’ Recently, parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including the central U.S.,
observed one of the coolest summers since the end of the so-called ‘Little
Ice Age’ in 1850. October of 2009 was the third coldest since at least 1895 in the U.S.,
more than 4 degrees below normal. For Kansas and Oklahoma, it was the most
frigid October in recorded history dating back to the Civil War Days. As of this mid-November writing, the 2009 harvest season in the nation’s
midsection has been one of the latest on record. Only half of the 2009 corn
crop was "in the bins." The rest of the crop was still "trapped in the
fields of mud and slime" on November 19. All-time record snows were gauged in parts of Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon,
Montana and Colorado during October of 2009. One station west of Cheyenne,
Wyoming was buried by more than FOUR FEET of the white stuff just before
Halloween, a nasty ‘trick’ indeed from Ma Nature. Locally, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, we observed our coldest morning for so
early in the season since at least 1895 with a bone-chilling 15 degrees on
Columbus Day, October 12. Our birdbath froze solid! Late-season gardens were
‘blackened’ by the week of hard freezes between October 7-14, likewise the
most frigid early autumn week on record. Record low maximum readings near 40
degrees, more typical of the same period in November, were observed on
November 10, 11 and 12. Leaves turned color overnight! Elsewhere around the world during October, there were record early season
snows in China, Japan and Norway. In the Southern Hemisphere, New Zealand
observed record cold readings for early spring and the heaviest late-season
snows on record, more than THREE FEET in places. In Europe, October of 2009 was the coldest such period on record in
Germany, Denmark and northeastern France, where ‘rare’ October snowflakes
were reported.
