Global Warming?

Global warming (or "climate change" as is now the politically correct way of putting it) has been a hot-button topic for at least a decade or so, and there are passionate people on both sides of the issue.  While the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reached the conclusion that global warming is occurring and is caused by humans, there are thousands of climate scientists who disagree. I also have yet to see any of the predictions by the global warming advocates come true in the last several years.  Global temperatures have actually been decreasing in the last eight years, and we haven't seen the horrible weather they were expecting.  Remember when Hurricane Katrina devistated the American Gulf coast?  That was a record-breaking year for hurricanes, and was being touted as the first of many such years. Yet the years since then have had unusually low activity, completely against the "experts'" predictions.

Now we have the super-cold temperatures hitting the US over the last week or so.  We're seeing low temperatures not recorded in decades.  And today I read an article where an author of the IPCC's report said that this weather is the beginning of a 30-year cold snap, sort of a mini-ice age.  Now this climatologist says that this is merely a "blip" in "man-made global warming", but I have to wonder.  A year or two ago I doubt any global warming supporters would have given any credence to a decades-long significant decrease in temperatures.  And if any remembers back in the 1970s the climatologists were raising heck about global cooling!  I can certainly feel the cold in my own house, where the outside temperatures are about 20-30 degrees F below normal!

Frankly, I don't think any of the climate models are accurate long-term.  We're making business and government policies based on predictions of what weather will be like 50 years from now.  Yet if you watch any weather report, there is only limited accuracy even just a week out!  We're lucky to get a real prediction a few days ahead of time, let alone being able to tell the exact weather several weeks out.  Yet these same people say they can tell what the climate will be like when I have grandkids.

Let's see.  Climatologists said we were in danger of a full-blown ice age 30 years ago.  Ten years ago they said that we were in runaway warming of the Earth with catastrophic consequences.  Now those same people say we're going to have a period of global cooling.  Hmmmm.  I wonder if they actually do know what they're talking about?