Global 'Warming'. The Associated Press today reports that:

An unusual spring storm dumped nearly 2 feet of wet snow on parts of the Midwest and Appalachians, snapping power lines, taking a bite out of baseball and rewriting the record books. * * * The two-day weekend storm brought temperatures as much as 25 degrees below the normal of around 60 as snow fell across parts of Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and western Pennsylvania, and south along the Appalachians as far as western North Carolina.

That same weekend, PBS broadcast the National Geographic Society's documentary/polemic "The One Degree Factor", part of a larger program, "Strange Days on Planet Earth", which decried natural processes, such as competition between earlier plant species and new arrivals!
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That NGS/PBS special backtracked a tad from the extravagant claims that planetary temperatures are rising starkly, since science does not support any such claim, but asserts that a rise of global temperature of only one degree Fahrenheit — not even Celsius, which is almost twice as large, but Fahrenheit — is having powerful, borderline catastrophic effects. What a bunch of bull!
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As yesterday's drop of 25 degrees below normal in large parts of the United States shows dramatically, the natural world has huge fluctuations in temperature, without catastrophic effects upon planetary animal or plant populations. Historically,

A careful examination of the climate record reveals that Europe experienced a prolonged warm period known as the Medieval Warm Period (hereafter referred to as MWP) between the years 600 and 1150, cooling of the climate between the years 1150 and 1460, a brief warming between the years 1460 and 1560, followed by dramatic cooling known as the Little Ice Age (hereafter referred to as LIA) between the years 1560 and 1850.

Figure 5 at that Suffolk County (New York) Community College website shows the variation in average temperatures was probably on the order of 3.5 degrees during the past 1,000 years. There are no actual human records for most of that period, of course. As Figure 1 shows, there weren't meaningful weather records of any kind in most of the world until 1850 and in some places not until 1945! Moreover, as I think TV comic Dennis Miller observed on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno recently, to believe in the reliability of temperature recordings from 100 years ago, you'd have to believe that thermometers today are no more accurate than those 100 years ago, so the entire case for "global warming" may rest upon the flimsy premise that thermometers 100 years ago were as accurate as those today.
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But even if there has been a rise in global temperatures, as an average, that does not mean that all parts of the planet are uniformly warmer. Some places may be warmer, others cooler. An average is a statistical leveling that can be distorted by anomalies. For instance, if you average Bill Gates' income with that of 1,000 ordinary retirees from the lower middle class, you will see that the group as a whole is very rich! That does not, however, mean that the great preponderance of people in that group are rich, or even comfortably above the poverty line.
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Similarly, if you have 3 days in early April that are much warmer than normal, but the rest of the month is a little cooler than normal, the average may be warmer because of those three days. That does not mean that the stress upon wildlife of the remainder of the month, which is colder, is eased.
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We need to remember that the bulk of terrestrial life, especially mammals and plants, is affected adversely much more by cold than by warmth. Mammals need to maintain a certain temperature or they will die. Plants are more active in warmer temperatures than colder, and even the thickest evergreen forest stops photosynthesizing if the temperature falls below about 45 degrees F.
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All the while the planet's temperature may have been wandering up and down by about three and a half degrees Fahrenheit from 900 A.D. to 1740, no human activity had anything to do with it. There were no industrial plants belching millions of tons of "greenhouse gases" to warm the planet; nor were people growing millions of square miles of extra forest to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as might cool things down. The Ice Ages likewise came and went without any human input whatsoever.
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It is arrogant to believe that tiny little people, who are scarcely even found on the great preponderance of this planet's surface — the oceans, deserts, high mountains, ice caps — could have any significant effect whatsoever upon planetary weather.
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Two feet of snow in the industrial heartland of America more than a month into spring is global warming? What kind of weather will we have if we stop or even reverse global warming? Don't worry about it, because people have no effect upon planetary temperature.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:08 PM