OPINION:
Ms. Nature may be giving global warming the cold shoulder. It’s only September, but there are signs that the approaching winter will be a repeat of last year’s frigid season. Yankees who likely face the worst of it won’t be pleased. Neither will President Obama, who would spin his wheels trying to persuade Americans that the effects of man-made carbon dioxide, or humanity’s “carbon footprint” as environmental extremists call it, will trigger a global catastrophe.
The Farmer’s Almanac, a venerable publication with a better reputation for reliability than the global-warming scientists, predicts with a combination of folklore and homespun long-range weather predictions that it will be “winter deja vu” all over again. The almanac warns of “temperatures with unseasonably cold conditions over the Atlantic Seaboard, eastern portions of the Great Lakes, and the lower peninsula of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, most of the Tennessee and Mississippi Valley, as well as much of the Gulf Coast. New Englanders will once again experience a very frigid (shivery) winter.” Snowier -than-normal conditions will persist along the northern tier of states and the Midwest and Pacific Northwest can expect milder temperatures. This is not the scary stuff the president has been peddling.
Mr. Obama spent several days in Alaska earlier this month lamenting the melting of the Exit Glacier near Seward, arguing that the shrinkage is the work of evil fossil fuels. The nearby Arctic ice sheet is doing the opposite — freezing wider and thicker. The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., calculates that even though the Arctic ice sheet is still smaller than the long-term average, at 2.16 million square miles, the ice has expanded by 350,000 square miles since 2012. That’s 30 percent larger than the size of Texas, If climate change is melting Alaska’s glaciers, it is having the curiously opposite effect on the Arctic Ocean. This raises embarrassing questions about what the president calls “settled science.”
Hurricanes, the most destructive weather of all, aren’t measuring up to the climate-change hype, either. The journal Nature Geoscience cites a study by scientists at Colorado State University, who suggest that weather and current patterns in the Atlantic Ocean indicate a quieter period of hurricane activity. Nine years have come and gone since a storm of Category 3, or worse, has lashed the Gulf or East coasts. Chicago has suffered a record number of tornadoes this year, but across the country, the National Weather Service puts the number of twisters below average for the fourth year in a row.
Local weather can’t be equated with long-term effects of climate, but it has been more than 18 years since the temperature of the planet has risen, though carbon dioxide, the climate scientists’ favorite villain, has climbed relentlessly. Everyone agrees that the climate changes — it always has and always will — but skeptics abound that the globe is warming.
The president cries climate change with the fervor of the little the boy who cried wolf. But where’s the wolf? When Google identified in June the issues most important to Americans, climate change was No. 8 of 10. Based on forecasts of an approaching frigid winter, there’s more to fear from the icy grip of nature than the likelihood that carbon dioxide will toast us all.
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