Instinctive responses to global warming/cooling vary by region

It is snowing again in the U.S. northeast, where we are having a winter more evocative of my New England childhood in the 1960s. No roofs are spared the ominous ice dams, and you can hardly see over the snowbanks. Much of the United States has experienced a similiarly rough winter. What happened to global warming?

Well, once again, ask the Australians. They seem to be living in the equivalent of Death Valley, California, with temperatures in Melbourne and Adelaide ranging from 109 to 114 degrees Fahrenheit, amid a 12-year-long drought. I hiked in Badwater, Death Valley this year where it was 109 F., and neither the landscape nor the temperature seemed to belong on Planet Earth.

The point is that weather is not climate, and that forming an opinion about global warming versus cooling based on the weather outside, however tempting, is short-sighted.

At any given moment you can find opposite representative examples of weather extremes in the world, such as Australia versus the top of Mount Washington (where Summer is really summery, and winter is really wintry).

The National Academies of Science and the Royal Society lean strongly toward global warming, as in forming a scientific consensus that unchecked manmade greenhouse gases can trigger dangerous feedback mechanisms.

As the AccuWeather global warming blog points out, a recent study indicates tht Antartica has indeed been warming during the last 50 years.

Finally, 2008 turned out to have been about the ninth warmest year globally since 1880.

When I'll consider changing my mind about "global cooling"

One more word about global cooling and I'll clam up about it.

Until the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences come forward and say, "cool it folks (no pun intended), global warming is over, and actually, you better get your long underwear on," I'm not going to budge my position on global warming one iota (that manmade greenhouse gases pose a threat to trigger feedback mechanisms, such as vast methane releases, which will endanger civilization).

I listen to scientists, not Fox News bloggers.

A few more points about global cooling

Here are a few more points about "global cooling" and whether global heating has "stopped," some anecdotal and another involving a reference to a more technical climactic discussion.

The take-away point is that weather is "noisy," it jumps around from one extreme to another in different regions of the world, and that you cannot make long-term climate predictions based on local regional observations.

It seems like the global-cooling advocates are cherry picking their data, and making the common mistake suggested by the latter paragraph.

For example, it is very cold in New England right now given the time of year. A hike on Mt. Washington right now is only for highly experienced and equipped winter explorers; it's killer cold!

However, just last week, I looked out my window and mosquitoes were swarming around my (uncleaned) gutters where water had pooled. It is unheard of in this region to still have mosquitoes in the winter (I grew up in this area), as we have the last several years. It was also 70 degrees Fahrenheit at night just a week ago, and I am 35 miles north of Boston, Massachusetts.

The point is that these weather extremes are caused by dominant air masses originating from Canada (when it's cold) and the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico otherwise, which are in turn affected by the position of the jet stream.
You cannot come to global cooling or heating conclusions based on these short-term differences. However, the long-term changes I have observed in New England, along with all of the other accumulated evidence (e.g., the melting in Greenland and of the North Pole sea ice; the substantial glacier melting in the Alps), have lead me to strongly embrace the theory of a global aggregate temperature increase.

The site realclimate.org says it better than me here:

"The climate system has enormous amounts of variability on day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year and decade-to-decade periods. Much of this variability (once you account for the diurnal cycle and the seasons) is apparently chaotic and unrelated to any external factor - it is the weather."

Hey wait, the earth is cooling...

I have heard a few arguments for global cooling of late.

This is a huge issue because, for example, President Obama may propose a far-reaching cap-and-trade system for CO2. While any opposing theory deserves consideration, "global cooling" discussions should not become another excuse for inertia unless the evidence is extremely strong and a scientific consensus forms around it, because the stakes are too high for future generations.

First, all short-term anecdotal evidence, such as glaciation in Alaska, should be thrown out, because one or two years is just a nanosecond in geological time.

You can just as easily find anecdotal evidence for continued warming in other regions.
Tell the Australians that their continent is "cooling off," or the people in southern California or Arizona, whose forested regions are often on fire. There are a lot of villages in Alaska where the permafrost is melting, causing their abandonment.
I've visited a glacier in Switzerland for the last 15 years (it has lost 30 percent of its mass since the 1970s), and it added snow last year, but that doesn't mean that "phew, global warming must be over."

"Global weirding" I've heard is a much better term for what's happening.

In addition, weather patterns are heavily affected by the growth of algae in the seas (algae is an important CO2 sink, and is critical for the formation of reflective clouds because it generates the cloud-seeding precursor chemical dimethyl sulfide).
The upper layer of the oceans has warmed over the decades, creating vast "deserts" where algae plumes used to flourish. Some scientists have concluded that runaway global heating can occur partly because of this massive algae destruction. See James Lovelock's "The Revenge Of Gaia."