More Global Warming Busts

The global warming busts are coming fast and furious nowadays!

The U.K. Daily Mail posts an article (hat tip: Stephen Klinck) illustrating how many countries have recently experienced record cold or snowfall.  Some excerpts:

Across much of the northern hemisphere, from Greece and Iran to China and Japan, they have been suffering their worst snowfalls for decades.

Similarly freakish amounts of snow have been falling over much of the northern United States, from Ohio to the Pacific coast, where in parts of the state of Washington up to 200in of snow have fallen in the past fortnight.

In China - the only example to have attracted major coverage in Britain - the worst snow for 50years triggered an unprecedented state of emergency.  Large parts of the country have been paralysed, as rail and road transport ground to a standstill.

In Afghanistan, freezing weather and the worst snow for 30 years have killed more than 900 people.

In neighbouring Tajikistan, according to aid agencies, the coldest winter for 50 years, along with soaring food prices and a massive energy crisis, threatens a "humanitarian catastrophe".

In Greece and Turkey, where temperatures dropped as low as minus 31 degrees Celsius, hundreds of villages have been cut off by blizzards and drifting snow.

In Iran, following heavy snowfalls last month, its eastern desert regions - normally still hot at this time of year - have seen their first snow in living memory.

In Saudi Arabia last month, people were amazed by the first snow most had ever seen.

On the Pacific coast of Japan last week, heavy falls of snow injured more than 50.

Following last year's freak snowfalls in such southern cities as Buenos Aires and Sydney, satellite observations from the other end of the world have this winter shown ice cover round the Antarctic at easily its greatest extent for this time of year since data began in 1979, 30per cent above average.

So far, the leading advocates of the global warming thesis have remained fairly quiet about the 2008 freeze, although some may explain that "freak weather events" such as we are now witnessing are just what we should expect to see as Planet Earth hots up - even if this produces the paradox that warming may sometimes lead to cooling.

To the millions of people whose lives have been seriously disrupted by this year's freeze, the concept of global warming must seem awfully remote.

Check out the link to see some really cool pictures of ice formations (caused by global warming, no doubt).

Conservative Thoughts also rounds up a couple great examples:

January 2008 global temperatures were .75°C cooler than they were in January 2007. That is the single largest annual drop in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) data set, which goes back over 200 years.

Also, the Artic sea ice has grown more than the average for the last three years, by 2 million square kilometers. In addition, the thickness of the ice is increasing in some areas, by about 10 to 20 centimeters, over last year.

As the Weekly Standard says, January was wicked cold.

But, wait, isn't global warming still the scientific consensus??

Even the venerable 'consensus' argument can be busted, and I've blogged about that more than once.  Here's another example.  The scientific consensus is that the Milky Way Galaxy is 6,000 light years thick.  It took a team at the University of Sydney just a couple hours and some basic Internet research to blow that consensus out of the water - it is actually more like 12,000 light years thick.  The consensus was off by 100%!

In this age where words are constantly being redefined, consensus appears to no longer mean 'majority of opinion', but rather something along the lines of 'we want you to think we know what we're talking about even though we don't have any hard evidence or fact'.

There's my two cents.