Global warming or global icing

The News Virginian / News Virginian
Published: April 15, 2008

Impressively reducing the likelihood of inaccuracy in their prognostications, scientists as a collective have amended previous hysteria to declare with reasonable certainty that either the Earth will warm or it will cool. So is proved the verity of a cliche, slightly amended: The more scientists change, the more they stay the same.

Cloaked in the shadows of killer storm clouds that never formed, scientists, having spent recent years crying from rooftops about global warming's impending horrors, now are being compelled to take note of pesky details, wont as they are, the little devils, to stray from Al Gore's meticulously drawn party lines.

To wit: Average temperatures in the U.S. dipped slightly in January compared to averages from the same month in the previous century. Ice storms have crippled Canada and China, cutting off electricity in some places for weeks. Snow cover over large swaths of the world is at its highest since 1966. Arctic ice, which we've long been told is on the verge of forming into a vast polar fishing pond, is 4 to 8 inches thicker in some places than it was a year ago.

This draws a studied, but concise response from forecasters of fiery doom: Oh.

Of course, there's more, but nothing sufficient to cease wonderment over whether all the world's scientific intellects have not been overexposed to the sun, unrestrained as it is by the onion skin formerly known as ozone layer.

The gang at Princeton University's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory tells us that the oceans, affected like scotch with the requisite addition of the rocks, are being chilled by ice melt, which in turn is halting the dispatch of warm water from the equator to the north. The predicted result- Not the oceans' invasion of southern Florida and western California, for which so many had hoped, but another Ice Age. Other scientists agree about the looming necessity of layering, or some other measures against the cold, but offer the kind of variably illuminating rationale that melts brain cells.

Despite the brightening of prospects for the preservation of our wayward coastal states, there is good news, at least for New Zealand and Australia. The practical defeat of the theory of global warming would translate to the endurance of beer as now they know it. An especially alarming study by New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research found that global warming would reduce malting barley yields, driving up prices and perhaps forcing some breweries out of business.

Naturally, scientists advise against purchasing parkas in anticipation of the coming chill. And stockpiling beer still might be a prudent option. One frosty winter, after all, does not add up to a trend.

What it does demonstrate, in conjunction with the widespread difference on climate change among reasonable scientific minds, is that some restraint might be in order on a subject about which environmentalists decidedly prefer panic. That group and others under their sway might begin by ending the wearisome practice of declaring as anathema all those who dare to wonder whether global warming is real.

In the meantime, the rest of us might be better served if some among the weather prophets invested their energies in more immediate and yet equally daunting challenges, such as telling us with a modicum of certainty whether it will rain tomorrow.