Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, January 07, 2008
'Something other than CO2 and CO2-related feedbacks ... are playing a large role in the region's recent temperature trends."
Read that again and keep in mind the "the region" being referred to is the Arctic. The plain meaning is that the warming in the Arctic is not only -- or even mostly -- man-made. It is not the result of carbon emissions, no matter how often we have been warned that this past summer's melt was unprecedented and a foreboding harbinger of a coming global meltdown.
In the most recent issue of Nature -- a prestigious scientific journal that in the past has shown a decided hostility to studies that contradict the climate change hysteria -- Rune Graversen and others from the meteorology department at Stockholm University postulate that the recent, allegedly dangerous Arctic thaw is far from unique in history. Rather than being the result of man-made climate change, they argue, the warming northern seas and tundra mainly result from atmospheric energy transfers from southern latitudes to northern.
In other words, tropical storms and atmospheric currents travelling from the tropics to the Arctic have shifted a large amount of heat from equatorial regions to the North.
In addition to being natural, this is also a cyclical phenomenon. It has happened before and will happen again. Big melts up north very likely occurred well before industrialization and will almost certainly recur periodically even if we cork all our factory stacks and shut off all our car engines. Maybe Arctic warming is just something the Earth does occasionally to let off steam in the tropics.
Are man-made emissions magnifying the warming? The Swedes think they may be, but their effect pales next to that of nature's own south-to-north heat conveyor.
Remember, too, amidst all the headlines about catastrophic Arctic warming, there are reliable satellite images of Arctic ice coverage going back only to 1979 and -- at least in the Western hemisphere -- reliable surface and air observations going back to just 1972. So-called "record" melting is only a record compared to the past 30 or 40 years.
Then there was the news in early December that Icelandic and Norwegian scientists had determined an ancient polar bear jawbone they had discovered in 2004 was 110,000 to 130,000 years old.
What has that got to do with global warming? Only that it proves Ursus maritimus was a separate species before the Eeemian interglacial period. The Eeemian was a much warmer period than our own Holocene period, yet the big white predators managed to survive it without endangered species protection or the hand-wringing of environmentalists.
The Rest Here: http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=220210