NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

There has been some press recently to the effect that global warming is over and global cooling has begun. Blizzards and ice storms have a way of bringing out bogus stories like that, but they seem to appear mainly in conservative venues.

A recent story by Deroy Murdock on Scripps News Service was picked up by several out-of-town papers, and one version was sent to Vic and me by a reader. Murdock’s claim that “global cooling is here” is based on the observation that 1998 was the hottest year on record and temperatures haven’t climbed that high in the 10 years since then. This is supposed to prove that there is no global warming.

Let’s look at the source. Deroy Murdock is a Media Fellow with the conservative Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. The Hoover Institute receives a lot of their funding from the oil and auto industries, which have vested interests in disproving global warming. Conservative think tanks such as the Hoover Institute try to cast doubt on good research science. They find the one scientist in a thousand who disagrees with the majority opinion, and they sell this doubt.

We’re here to set the record straight. The decade of 1998-2007 was the hottest decade ever recorded. Recent years have been cooler than 1998 in part because our solar system is currently near the low point of a sunspot cycle.

This cycle is known to cause warming and cooling here on earth. Global warming advocates don’t deny the existence of this cycle, or Pacific Ocean current cycles, or the random cooling effect of volcanoes that spew debris in the air. These things are why global warming is an irregular process instead of a steady progression.

Murdock conveniently misses the significance of the fact that sunspots and ocean currents are cyclic. Global warming theory doesn’t predict the absence of these cycles, only that a long-term warming trend will be found superimposed on these short-term cycles. Scientists are predicting that the planet will really start to warm in 2010 once La Nina and this current sunspot lull are over.

In his article, Murdock pointed out that an ice storm left New Englanders without power in December and that it snowed in New Orleans, Malibu and Las Vegas. He chose to present that as evidence of global cooling. He obviously doesn’t understand the difference between climate and weather. Climate is a long-term phenomenon, while weather is local and temporal.

Look around the globe. Australia is suffering from heat waves and wildfires right now. Temperatures hit 114 degrees in Adelaide on Jan. 28, and reached a record breaking 116 degrees in Melbourne on Feb. 4. At least 37 people died from the worst heat wave there in 150 years. These record-breaking temperatures have fueled devastating wildfires throughout southeastern Australia that have killed at least 170 people as of press time.

If the planet is cooling, then why did the Arctic ice pack melt enough to open the fabled Northwest Passage in 2007, which, by the way, was the second warmest year on record? Anecdotes that show that one place was colder than usual, or that glaciers are growing someplace, give an unrealistic impression of what is happening on Earth. Overall, the planet is getting warmer. We have peer-reviewed science in reputable publications like “Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” to back up this point of view.

For example, a number of articles in late January reported that the collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica was imminent.

The rotation of the earth on its axis will shift and gravitational forces will also shift, all of which will cause ocean levels to rise disproportionately in the Northern Hemisphere, up to 20 feet. We need to pay attention to such things because what happens in the Antarctic and Greenland could affect us here in coastal Huntington Beach.

We can’t deny global warming. We’ve been burning fossil fuels for more than 100 years, pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It took millions and millions of years to sequester that carbon, but it got released in just a century.

The molecular structure of carbon dioxide makes it a greenhouse gas that traps heat. That’s a fact. The more of it that is in the atmosphere, the hotter the planet will get. That too is a fact. Scientists have predicted the extreme droughts, wildfires and severe storms that we’re already seeing. Think of it as global weirding.

Maybe it’s more comforting to disbelieve global warming than act to prevent it. But we really need to take global climate change seriously and do everything that we can to reduce and offset our carbon footprint.

In our columns, Vic and I mention many things that we all can do, such as reducing consumption, conserving gas and electricity, buying carbon credits, planting trees, eating less meat, growing our own food, and buying locally produced and grown items. Do what you can, while you can, because time is running out.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].