Despite supposed Global Warming, the past two winters have brought uncommon amounts of snow and cold to the U.S.

   Those who have touted CO2 as a cause of Global Warming are having increasingly hard times making their cases in light of recent winters that have brought record cold temperatures to the Northern Hemisphere and nearly unprecedented snow falls in many areas. At the same time Australia has finally broke a years-long drouth with floods and as I write this another typhoon is threatening the northern half of the nation.

  All of these events are catastrophic only in the light of recent climate history. They are in the range of normal weather events that have occurred for centuries. Climate variation does occur from year to year and those who claim CO2-related global warming are really having to hem and haw in attempts to make their cases sound plausible.

  A few years ago they claimed that they could see long-term trends with the rise of world temperatures being directly related to increasing CO2. Further reasearch revealed that it was rather the other way around. Global warming from other factors promoted the growth of vegetation, release of this gas from the sea and decaying plants and that higher CO2 levels followed, rather than preceded, the warming event.

  Then they changed their tactics and said that CO2 was causing short-term impacts as witnessed by the then current series of world-wide droughts, melting glaciers, etc. Recent winters have given the lie to that trend too as has more careful long work on determining temperatures from isotope data derived from sedimentary sequences. This data tracks very well with historic weather data and shows only normal climate variations unless one throws out conflicting information as being an anomalous weather spike.

  Climates do, and have, radically changed in the historic past.  People in Chicago now have reason to wonder if the Pleistocene Ice Sheets from 10,000 years ago are on their way back for another glacial period that might drop sea levels hundreds of feet and have 1,000 feet of ice on Lake Shore Drive.

  The next spade of headlines from the climate people may claim that the New  Ice Age is upon us, as they did in the 1970. The take away here is do not get too excited about short-term climate variations, and CO2 has nothing to do with it.

  For more information see an earlier post, “CO2 Does Not Cause Climate Change.” I also did a radio show on this topic on “Hovey’s Outdoor Adventures” which aired on WebTalkRadio.Net in early January. The easiest way to access the show is to go to my website, www.hoveysmith.com, and just below the banner you will see a live link to the radio show. When on the show page, click on the “archives” show tab at the top of the page to bring up this and other shows.