Forecasting global warming, apparently, isn’t an exact science:

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Look. I don’t pretend to know what the hell is going on with the environment. (Last summer seemed pretty damned hot to me!) But it seems that before we start calling for all kinds of government intrusion into the affairs of business (banning light bulbs? really?), we had better be damned sure what’s going on is as dire as Al Gore thinks it is.

A movie with a politician giving a glorified PowerPoint presentation is not a legitimate reason to react as if the sky is falling.

Just a thought.

Filed under: Daily Rant