Is It Cold, or Is It Just Me

After several years of warmer than average winters, this year winter has been distinctly cooler than normal here in Lee's Summit, and I for one am ready to see it come to an end. As I write this, the local weather forecasters are predicting yet another round of snow.

The truth is the Midwest isn't the only area of the country suffering from a cooler than normal winter, according to the U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) many American cities and towns have suffered from record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average." In the same report the NCDC reported that snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The Ice that was supposed to have disappeared from the Northern Ice Cap is back and it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year according to Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa.

So it appears that the entire Northern Hemisphere is suddenly in the deep freeze so surely if the Global Warming crowd is correct then the Southern Hemisphere should be just burning up, right? Wrong, both Argentina, and Brazil had much colder than normal winters this year. On November 15 of last year, springtime in Argentina, Buenos Aires recorded the coldest temperature in 90 years, roughly just 36 degrees Fahrenheit.

What we should draw from this, is that maybe we don't know all that we think we do when it comes to weather. Whether or not man can actually cause an increase in Global Warming is still open to debate, but one factor in our weather is beyond dispute, even by the most hardened scientists and meteorologists. That undisputable factor is that our Sun or specifically the sunlight we receive from it is and always has been the main driver of the earth's weather.

According to the Canada's National Post, Kenneth Tapping of Canada's National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

Professor Tapping maintains that the last time the sun was this inactive; the Earth suffered what is known as the "Little Ice Age". The Little Ice Age lasted nearly five centuries and just ended in the 1850's. During that period crops repeatedly failed from killer frosts and drought, sparking famine, plague and war. Imagine the effect on today's economy if Boston and New York Harbors froze solid as they did as recently as in the winter of 1779/1780.

If Professor Tapping is correct and we are in for an another "Little Ice Age" will Al Gore and the environmentalists who maintain that mankind has increased Earth's temperature through increased pollution tell us to buy and drive our SUVs, remove our catalytic converters and cut down the nation's forests so we can soften the blow of the new "Little Ice Age" on mankind. No, I doubt they are really that interested in looking after our best interests even if mankind did have the power to affect the earth's weather. Instead they would claim that we need to wait for more data to be collected before we make a rash decision, either that or they will find some way of making the decrease in solar radiation a result of man polluting the earth atmosphere.

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