IT'S NOT AS HOT AS YOU THINK
by Harold Hough

Late June and early July were as welcome to the global warming community as a visit by their high priest Al Gore. Hundreds of record highs were recorded in the Midwest and East and the environmentalists who were talking about manmade climate change a few months ago were once again shouting "Global Warming."

But, was the world really that hot? While the East was sweltering, Tucson Arizona experienced one of the coolest Fourth of Julys on record. Meanwhile, those Himalayan glaciers that were shrinking a few years ago are now growing.

All this happened as a new study came out that scientifically proved that the Middle Ages and Roman times were actually warmer than today, not colder. The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, looked at tree rings in Lapland, Finland. These "sub-fossil pine trees," allowed scientists to look at temperature variations going back to 138 BC.

What they discovered wasn't what global warming advocates wanted to hear. "We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," said Dr. Esper. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today's climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods."

The UK Register noted, "Americans sweltering in the recent record-breaking heatwave may not believe it - but it seems that our ancestors suffered through much hotter summers in times gone by, several of them within the last 2,000 years. A new study measuring temperatures over the past two millennia has concluded that in fact the temperatures seen in the last decade are far from being the hottest in history."
What caused the cooling? According to the team, it's the changing distance from the sun.

It will be interesting to see how the Global Warming Community will handle this. In their analysis, the team was critical of the IPCC, which has specialized in alarmist predictions on global temperatures. The team noted, "Our results suggest that the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia." In "scientist talk," that is saying, "The IPCC messed up."

Unfortunately, we will hear more global warming alarm in the next couple of years as we head into a period of increased solar activity. An international team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) used more than a century of weather observations and three powerful computer models to show that if the total energy that reaches Earth from the Sun varies by only 0.1 percent across the approximately 11-year solar cycle, it can drive major changes in weather patterns on Earth.

The slight increase in solar energy during the peak production of sunspots is absorbed by stratospheric ozone. The energy warms the air in the stratosphere over the tropics, where sunlight is most intense, while also stimulating the production of additional ozone there that absorbs even more solar energy.
It so happens that 2013 should see a larger number of sunspots. That means that more hot weather can be expected and more wails from the global warming community. And, no matter who wins the election in November, we know that there will be more political pressure to curtail the mining of coal and other fossil fuels.