In December severe cold and snow made life miserable for global warming alarmists gathered for the climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Yes, children of American public education, Denmark is part of Scandinavia as properly defined not only geographically but also politically.) Kind of tough whipping up much fear of global warming under those conditions.
But the region’s weather woes didn’t end when the thousands of conference delegates flew away in their carbon dioxide-spewing jets (many of them private).
The winter of 2009-2010 has turned out to be Scandinavia’s coldest in 15 years, with below-freezing temperatures almost constantly since December. And that’s caused a problem.
The big news on March 5 was that 26 ships were stuck in ice, amid huge icebergs, in the Baltic Sea. One more—a ferry carrying nearly 1,000 people—had just been broken free with the help of icebreakers.
AOL reporter Lauren Frayer explained, “Thick ice annually forms on the northern half of the Baltic, but . . . with temperatures below freezing consistently since December, . . . the ice has spread farther south. Swedish maritime authorities are running ice-breaking vessels that use hammers to slice through the icy crust and clear channels. But even so, gale force winds have swept massive chunks of ice into a huge barrier off Sweden’s coast, ensnaring unsuspecting vessels.”
The cold winds interfered with rescue efforts. “As soon as they break the ice, it freezes over again,” sea rescue spokesman Peter Lindquist explained.
With some important exceptions, Scandinavians have been among the most vocal of alarmists about alleged dangerous manmade global warming. Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and economist, doesn’t contest scientists’ claims of manmade warming, but his analyses lead him to believe stifled economic growth caused by drastic policies to fight global warming will do more harm than the warming itself. And Norwegian sea level expert Nils-Axel Moerner has obliterated arguments that sea level rise has accelerated and is a serious threat.
But now Old Man Winter has blown in with a vengeance on Scandinavia. One wonders whether many of the rank and file there might be wishing they had some global warming after all!
You can bet the farm that if this had been the warmest Scandinavian winter in 15 years, alarmists like Al Gore and James Hansen would trumpet it up as more “proof” of global warming.
But it’s not the warmest. It’s the coldest.
If I were like Gore and Hansen, I would claim this is evidence against global warming.
But I’m not. I know—as global warming alarmists now find themselves having to say again and again—that a few months, or even a year or two, don’t establish a trend.
So I won’t say “I told you so.” I’ll just let them ponder for a while: Were they honest when they pointed to heat waves here and there (like the massive one in Europe in the summer of 2003) as sure proof of manmade warming?
