Global Cooling

2006 isn't quite over yet but the experts are already announcing that it will be the sixth warmest year on record. Of course they try to make out that it's all doom and gloom- melting ice caps, rising sea levels, flood, famine, storms, dogs and cats living together. You get the picture.

What the report actually seems to miss though is that while 2006 was quite a warm year, the warmest years on record are 1998 and 2005. So what we're really looking at here is not evidence of global warming, but global cooling. It's actually cooler than it was nearly 10 years ago.

And the Belfast Telegraph reports that for the month of November, 12 were warmer than the month we've just had over the past 100 years.

Time to celebrate? Or worry about an impending ice age?

/snark

Just a little food for thought- if you look at these graphs you'll see that the current fossil fuel burning, cow raising, SUV driving, human intervention-caused global warming temperatures are similar to the Medieval Warm Period of about a thousand years ago. You'll also note that it was followed by a period called the Little Ice Age; since that time the graphs have been pretty much trending upwards. You'll also see a curious mirroring of this in the graphs for solar output over the same period. Oddly enough there was a period of high output a thousand years ago during the pre-industrial Medieval Warm Period just as there is now. In fact there's been a quite low period of solar activity over the past few hundred years that just so happens to coincide with the accurate, scientific recording of temperature- one might think that the recovery from the Maunder Minimum might suggest that it was that period which was the anomaly and not the current warmer temperatures we're experiencing.