Via instapundit I saw this post on The New York Times Dot Earth blog entitled "A Cooler Year on a Warming Planet." Included are two graphs, the first of which looks like this:
This reminds me of a point raised in the book The Satanic Gases that, to the extent global warming is occurring, much of this is taking place in some of the planet's coldest places such as Siberia. Indeed, rather than the hot places becoming even hotter we can see that the warming effect is not at all uniform. The U.S., for example, has warmed either between 0 and .2 degrees Celsius or .2 to .6 degrees Celsius. Parts of Brazil have even cooled.
It doesn't exactly strike me as stuff that makes you climb up on the ledge and contemplate ending it all.
Here's the second graph:
This looks pretty scary until you realize that since 1880 the amount of warming that has taken place is about eight-tenths of one degree Celsius. When you measure global warming in literally fractions of a degree you need to also consider how much the technology for measuring temperature has changed. For example, if a weather station originally built in the country experienced a large degree of urbanization around it it stands to reason that its temperature measures could be impacted by the heat island effect alone. Satellites also may give us more accurate readings than what was available about 110 years ago. The point is that the readings between now and then may not be a totally apples to apples comparison.
Even if the readings are absolutely correct, meanwhile, it needs to be reiterated that we are talking about mere fractions of a degree. Is this really sufficient cause to turn our economy upside down and impose substantial new costs?
As one commenter on the blog piece noted, is it a coincidence that the remedy to global warming happens to dovetail nicely with much of the left's economic agenda? In fact, there are a number of good comments made that might be worth checking out.
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