Maybe all that warming is in Al Gore’s head?

While record cold has been recorded early in this 2009- 2010 winter season, that is no reason to think it will continue. At least according to Al Gore. He’s sure the heat will continue! I’m writing this article after just writing another large check to the electric company.  My heating bills have been also at record highs this year. So, what’s going on Al? Are there perhaps other forces at work that you did not account for in your book?

It is interesting to note also Al, that according to new evidence, regular wobbles in the Earth’s tilt have been largely responsible for the global warming episodes that interspersed prehistoric ice ages. This finding is the recent result of research led by Russell Drysdale of the University of Newcastle that has been able to accurately date the end of the penultimate ice age for the first time.

The new dates, which appeared in the August 2009 edition of Science, show the end of the second last ice age occurring 141,000 years ago, thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

Researchers have also found that, in the past million years global warming events have occurred every second or third cycle of the Earth’s changing obliquity, which occurs every 41,000 years. So, gee they must have been burning fossil fuels back then too, huh Al? All those Barney Rubble gas guzzlers took a toll!

Oh, and despite reports to the contrary, ice in the Antarctic is growing in area and density and has been consistently doing so for at least 30 years now. Western Antarctica has shed several ice shelves over time, but Eastern Antarctica has grown greatly in the same time.

Ice-core drilling and monitoring of sea ice indicate that although there exists a widespread public belief in the melting of the Antarctic ice caps, this is not founded in evidence gleaned from the scientific monitoring of the sea ice conditions. East Antarctica, a sea ice region extending out at over four times the size of the West sea ice region, has grown massively during the same period that the monitoring of the West Antarctic revealed melting. Scientists now theorize that such melting may be normal.

You might also read blogs by others who are better informed than me (See TMROAS Blog on Global Warming)!

So maybe the real question you might want to be asking is just where are we in the ‘wobble cycle’? Someone please pass me another book for the fire.