Six More Weeks of Winter

By Alan Caruba

Punxsutawny Phil, Pennsylvania’s and the nation’s most famous groundhog, took time out from hibernation to let us know that there will be six more weeks of winter. Apparently, once again he did not see his shadow.

This annual bit of theatre arrived the same time we are reading about horrendous blizzards in China that killed some, stranded millions, collapsed 100,000 homes, and have wrecked winter crops. But it’s winter, right? Well, how about the snowstorms in the Middle East? In January, dozens died in Iran after being stranded in their cars by blizzards. Jerusalem was blanketed with heavy snow. But it’s winter, right?

In January 2007 there was a major freeze in California and in April a severe freeze hit the Midwest and South East. In the first weeks of 2008, there have been some equally severe blizzards and freezes in parts of the nation. The Cascade snowfall was 150% above normal. A number of record low temperatures occurred across the U.S. But it’s winter, right?

If you want to check out the weather, you can visit NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center at www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/weather-events.html. They have the data on 2007’s worldwide major weather events.

Weather watchers noticed for example that, by July 2007, Alaska’s glaciers had advanced one-third of a mile in less than a year. Glaciers normally tend to be…well, glacial. But in October 2007, there were reports that the Mont Blanc glacier on the border of northern Italy and France almost doubled in four years. When glaciers begin to grow it is a sign that the weather is getting colder and over long enough periods of time to permit and encourage such growth.

So, yes, it’s winter, but some of us are not so sanguine about what we’re seeing. Some of us think that, because we are at the end of the typical interglacial period of about 11,500 years, these blizzards and glaciers that are on the move likely signal the arrival of a new ice age. And when it comes, it will arrive very swiftly. The last one left wooly mammoths frozen in place with their last meal still fresh in their belly when the scientists dug them up.

To learn more about this, visit http://www.iceagenow.com/, a website that Robert W. Felix maintains. He authored “Ice Age Now”, a book filled with the science about ice ages and the prediction that the real climate drama coming soon will be a whole new ice age.

An earlier change in the climate chased the Vikings out of a place they called Greenland because, when they arrived, it was green. During the mini-ice age from 1300 to around 1850, the Thames River in London froze over and Napoleon’s army was destroyed by the cold after it failed to conquer Russia. Here in the U.S., it made for a very cold winter in Valley Forge.

That’s the thing about ice ages, large and small, they do not take into account the problems for humans. They, like the bogus “global warming”, are not caused by humans. They are the result of forces far greater than anything humans can create. Or stop.

But, hey, it’s winter, right?