Global warming or cooling?

Farm and Ranch February 18, 2011 “To say that all of the sudden we are going to warm up and all the ice is going to be gone, I don’t think the data show it.” That was said by Dr. Art Douglas, Professor Emeritus of the Atmospheric Science Department of Creighton University, to the recent Pacific Northwest Farm Forum in Spokane.

Douglas: “If we really look at the climate over the last four or five years we are not seeing the continued ramping up of temperatures around the world. And in fact if anything the Artic has stabilized. There is data indicating that the thickness of the Artic sea ice is actually starting to increase. Maybe it is the best in eight years. Likewise in Antarctica, even though there has been melting especially in this past year, overall the values are still above what we saw in the early the 1980s.”

Douglas says more importantly we are in a sunspot minimum period.

Douglas: “It had been forecast quite some time ago that we would be going up into this big maximal in 2011-2012, which is not occurring yet. And if we go back historically on a long geological time frame, basically when we have minimum sunspots we have minimum temperatures.”

Douglas says you have to go back to the early 1800s, which were quite cold, and the Little Ice Age, to find periods with as little sunspot activity as is currently being forecast.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net.