When a looming menace chased valuable armadillos out of Indiana

From the very clever and very funny Tim Blair: More climate alarmism from Time magazine: As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually …   Warmer? Hotter? Burnier? … cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.   Welcome to the scientific consensus of 1974, when looming cold menaced Iceland and chased valuable armadillos out of Indiana: Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F.   Note how precisely the language is repeated in modern warmy talk, right down to an ominous “tipping point”: Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth’s surface could tip the climatic balance, and cool the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another ice age within only a few hundred years.   Can’t disagree with this, however, from University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare: Warns Hare: “I don’t believe that the world’s present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row.” Three 1972s in a row? Bring on the mass suicides. (Via No Pasaran) UPDATE. For once, Time got it right. UPDATE II. Stats guy Wilson Flood reviews centuries of British weather records: Summers in the second half of the 20th century were warmer than those in the first half and it could be argued that this was a global warming signal. However, the average CET summer temperature in the 18th century was 15.46 degC while that for the 20th century was 15.35 degC. Far from being warmer due to assumed global warming, comparison of actual temperature data shows that UK summers in the 20th century were cooler than those of two centuries previously. Further coolening is anticipated in the US.

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