Are Kevin O'Brien and the PD correct... there is no global warming!?!?

Each of the last two winters, Cleveland Plain Dealer writer Kevin O'Brien wrote that it sometimes snows in Cleveland so there is no global warming. His latest scientific position on this is posted on Cleveland.com here [1] (and included below). O'Brien is such a strange writer I cannot tell if he is kidding, but in the interest of good public information it seems important for all people to consider what O'Brien published in the Plain Dealer and discuss if it is intelligent, misleading, incorrect or perhaps true. Who has an informed position on global warming and what O'Brien writes below?

For global warming worry-warts, an inconvenient cold spell -- Kevin O'Brien [1]
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Kevin O'Brien
Plain Dealer Columnist

It would be so cool if we had the Southern Baptists to thank, but I fear their intervention in the "problem" of global warming has come too late to explain the last 14 months.

At a meeting just this month, the denomination's leaders discerned a biblical duty to get right with Brother Al Gore & His Oscar-Winning Nobel-Laureate Traveling Climate Show and Relevancy Revival.

For what seems like eons, but in fact has been only years, Brother Al has been trying his hardest to help the planet get saved.

And wouldn't you know it, just when a group of fellow preachers answers his altar call, the four biggest temperature tracking outfits on the allegedly fevered planet come out with the news that in January 2008, the Earth's average temperature was down 1.35 degrees from January 2007.

Not much, you say? A snowflake in the bucket?

Well, for the sake of comparison, that's about twice the 0.72 degrees the Earth's average temperature has risen since 1978.

Those numbers don't come from the skeptics routinely dismissed by global-warming hysterics as corporate toadies. No, they come from outfits the global-warming hysterics generally respect: NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Remote Sensing Systems, affiliated with both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the University of Alabama-Huntsville; and Britain's Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research.

Yes, yes, we all know that we can't read too much into one cold month. Only the prophets of sudden, catastrophic climate change are allowed to use such anecdotal evidence to further their arguments.

But then again, it wasn't just one cold month. It was the beginning of what, so far, has been another cold year.

Throughout 2007, even as Brother Al waved aloft the little golden idol presented to him by the movie people and demanded a rain of fire and brimstone (of the carbon-neutral variety, one would think) on the global-warming scoffers, the Almighty sent ice and snow instead.

 The last winter when North America had as much snow cover was 1966. Same for Siberia and Mongolia. China is enduring its coldest winter in 100 years. A major snowstorm paralyzed most of Greece last month. Baghdad got its first snowfall in recorded history, and they've been recording for quite a while in that part of the world.

Now, it's really cold in Greenland, which normally would not be news, but the effect on the famous sea ice sheet has been most enlightening: It's back, bigger and better than ever. Between Greenland and Canada, the ice is the biggest it's been in 15 years, according to Denmark's Meteorological Institute. The Canadian Ice Service -- yes, there really is such a thing -- says that in many places, the Arctic ice is also thicker this year than last.

Good news? Bad news? I honestly don't know. All I know is that over the weekend, as the snow fell and fell and fell in Northeast Ohio, I found myself wondering which might arrive in our little cul-de-sac first: the Greenland ice sheet or the municipal snowplow.

You have to wonder how Brother Al looks at the last 14 months. Is he glad that maybe the Earth is getting saved without his drastic measures, or is he worried that he might have to come up with a new sermon because he's been riding the wrong crisis?

There is, after all, another theory out there, most recently propounded by a Russian scientist named Oleg Sorokhtin. He says -- and I want you to slow down here and really let this sink in -- it's the sun that's actually responsible for temperatures on the Earth. Pretty revolutionary, eh?

And he goes on to say that although the sun has been pretty intense in recent decades, heating things up in this part of the planetary neighborhood, it has just throttled back quite a bit. You can guess what he says is coming. It does not involve palm trees swaying in the Yukon.

I like it. I'd like to think the sun has more influence on the Earth's climate than Chinese factories and muffler-dragging Chevys. But I -- unlike Brother Al and his choir of grant writers, moviemakers and hyper-extrapolating scientific bandwagoneers -- don't claim to know.

I think I'll just keep taking it one season at a time, adjusting as needed. And the next adjustment will be a snowblower.

Yea, though I walk through the shadow of drifts higher than my head, no global warming will I fear.

O'Brien is The Plain Dealer's deputy editorial page director.

To reach Kevin O'Brien:

kobrien [at] plaind [dot] com, 216-999-4146

Previous columns online:

cleveland.com/columns