Middleton, Wis.

If this is what global warming is all about, I think we could do with a lot less (or a lot more) of it, depending on how you choose to look at these sub-zero temperatures. Actually the pieces were already in place last summer for a very severe winter. This one is just a little late in arriving — groundhog’s shadow or not.
Six months ago, NASA satellites, as they daily scan the northern Pacific, showed surface water temperatures in the Gulf of Alaska dipping below what they had been during the previous decade (negative anomalies). A few climate experts who were paying attention to this new development suggested we might be getting closer to turning the corner in this latest warming period, but their observations went mostly unheeded in the news media.

Chilling temperatures in that vast body of water may have been hinting that the rising global temperature was already beginning to reverse its upward trend of thirty years. No element of climate exerts more influence on weather patterns in the short or long term than does the Pacific Ocean. But in the summer, the media were preoccupied instead with yet another developing, albeit this time modest, El Nino weather pattern. That El Nino was to play a major role in the upcoming winter.

As winter approached I began to notice a steady buildup of unusually cold air masses (at least by recent standards) over northeast Asia (eastern Siberia and Manchur-ia) and the entirety of Alaska throughout December. An-chorage has since been treated to record snowfall that brought wandering moose to town.

Then full-blown frigid air masses started to process east- and southward, as they are inclined to do, along their customary trajectory across northwestern Canada. One after another, the cold fronts rolled into the Rocky Mountains during January. Record snows paralyzed Denver as the cold air collided with recurrent wet El Nino air masses from the Pacific. In recent weeks the battleground of dueling air masses shifted to the Plains and the Great Lakes regions, the result being that snow now covers half the land area of the country.

It does seem odd that some of my associates had convinced themselves and me (well almost), that there would be no more really cold winters. They were just a fading memory from a distant past.

Our problem in coming to grips with ubiquitous climate changes (climates have continued to change since the time Earth first had oceans and an atmosphere) lies more in our perceptions, abetted by short memories and constant stoking by a media hungry for its next story.

In actuality we and our forebears have been blessed beyond comprehension with a comparatively stable climate (that even permitted the development of a civilization) after the retreat of the continental glaciers 10,000 years ago. This civilization survived all periods of extreme drought and other adversity.

As a result of efforts by some in the media, we are convinced that what may be only the natural ebb and flow in climate patterns portends a dangerous upward trend, ala the warnings of catastrophic change being advanced by the true believers in Global Warming.

As a young man involved in environmental research back in the late 1970s, I can remember how some of the same voices that now warn of an impending runaway greenhouse effect were then warning of the impending return of glaciers. They almost had me convinced. And then along came the great Pacific climate shift (1976-77), and that was the end of “global cooling.”

More than a little ironic are the timings of the release of Al Gore’s movie last January and the U.N. climate committee’s press release this past week for their pending report. Mother Nature seems to thumb her nose at them. And here comes the coldest outbreak of Arctic air the United States has seen in more than three decades right on the heels of the latest U.N. Summary Report.

William Balgord is a

consultant and writer who heads Environmental & Resources Technology Inc. in Middleton. He frequently spends time working and writing in the La Crosse area.

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