Global Heating in Alaska

There are lots of important things to blog about--even more important than the President's looming divorce--but I couldn't resist the Global Warming story.

Joseph Farah, founder, editor and CEO of WorldNetDaily, has a great column today criticizing USA Today's reporting of the dire effects of global warming on Alaska. The crux of the criticism is that USA Today said, quoting "forest ecologist," Glenn Juday:

"Since the 1970s, climate change has doubled the growing season in some places and raised the state temperatures 6 degrees in the winter and 3.5 on average annually since 1950, says Juday, a professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks." (emphasis added)

Farah's response:

Now, back in the old days of my newspaper career, we had editors who actually looked at incredible claims made in stories, questioned them and struck out some of the more preposterous and bizarre assertions.

I guess this practice has been abandoned by Gannett and USA Today. Either that or the newspaper publisher has begun hiring arithmetically challenged reporters and editors as part of its diversity policies.

Think about this: If it were true that average winter temperatures in Alaska have increased 6 degrees Fahrenheit annually since 1950, it would mean average winter temperatures in Alaska are now 336 degrees higher than they were in 1950. Average summer temperatures, according to this statement would be 196 degrees higher, if we are to believe the nonsensical claim of a 3.5 degrees annual rise.

And if the average increase is 3.5 degrees, then that means the summer temperature only went up by about 1 degree annually, making the summers only 56 degrees warmer than in 1950. And that means Alaska's winters are a lot hotter than the summers. But nobody seems to be migrating to that tropical Alaska paradise.

OK, let's assume the forest ecologist didn't really say (or mean to say "annually"). That's a six degree increase in winter temperatures and a 3.5 degree average increase. Is this a steady trend? Or is it the result of normal weather fluctuation? I decided to go to that exacting research tool: Google, with search criteria of "average temperature alaska 1950." It was enlightening, and I think our forest ecologist ought to limit his comments to forests and leave the climate to others.

"Average temperature at the earth surface, 1950-99" - a chart showing roughly an average increase of less than one degree Celsius (13.9 in 1950 to about 14.5 in 1999/2000).

An article saying "boy, was it hot in Alaska in 2004," with a chart (yellow background) showing departures from the mean temperature from 1950 - 2004. It shows that the '50s had warm and cold departures, the '60s through the '80s were mostly colder than the mean, and since 1990, the temperatures have been warmer than the mean temperature.

A website apparently supported by extremist environmental groups that gives this statistic about Alaska: "Annual average temperatures have warmed up to 1.8?F (1?C) per decade over the last three decades, and winter warming has been as high as 3?F (2?C) per decade." They also list pick-and-choose statistics that appear to support the warming idea.

The Earth Policy Institute's website gives the Alaska temperature increase as five degrees F.

It's all interesting. Alaska's temperatures have gone up 1 - 5 degrees. But if you look at the yellow chart in the "boy was it hot in 2004" link, you'll notice that Canada has been getting colder since 2000, at the same time Alaska has been getting warmer. But the environmentalists are pretending that Canada doesn't exist and that Alaska is the thermometer/barometer of all global warming.

The environmentalists have put on their own set of blinders, so they can look at isolated cases to support their pet theories. When Alaska's polar bears start sipping piña coladas, maybe I'll finally believe Global Warming is here.