Global warming and common sense: Alaska is melting

An example of how the environmental left ignores scientific facts to promote their global warming agenda

Alaska | PHOTO CREDIT: Wiki Commons

At the beginning of last year it was publicized and widely reported that theAlaska Climate Research Center using data from NOAA weather stations throughout Alaska had determined that temperatures in Alaska had dropped significantly over the past decade.

A new report from the research center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks reveals that the 49th state of the union has cooled by 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 2000.

The drop is described as a ‘large value for a decade,’ in the academic paper ‘The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska.’

This was not some idle speculation but as I said a widely reported throughout the scientific community and in the popular press worldwide.

As the story from the UK Daily Mail points out, a drop in temperatures of 2.4 degrees over a decade is significant and a decade worth of data is more than just a simple anomaly. The report’s own title calls the past decade a “cooling trend”. The current climate science community will often use yearly or even seasonal anomalies to alarm the public and here we have an entire decade long trend of cooling.

Furthermore we are not talking about some random decade but rather the last decade when global temperatures especially in the northern latitudes were prophesied to rise. But rather than rising it has been been proven using the “warmist’ communities own records that temperatures in Alaska actually dropped significantly over the past decade. These findings have not been disputed.

What may have happened in previous decades although possibly significant as well does not change the fact that the current climate in Alaska is experiencing a cooling trend. This is a fact based on actual data and research, plain and simple. All of this was brought to the worlds attention in the first week of January 2013.

So why is it that the National Wildlife Federation at the end of January issued a report which states the following ? (emphasis in original)

Alaska has warmed about twice as much as the continental United States and warming is severely altering the Arctic landscape including melting permafrost. In the face of this unprecedented warming, many uniquely polar habitats—like the sea ice that polar bears, seals, and walrus require to hunt—are shrinking fast.

In what time frame is this purported warming supposed to have occurred? Obviously they can not be referring to the most recent available data since again as has been widely reported, Alaska temperatures are decreasing. The NWF must simply be ignoring recent long term changes in Alaska’s climate in order to make such a statement.

Read my entire article at Brenner Brief.