In view of the winter season we and many other areas of the planet have experienced, it would appear that “global warming” is more like “global cooling.” Needless to say, we’ve all heard joking remarks to that effect this winter. But one year’s season, regardless of the temperature and precipitation extremes, is but a millisecond in the Earth’s climate history and change patterns.
During the last 2 billion years the Earth's climate has alternated between a frigid "Ice House", like today's world, and a steaming "Hot House", like the world of the dinosaurs. How could there be fossils of tropical and temperate climate species in Antarctica, a continent that is now permanently covered with ice and snow? It is the result of the constant and ongoing dynamic changes the earth experiences, both in climate and land plate tectonics (continental shifting).
Al Gore’s Nobel Peace prize-winning book “An Inconvenient Truth” which focused on “global warming” has been the basis of arguments among the scientific community, both pro and con, ever since it appeared. The primary arguments center on: is global warming primarily the result of carbon dioxide emissions generated by man, and can it be neutralized, or is it just a natural climatic occurrence that the Earth periodically experiences? Gore's recent Washington D.C. conference on the topic during one of the coldest days of recent years provided joke fodder for several talk show hosts.
Recently the phrase “global warming” has been replaced by “climate change.” Why? I did some investigating. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), "The phrase 'climate change' is growing in preferred use to 'global warming' because it helps convey that there are changes in addition to rising temperatures."
According to Kevin Grandia of the Huntington Post, ”While these are the technical uses of the terms there is an argument made that ‘global warming’ should be used instead of ‘climate change’ when writing in the popular media, especially online. This is because the term ‘global warming’ is searched out on Google millions of times more a month than the term ‘climate change.’ The argument goes, if you want to increase the number of people reading your material you should use the lexicon that will most increase your chances of appearing in the search engines.”
The California Institute of Technology explains it thusly, “But temperature change itself isn't the most severe effect of changing climate. Changes to precipitation patterns and sea level are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone. For this reason, scientific research on climate change encompasses far more than surface temperature change. So ‘global climate change’ is the more scientifically accurate term. Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we've chosen to emphasize global climate change on this website, and not global warming.” And “Global warming -- the increase in Earth’s average surface temperature due to rising levels of greenhouse gases. Climate change a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on Earth.”
Canadian scientist Randall F. Miller, Ph.D. notes, “Climate change is nothing new. The recent meeting on climate change that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol (Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climatic Change) is not examining some new phenomenon never before experienced on earth; the Earth always changes. Plate tectonics shift continents, uplift mountains and create new oceans. The surface we live on is dynamic. Climate has swung from greenhouse to icehouse conditions. The evolution of life is linked to the composition of the atmosphere and to the temperature and climate on the planet's thin skin.
“That the planet's climate can change rapidly, say several degrees centigrade over a matter of decades, is not new. It happened most recently during a time known as the Younger Dryas. About 10,800 (radiocarbon) years ago as average temperature in the Maritimes was slowly warming, a rapid cooling plunged the region back toward the ice age. Average annual temperature dropped as much as 5 C in as little as a decade. Glaciers re-advanced across the landscape and fossils show that the developing forest reverted to tundra. The cold climate lasted for hundreds of years and was experienced all around the North Atlantic. Scientists are very interested in the Younger Dryas event since it is one of the best examples of rapid climate change, similar to the magnitude of future climate change predicted for some models of greenhouse warming.”
Scientists have found that the last ice age 13,000 years ago took hold in just one year, more than ten times quicker than previously believed. Rather than a gradual cooling over a decade, the ice age plunged Europe into the deep freeze, German Research Centre for Geosciences at Potsdam said. Cold, stormy conditions caused by an abrupt shift in atmospheric circulation froze the continent almost instantly during the Younger Dryas less than 13,000 years ago – a very recent period on a geological scale. The new findings will add to fears of a serious risk of this happening again in the UK and western Europe – and soon. London recently experienced record snowfall and cold.
The proverbial bottom line is that global warming doesn’t necessarily translate to warmer climates for all regions, but in fact may accelerate the emergence of much colder climates in some regions. Studies of the Younger Dryas period seem to support that theory. Can be slow this? Maybe. Although both the U.S. and Europe are striving to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the biggest challenge may be getting other rapidly emerging mega-industrial nations such as China to follow suit.
In the meantime, don’t expect to see palm trees growing in New York and definitely don’t sell your snowblower quite yet.

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