I admit glossing over most of the discussion, so apologies if this has already been hashed...
Global warming, as much as the PC crowd wants it to be, still is just a theory. In fact, there was a time when France banned wine imports from *england* which had much higher temperatures than today.
The global temperature rises and falls in cycles. There is plenty of evidence of much warmer times before humans were making these "greenhouse gasses."
BTW, you know what the biggest greenhouse gas is? Water vapor. Think of that every time you see a cloud. That is why clear nights are colder than cloudy nights.
Volcanoes produce an untold amount of carbon dioxide (the gas touted by environmental groups) each year, more than humans produce. Our actual production is negligable. Now, there is air pollution, but that's not global warming... that's air pollution.
I have national geographic magazines from the 60s and 70s. They are worried about global *cooling,* especially caused by jets as they saw the contrails up high.
We can't take 10 or even 100 years of data and actually *know* what's going on. We can only guess. Right now there is a lot of public pressure on scientists to simply agree with the idea.
Think of this, we know glaciers weren't always there because there is stuff under them. They also are growing, now if they are growing, that means that they weren't always so large (since they get bigger each year). See where I'm going with this?
Temperatures can rise dramatically and still be within historic patterns. England was a temperate zone! If it was just a global temperature that was going to make the world end, then how did we survive when England was like that? And why wasn't it under water? There are records of the *wine* industry in England... it's too cold for the grapes now.
I still hear that for the past few centuries we've been in a mini ice age. That we should expect to experience warmer temperatures as we come out of it. That national geographic article actually worries about whether we *would* come out of it (IE, "will it get warmer like it should?").
I only wish I had the thing with me so I could quote it directly. Funny how in 30 or 40 years we can conviently forget what they knew then. Some people want so badly to be right, they don't actually care if they are or not, they just want everyone else to say they are.
Then there are those who pretend just to try to make other people agree with what they want done. I talked to a group of environmentalists on the north slope about a month and a half ago. They were looking to oppose drilling in the ANWR (btw, the area in the ANWR they intend to drill is tundra, not the mountains and streams you'll see from them but the flat nothingness like they already pump oil from). I asked them about it and they freely admitted to me that they didn't really think the drilling would harm anything, but they had to say it to try to keep it from happening... to reduce oil supply with the idea of reducing usage of gasoline. And not for global warming, but becuse of the *other* effects they believe come from combustion. This is the only time I've ever had a group like that talk so freely, but they did seem sincere. I guess they felt I'd agree with the reasoning.
Anyway, that's getting a little off on a tangent. What I wonder is how many people out there spouting stuff really see it as a "ends justify the means" thing.
In any case, even if the weather isn't *normal* there has always been abnormal weather, some storms are 100 year storms for that reason, they don't happen that often. Well what's a 1000 year storm then? Just because it happens doesn't mean that we caused it too, it could just be a rare occurance.
Storm cycles also vary. For a while we were in a cycle (that can be traced back through records) of lower numbers of hurricanes and other storms. Now we are back in the upswing. I don't know if we are topping out now or not, but they had tracked a cycle.
I've been told many times now that this is the coldest summer on record in Alaska. That doesn't mean there's global cooling though. Just like hotter than normal temps don't mean there is global warming.
BTW, someone tried to tell me that in global warming some places would be hotter and some colder. If there is a shared relationship, how is it global warming if the averages are going to stay the same? Wouldn't that just be global sameness?
Oh, and they had trouble getting the fuel barges to barrow this year because the ice pack didn't recede nearly as quickly (or as far) as normal.