BALTIMORE, Maryland, Thursday, December 15, 2016 - The debate about global temperature change has heated up in recent days, as several courageous scientists have stepped up to the plate and put forth evidence of cooling on the Earth's surface, or, in one case, the imminent cooling of a crucial area of the this planet's land masses.
The London Daily Mail reported recently that "an intensive scientific study of both of Earth's poles has found that from 2009 to 2016 overall temperature has dropped in the southern polar region." This is an area that you and I call the Antarctica, or South Pole.
Meanwhile, a prominent climate scientist at Northumbria University in England has added impetus to the controversial prediction of other scientists that the Earth is facing a mini ice age in the very near future. Relying on the expectation of significantly reduced solar activity, Professor Valentina Zharkova said fluctuations in an 11-year cycle of solar activity which the sun goes through would be responsible for a dramatic freeze, the like of which has not been experienced on this planet since the 1600's.
"From 1645 to 1715, global temperatures dropped, due to low solar activity, so much that the planet experienced a 70-year ice age known as [the] Maunder Minimum, which saw the River Thames in London completely frozen," said Professor Zharkova. Since that time, the Thames River - which flows through the heart of London - has rarely, if ever, frozen so solidly.
Christopher Shuman, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County glaciologist working at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told the Daily Mail concerning the polar cooling, "Field data suggests that there’s been a modest cooling in the area over the 2009–2015 time period, and images collected during that time by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on the Terra and Aqua satellites show more persistent fast ice (sea ice that is attached to the shore) in the Larsen A and Larsen B embayments”
However, Mr Shuman warned that in some areas of the Antarctic, glaciers continued to melt at significant levels, despite the slight temperature drop.
The real debate about global temperature change is not whether change is happening. Most observers concede that change is perpetual. Instead, debate concerns the cause. The Ultra Far Left is determined to link economic activity in developed nations with global warming, while those opposed to the Ultra Left decry such conclusions as not being supported by science. The Left makes it seem like mankind's very survival depends on the radical scaling back of economic activity, even if it causes tremendous economic upheaval.
Moderate politicians are seeking to put economic activity on a robust schedule while doing their best to restrict resulting pollution. Donald Trump seems to be in this group. He is opposed to President Obama and the Left's determination to end coal mining in the USA. Trump has also vowed to avoid signing a UN-sponsored climate accord that Obama favors. Such an accord calls on the world's nations to jointly restrict economic activity while, at the same time, allowing third world nations to be exempted from the harshest measures. Many American leaders also fear that Russia and China will not keep their obligations under the accord. Both nations have severe pollution problems.
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