Buoy meets Gore

Investor's Business Daily
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 31 March 2008

Global Warming: Computer models used by environmentalists predict imminent and disastrous climate change. But actual temperature measurements by high-tech equipment show something completely different. An early scene in the sci-fi disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, showing what allegedly will happen to the planet if we continue to ignore Al Gore's warnings on global warming, shows three of the film's secondary characters at some kind of scientific station in Scotland.

They're watching as automated data buoys in the Atlantic Ocean report sudden drops in water temperature resulting from melting Arctic ice stopping the Gulf Stream, which warms the Northern Hemisphere. "I don't understand what's supposed to be going on," says one of the three, an oceanographer. Apparently neither do the film's creators, Gore or any of his climate-change cultists. For actual measurements of actual oceans by actual instruments have thrown cold water on the theory that such a scenario could ever occur or is in fact occurring now.

As Lorne Gunter reported Monday in Canada's National Post, the first of 3,000 new automated ocean buoys were deployed in 2003. They amounted to a significant improvement over earlier buoys that took their measurements mostly at the ocean's surface. The new buoys, known as Argos, drift along the oceans at a depth of about 6,000 feet constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity and speed of ocean currents. Every 10 days or so a bladder inflates, bringing to the surface readings taken at various depths. Once on the surface, they transmit their readings to satellites that retransmit them to land-based computers.

The Argos buoys have disappointed the global warm-mongers in that they have failed to detect any signs of imminent climate change. As Dr. Josh Willis, who works for NASA in its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, noted in an interview with National Public Radio, "there has been a very slight cooling" over the buoys' five years of observation, but that drop was "not anything really significant." Certainly not enough to shut down the Gulf Stream.

Climate-change promoters also are perplexed by the observations of NASA's eight weather satellites. In contrast to some 7,000 land-based stations, they take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily over the surface of the Earth. In 30 years of operation, the satellites have recorded a warming trend of just 0.14C — well within the range of normal variations.

In January 2007, folks at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration trumpeted the "fact" that 2006 was the warmest year ever recorded in the continental U.S. This was based on daily readings gathered by NOAA's climate data center and the 1,221 or so weather observation stations it monitors around the country.

As we've reported, the locations of some of these land-based stations are suspect. One in Forest Grove, Ore., stands just 10 feet from an air-conditioning exhaust vent. Another in Roseburg, Ore., is on a rooftop near an air-conditioning unit. In Tahoe, Calif., one is near a drum where trash is burned.

If the Argos buoys and satellites had confirmed the greenie computer models and Gore hype instead of natural temperature variations, it would have been big news. The silence speaks volumes.