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In Dubai, there is an indoor downhill ski park. That's right, an indoor downhill ski park. It's indoors because Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates is in the hot desert. Rainfall is spotty and in the summer temperatures can soar to 100 degrees. Winter temperatures can fall to the mid 50s, but that still isn't cold enough to keep snow on the ground. In the UAE, if you want to see snow, you have to visit the Ski Dubai Resort.
That is, you would have had to visit Ski Dubai to see snow until this week. Despite the fact that global warming is still all the rage (Sec State Clinton just appointed Washington lawyer Todd Stern to be a special envoy to the UN for climate change), there are more and more signs that the actual climate is intent on ignoring those who so badly want it to get warmer for political reasons.
The UAE is the current case in point. Agence France Presse is among the wire service reporting this week's unusual snow event in the UAE. Here is the AFP report in full:
DUBAI (AFP) — A blanket of snow has covered a mountain in a part of the United Arab Emirates, a rare phenomenon for the desert Gulf country, according to local media report.This is just one sign that the climate is not cooperating with the doom and gloomers. Not only is it snowing in the UAE, but it has been darn cold in the U.S. this winter, just like it was last winter. And it is not just the northern hemisphere. Last winter was particularly harsh in parts of the southern hemisphere.
Al-Jees mountain, 5,700 feet (1,737 metres) above sea level and 25 kilometres (15 miles) northeast of Ras al-Khaimah city, was covered in 20 centimetres (eight inches) of snow, the state news agency WAM said.
"Although limited snowfall was recorded on the mountain some years back, for the first time the peak of the mountain was fully covered in snow," it said.
Local authorities said temperatures plunged to minus 3 degrees Celsius (26.6 Fahrenheit) on Friday and again to below zero on Saturday, The National newspaper reported.
Major Said al-Yamahi of Ras al-Khaimah police told the newspaper that an area of five square kilometres (almost two square miles) was covered in snow.
The emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai also had heavy rains on Friday and Saturday, in a spell of rare chilly weather in a desert state where summer temperatures can reach 50 Celcius (122 Fahrenheit).
But, of course, the glaciers are still melting, right? Wrong. The glaciers that have had the climate change fetishists most up in arms are in Greenland. Al Gore promised that they would rapidly melt and cause the oceans to flood the world's coastal cities.
That's not happening either. Recent reports indicate that movement of the Greenland glaciers is slowing. According to the World Climate Report Blog, writer Richard Kerr, recapped discussion of the Greenland situation from last December's meeting of the American Geophysical Union for Science magazine. According to the blog, Kerr wrote:
Things were looking bad around southeast Greenland a few years ago. There, the streams of ice flowing from the great ice sheet into the sea had begun speeding up in the late 1990s. Then, two of the biggest Greenland outlet glaciers really took off, and losses from the ice to the sea eventually doubled. Some climatologists speculated that global warming might have pushed Greenland past a tipping point into a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level.What is like now in Greenland? Kerr continues:
So much for Greenland ice’s Armageddon. “It has come to an end,” glaciologist Tavi Murray of Swansea University in the United Kingdom said during a session at the meeting. “There seems to have been a synchronous switch-off” of the speed-up, she said. Nearly everywhere around southeast Greenland, outlet glacier flows have returned to the levels of 2000.These types of observations do only one thing: they underscore our current inability to predict the behavior of the climate.
Despite that fact, the doom and gloomers are pushing ahead with all kinds of strange, potentially dangerous schemes for geo-engineering. One of the big plans they have is to seed the world's oceans with iron filings to encourage the growth of algae that consume carbon.
This craziness doesn't even pass the political left's own smell test. If the "geoengineering" done accidentally by the economic activity of modern man is capable of causing harm to the environment, why is it that we should expect that left-wing eco geoengineering projects like dumping iron filings in the ocean won't be harmful? Once upon a time this would have been called pollution.
The fact is, we should leave well enough alone. The climate is complex, we don't fully understand how it works, and the observable data are inconsistent and contradictory.
It's high time we start paying attention to the things we can control and leave the climate up to the planet.
