Several parts of the nation suffered all-time lows for the lower 48 states, and indeed levels never reported outside of Siberia, northern Canada, or Antarctica. North central Florida’s 1982 citrus crop was written off as a disaster.
Manmade global warming had been a scientific theory since long before Cold Sunday. In fact, some scientists had been hypothesizing since the 1880s — a century before the 1982 event — that carbon emissions would gradually raise the temperature of the planet. The idea of a “greenhouse effect” supposedly caused by humanity burning fossil fuels leading to a rise in CO2 emissions was discarded by the 1940s, when the predicted rise in global temperature of one degree centigrade did not occur. Humans have been burning fossil fuels for thousands of years, although higher levels were not reached until the 19th century.
What has never been questioned in modern scientific history is that the planet’s climate is gradually changing all the time. Earth’s revolution around the sun and its rotation on its axis cause short-term, predictable climate change related to the planet’s position and movement in the solar system.
Interestingly, the first supercomputers were developed in an effort to handle the millions of calculations required even for modest weather forecasts. The measurement tools and the number of data elements measured have increased dramatically in the four decades since supercomputers were invented, but we still have limited power to accurately predict weather for more than a few days in advance.
The gradual and natural change of our planet involves more than simply temperature. For the last 50 years, the San Andreas Fault — the focal point for continental drift — has been recorded producing a force that easily dwarfs all the energy that human effort could achieve by every available means. Volcanoes have produced dramatic changes in the upper atmosphere, although in many cases those changes have dissipated relatively quickly. The polarity of the planet, geologists told us many decades ago, has shifted without causing the extinction of life. In fact, radical changes in Earth’s climate have occurred since creation.
Likewise, anyone familiar with cosmology knows that the collision of an asteroid or meteor with Earth could result in the widespread loss of life. The patchwork craters on the moon, which has no atmosphere to burn up debris from space, demonstrate just how many impacts it has sustained. The question is not “if” but “when" in the stubborn statistics of cosmology. If a gigantic asteroid or meteor does collide with Earth, it will not matter on that day whether the planet is one degree warmer than it is today. In fact, an argument can be made that man’s chances of survival will be greater if the world is warmer, because such an event would be expected to increase the amount of dust in the atmosphere, causing cooler temperatures.
Certainly warmth has historically led to an improvement of conditions on Earth. During the Ice Age — with glaciers covering much of Europe — man was forced to seek shelter in caves in southern France and Spain, and species such as the wooly mammoth were wiped out. In the Medieval Warming Period — which was much warmer than anything predicted by today’s scaremongers of alleged manmade global warming — wine grapes grew in Britain and crops in Greenland. The Little Ice Age that followed that period is thought by many to be connected with the decline in food growth (and consequent reduction in autoimmune systems) which made the Black Death such a devastating plague.
More curious is the fact that some of the same scientists who today warn us of the dangers of alleged manmade global warming are the same people who 30 years ago were predicting a new ice age for the planet. In fact, if humanity were forced to choose between the two, global warming is much less frightening than global cooling. England’s Sir Fred Hoyle, a leading cosmologist and theoretical physicist of the highest caliber, in his 1981 book, Ice: How the Next Ice Age Will Come — and How We Can Prevent It, warned that unless governments began to act at once, humanity was doomed to deadly and perhaps terminal losses. The book is full of fascinating charts and graphs. Figure 28, for example, shows that the temperature of the Pacific Ocean has dropped steadily over the past centuries. Figure 29 shows that this decline has been even more alarming in the coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean.
On the back cover of the book, Hoyle warned, “When the next ice age comes — and that may be in a very few years — glaciers will cover most of Britain and northern America.”
The year after Sir Fred Hoyle’s book came out, America experienced Cold Sunday, its coldest day in recorded history.
Scientists’ theories constantly differ with one another; thus, many are obviously wrong. Anyone who asks present-day scientists who warn of manmade global warming to mandate government policy, for instance, will no doubt reap the whirlwind of draconian government regulations.
