Getting warmer...?

Despite all the propaganda that in five, ten eighty or ninety years human, or anthropocentric CO2 emissions are going to result in the heat death of the planet, there seems precious little real empirical evidence that temperatures globally are actually rising. Sure there is the argument which says that "the models predict", but forgive me for being a crusty old sourpuss when I point out that there appears precious little actual extra warmth due to Carbon Dioxide. At present the opposite seems to be happening. Snow in Buenos Aires perchance?

To enlarge; having spent several years as a farmworker while working my way through college, I spent a lot of time out of doors and learned to read the sky. Mainly because what I did day to day was highly weather dependent, and it helped if you knew to take a waterproof coat with you. It got to the point that towards the end of my working time on the farm, my boss would often take one look at the weather forecast, grimace, and then ask me what local conditions would be like for the next day or two, rather than trust the Met Office. Said skill often helped me out during my life on the streets because it usually meant that I was heading for a covered beat ahead of the downpours. I'd occasionally run into colleagues who were either sweating buckets because they were too heavily clad, or soaked because they went out in shirtsleeves, and not a little annoyed at me because they were too hot / wet and I often wasn't.

Needless to say yours truly was rarely caught out by the notoriously changeable British weather, although on a few occasions I found myself forced to 'ghost' a couple of streets when downpours ensued. Normally these errors of judgement were more due to a poor sense of timing rather than a failure to predict on my part.

One phenomenon that has caught my eye of late is the increased prevalence of phenomena like Noctilucent clouds. Essentially these are caused by low angle sunlight reflecting off clouds of high level ice crystals in the mesosphere, normally seen between 50 and 70 degrees of latitude. However, in the Northern hemisphere at least these appear to be observed ever further southwards if you can take the photographic galleries on spacewather.com, and various other anecdotal observations as a guide.

Now I may be wrong, not being a 'professional' in these matters, but an increase in ice crystal phenomena would to me indicate a net cooling effect (Albeit of the upper atmosphere). So why on earth are certain people so all fired certain that it's going to get hotter because of CO2? We are told that global levels of this trace atmospheric gas are up and that according to the IPCC it's all our fault, and we're aall doooooomed but for the life of me I just can't buy into the hype. If it's a race between what the politicians and media say and a real live (Albeit anecdotal) cloud gathering above my head, I know whose predictions I'll be paying attention to, and it won't be a journalist or politician, although Christopher Booker of the Telegraph does try, bless him). When the Moonbats et al are figuratively (and vociferously) running around with their fingers in their ears, bleating about Anthropogenic Global Warming and ignoring the current weather trends, he's got an uphill battle. The only reason why I bother to think about the subject at all is the continuing insistence of politicians all around the world that there's a climate problem we as a species have any control over; there isn't, I confidently predict the climate will change on it's own without any help from l'il ole Hom Sap; and that tax is not the answer. Taxing to 'prevent' a natural phenomenon is rather like writing cheques to ward off double pneumonia; or as Douglas Adams once pithily pointed out "it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy"

Back to the grindstone.