In this day and age, after the IPCC reports, Al Gores Nobel peace prize, a mountain of climate science, and the admission from just about everyone (including Bush) that global warming is a real human caused threat, it is rather depressing that the Boston Globe would still publish some global warming denial BS (Bad Science).

THE STARK headline appeared just over a year ago. “2007 to be ‘warmest on record,’ ” BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government’s Meteorological Office, the story announced that “the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007,” surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.
In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, “a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption.” In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country’s 24 provinces. In August, Chile’s agriculture minister lamented “the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years,” which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.

Latin Americans weren’t the only ones shivering.

University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that “unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007.” Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand’s vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.

Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years.(via)

Oh yes, I forgot because it gets cold in the winter that means that global warming is not real. I am sorry but you don’t look at one years worth of weather, you look at many years worth of weather. And the trend is clear, the earth is heating up. The ice caps are melting, and sea levels are rising. But I guess because it was cold this winter in South America we can ignore all that.

I understand that this is in the OP-ED section, but come on! The debate on global warming (or global climate change, or climate crisis or whatever you want to call the warming of the planet due to the human caused release of massive amounts of green house emissions) is OVER. Global warming is real, humans are causing it, and if we don’t do something about it we will almost certainly destroy our civilization. But hey, perhaps it is comforting to keep your head in the sand. Then again considering the source of the article it is not really surprising. Mr Jacoby has been in trouble before for less than stellar journalistic principles.