Seek and ye shall find

Let us imagine our deepest concern is global unhappiness. Every street corner drunk, every downtrodden kid, wife-bashing victim and starvation statistic would soon come into our focus. Our belief in a miserable world would be sustained.
These problems are always with us but it is we who decide how relevant they are to us and the extent to which our efforts can make a difference.

The Bible says seek and ye shall find. Buddhism says a teacher will appear when a pupil is ready. The Latin phrase cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, was proposed by French philosopher René Descartes to form a foundation for all knowledge. It meant we define ourselves by what we imagine. The mind becomes what it thinks it is.

Motivational speakers preach that what we pay attention to increases, and wealth begins with attention to abundance. It may be the same with temperature. I read once that cold was an issue of confidence. In the 1970s when living a hunting and fishing life, I found I could walk unfazed into a freezing sea in winter to catch fish with a different mindset to wondering whether or not to go swimming.

It is a common experience to decide to buy, say, a BMW and then suddenly see that model passing us on nearly every street. Some say global warming is a problem that won’t go away, but is it the warming that won’t go away, or the media reinforcing the belief? What if after researching we concluded the problem was global cooling? Would suddenly evidence of that fill our sights? Well, we don’t have to look far.

On 23 February 2013 the Northern Hemisphere set a new, all-time record cold temperature in Oymyakon Siberia. It was -71.2°C, and shattered the previous record of -68°C set in 1933. Confusion was created as the news didn’t square with any global warming narrative. There were also record cold temps for Switzerland for the 2012/13 winter.

Temperatures in Florida this March were the coldest on record. By the end of March, the average temperature for 2013 ended up in the bottom five coldest and possibly the bottom two since records began.

Arctic temperatures have been below normal for the past month. Last January, north China saw the thickest ice in years, and Chinese nationwide were shivering through the coldest weather in 28 years.

This recent winter was the coldest in northern India for at least 44 years and killed 107 homeless people. Across the Middle East harsh weather affected most regions and the worst snowstorm in 20 years shut roads and schools in Jerusalem with snow blanketing the ancient city.

The worst snowstorms for half a century swept across Russia's Far East overnight on 8 January, paralysing the Pacific port cities of Vladivostok and Nakhodka. Two months' worth of snow fell on the Primorye region, accompanied by gusting winds of up to 144 kilometres (90 miles) an hour which brought down power lines and cut electricity supplies to more 20 villages. It amounted to two months of snowfall in 12 hours, something the head of the Primorye meteorological agency reported he had not seen for 50 years.

In Moscow a record snowfall hit the city which helped to make February the most snowy month in 40 years, with snow cover almost 1.5 times higher than longstanding average figures. Across the Atlantic the UK experienced the coldest March day in almost 30 years as temperatures dropped below -9C. Aberdeen saw the coldest March since 2006 and perhaps 1996.

The South Korean capital city of Seoul recorded a temperature of minus 16.5 C one morning in January 2013, the lowest in 27 years since a minus 16.9 C was recorded in 1986, according to the Korea Meteorological Administration.

Sweden has just recorded one of its coldest and wettest Junes since records began in 1786. And almost one year ago to today, on 8 June 2012, Cantabrians woke to Christchurch's coldest day on record, a month after 63 people died in Japan in lowest ever temperatures.

February 2012 saw the lowest temperatures recorded in Menorca in the Mediterranean over the past 40 years, with an average of 7.5 degrees, 3.6 below normal. On Carbon Sunday (July 10, 2011), Perth was enduring its coldest 11-day spell of maximum temperatures since records began.

December 2010 was the coldest since UK records began as temperatures plummeted to -10C bringing travel chaos across Britain. At the same time it was also the coldest ever recorded in Australia as summer snow fell in the Snowy Mountains, wild winds rattled the coast, and more than 500 people were still cut off by the worst flooding in years.

Germany’s December of 2010 was its coldest in 41 Years – the snowiest ever in Potsdam. NOAA scientists announced at the start of 2001 that the U.S. national temperature during the November through December two-month period was the coldest such period on record.

On 7 Aug. 2012 stunned residents of Johannesburg snapped photos and made snowballs after a rare cold snap brought a dusting of snow to the typically sunny country. On 25 February 2011 San Francisco and Los Angeles experienced their first snow since 1976.

These stats can easily tell the opposite story to global warming. Warmer-alarmists will say this is cherry picking, and that these figures are not representative of the true global warming picture. But selective one-sided reporting is how global warmers operate. Listing evidence of warm records broken is called climate science whereas equal instances of record cold gets called denialist propaganda.

All of the aforementioned cooling reports can be checked for authenticity. So why have we not heard about them presented in balance? Is it because when we create a question, the answer has already been decided on? And if the question comes with enough government funding, isn’t any answer going to qualify for the payout?

Ken Ring of www.predictweather.com is the author of Weather Almanac for NZ 2013.