A Snowball's Chance in Hell: Will Couric Do Another Interview With Palin on Global Warming

I as I write this, I look outside and think where are the man-made global warming theorists right now?

Are they sitting in some cozy location thinking of ways to cover their butts on new data that contradicts the theory that oceans will rise, the gates of weather hell will be unleashed and we will all be wearing some triple numbered SPF lotion?

What is interesting is a new study that came out and was published in Science on January 2nd, 2009, has not made the rounds in the media.

The meat of the study:

A paper published by Science on 2 January 2009 (Bao et al., 2009) is the latest and perhaps most significant development in Ian Fairchild’s collaborative research over the past 30 years on Precambrian ice ages and their associated carbonate rocks. The paper comes up with a new line of evidence to support a key, but counter-intuitive prediction of Snowball Earth theory: that carbon dioxide levels were high in the Earth’s atmosphere during an ancient ice age. During a Snowball event you can think of the Earth as being like a baked Alaska pudding – hot on the outside surrounding a cold middle (ice-cream in the case of the pudding). This strange situation arises if the Earth is largely covered in ice and snow in contact with an atmosphere rich in greenhouse gases in which heat is trapped. The covering of ice and snow stops rocks being weathered by carbon dioxide: weathering is the key process that uses up this gas which is continuously released into the atmosphere from volcanoes. So, during an extreme glaciation (probably triggered by low levels of greenhouse gas in the first place), levels of carbon dioxide progressively rose to unusually high levels (Hoffman et al., 1998).

Where is Katie Couric going back for a third interview with Sarah Palin and asking Palin what did she mean that Palin didn't think global warming is man made. Or the main cause.

Never mind what she read Katie, it is evident Palin read somewhere, something that made Palin believe global warming wasn't man-made and that there are cycles in weather patterns.

It is safe to say that, Palin didn't read it in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times or see it talked about on MSNBC or by Chris Matthews or Keith Olbermann.

By the way, someone should ask Couric and Olbermann et al, what do they read?

Do you think Katie will go back and say to Sarah Palin, you may be on to something?

Well, reasonable and intelligent people would say, "a snowball's chance in hell" would Katie Couric go back. Because reasonable and intelligent people know that quite frankly, Katie Couric doesn't run with their pack.

And what about climate change?

This discovery is of general interest for two reasons. Firstly, there is a fascination with extreme events in the history of our planet. It is proposed that a small number of Snowball Earth events of near-global or total glaciation of the planet occurred: if so they certainly represent one of the major challenges to survival of life on the planet. This was the reason that Channel 4 chose this topic for one of the programmes in their recent series called Catastrophe. The concepts behind Snowball Earth are accessibly described at the website of Paul Hoffman, who has been a major advocate for it: http://www.snowballearth.org/. A key part of the theory is that once snow and ice cover all the higher latitudes, the glaciation would go out of control because of a runaway positive feedback between the growth of a reflective white surface of ice and snow (i.e. high albedo) and cooling of the surface. Modelling shows that a stable state would be reached with the Earth close to -45�C (compared with +15�C) today. A weak hydrological cycle (with a little melting and evaporation in summer) would eventually create moving glaciers kilometres thick. However, many geologists think that although the Earth may have been significantly covered with ice, it did not freeze-up completely � they find open marine deposits sandwiched between glacial deposits (reviewed by Allen and Etienne, 2008). Some modellers find that a stable climate state could exist with a mean Earth temperature around zero and significant open water in the tropics: this has been termed Slushball Earth: still an extremely inhospitable place from a human perspective! A carbon dioxide atmosphere would also have built up in this case since weathering would still have been inhibited.

The earth would be an inhospitable place from a human perspective. That would be the earth's "Snowball Events."

Thus there is a snowball's chance in hell that the man-made global warming believers would believe in scientific data that contradicts them.