"If you torture numbers, they will tell you anything."

I do not know who first said this, but it applies to just about everything, from sports statistics to political polls.

Today, the numbers I wish to torture concern global warming. (I refuse to let anyone get away with calling it "climate change," because the climate changes every day.)

As an Iowa native who is becoming less and less of a fan of winter, I keep hoping that global warming warnings are right. I would love for baseball weather to happen while Christmas bells are ringing.

But alas, that virtually never happens in Iowa.

But is it getting warmer, even in Iowa, in the winter?

I wanted to find out so I did some searching.

By no means do I consider this any kind of final scientific verdict, but I have discovered a weather history web site that seems to have no political motives. That site lists high and low temperatures for each month of most years between 1942 and 2013.

What that Weather History site tells me is this: From 1942 to 1947, the mean (average) temperature in January in Iowa was 22.11 degrees. But from 2007 (which was one of the warmer in history) to 2013, the mean temperature was 21.35 degrees F.

So, along with the daily experience of wearing insulated gloves instead of baseball gloves, I can point to at least one web site that offers scientific documentation that global warming remains an unfulfilled promise. January weather in Iowa is more than one degree colder than it was during World War 2.

The ironic thing is that I agree with many of the things global warming prophets say we should do. I support using every possible source of renewable energy, including bio-fuels, solar and wind. Economics and world instability have been warning us for years about oil and how our need for it complicates our national security, especially as it involves nations with crazy, anti-American leaders.

But if you want me to join your "global warming" chorus, you will have to wait until January brings more baseballs than snowballs.

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JD January 23, 2014, 11:20 am You don\'t understand the difference between weather and climate Dean, neither do you understand the difference between local and global.
SN January 23, 2014, 12:49 pm I understand the differences in global/local and climate/weather...but I am not a believer in the whole \"global warming\" theory either, and here is my very simple reason. Weather records only go back so far. How do we know whatever is going on with the GLOBAL climate doesnt happen every 500, 700, or 5000 years? This could be a perfectly normal event. Our generation just happens to be the latest of those to live through it.
ZZ January 23, 2014, 12:57 pm Thanks Dean- and in just in case your readers hadn\'t heard about the global warming research ice-breaker that got stuck in polar ice, here\'s one the stories (ironic isn\'t it?)

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/idiot-who-got-ship-stuck-in-ice-trying-to-prove-ice-was-melting-wins-global-warming-award/
CD January 23, 2014, 2:13 pm I\'m certainly no expert but I don\'t believe colder averages in the Midwest are the end result of global warming -- my understanding is that it is the extremes of weather that are touted to be the direct result of warming. Unless of course you live on the North Pole where the ice cap is melting.
SH January 23, 2014, 5:43 pm I understand the differences in global/local and climate/weather...but I am not a believer in the whole \"global warming\" theory either, and here is my very simple reason. Weather records only go back so far. How do we know whatever is going on with the GLOBAL climate doesnt happen every 500, 700, or 5000 years? This could be a perfectly normal event. Our generation just happens to be the latest of those to live through it.

Your simple reason fails to take into account the entire field of paleoclimate. Climate change is perfectly normal, but there has to be a forcing to cause the climate to change. In the past, the sun has been the predominant forcing, however the sun cannot explain the current warming. 1. If it were the sun, both the atmosphere and troposphere would have warmed instead of just the atmosphere; 2. You could measure increased total solar irradiance, which is now going in the other direction. This is what science is for.
JW January 24, 2014, 12:07 pm The Global Warming battle, or what is now being referred to as \'Global Climate Change\', has been going on for years. Recent Time magazine reported that the \'Polar Vortex\' that caused the record to near record cold temperatures in the US was caused by \'global warming\'. With a small search you\'ll find that Time reported in 1974 that the \'Polar Vortex\', that was experienced then, was caused by, get this, \'Global Cooling\'. That\'s right, the world was getting colder in the 1970s according to the same scientists that are saying it\'s getting warmer now.

Al Gore and other predominate global warming scientists also said that the ice sheet at the north pole would be gone by 2013. While the ice is smaller than is has been, it is larger than it was in 2012 and a report in 2009 showed that the young ice (less than 2 years old) was twice as think as scientist expected.

This is what you can expect from many of the social scientists who are trying to push their agendas. Do you remember the reports in the 80\'s and 90s that the rain forests were being destroyed at an astronomical rate? The TV commercials talked of the rate in acres per hour. The problem was at the rates they preached, the entire surface of the world would be deforested in a matter of months (oceans included). We still have our rain forests, we still have hot and cold temperatures.

The fossil record shows us that much of the US at one time was a lush tropical region and later was covered by glaciers. Which of these was normal if either?

While we keep being told that CO2 is the most dangerous thing, causing a huge impact to the greenhouse gasses I want to educate with this. CO2 is not the top greenhouse causing gasses. In fact the #1 greenhouse gas is water vapor, which accounts for between 36 and 70% of the greenhouse effect. This vapor is caused by evaporation and being the earth surface is roughly 70% covered by water, controlling that is beyond our control.