“Devastating release of carbon emissions has ancient Syrian city of Palmyra now under ISIS control“.

Tongue in cheek, of course, from Twitchy. But maybe not so much: in his commencement address to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy this week, President Obama took the laughable positions that global warming was a) contributing to unrest in the middle east; and b) is an immediate threat to U.S. national security. He bases this immediacy on climate models that have been not just wrong, but extremely wrong, as well as a series of related distortions. These are rebutted one-by-one in “Does the ‘leader’ of the free world really know so little about climate?” by Christopher Monckton.

Global warming activists are so fond of their scare stories that they just can’t stop, despite a long track record of predictive lousiness. But their sins extend beyond bad predictions to bad data itself. One scare story has the world’s sea-ice extent shrinking drastically, especially in the Arctic. Now, NASA has come clean on this point: updated data from the agency shows that sea ice has not contracted over the past 35 years, it has actually increased somewhat. The data is charted here. From the Forbes link:

“Updated data from NASA satellite instruments reveal the Earth’s polar ice caps have not receded at all since the satellite instruments began measuring the ice caps in 1979. Since the end of 2012, moreover, total polar ice extent has largely remained above the post-1979 average.“

To this day I see posts suggesting that the polar ice caps in a fast melt and that polar bears are increasingly endangered. Both assertions are simply not true. The global polar bear population has recovered from the lows of 50 years ago and is stable. Most regional populations are stable, some are in decline, and some are growing.

Another claim is that that Antarctic ice is melting. In fact, the ice extent around Antarctica is at record levels. There is massive volcanic activity under an area in western Antarctica, where some ice loss has been recorded. That is hardly proof of a man-made carbon-induced effect. Along with the fictitious ice melt, alarming predictions of increased sea levels are often heard. But sea level increases in the past 100 years are minuscule relative to more distant historical episodes.

President Obama is casting about for a legacy other than failure. His signature health care plan is in jeopardy on several fronts, his foreign policy is bumbling (even to a non-interventionist), his economic legacy is weak at best, his legacy of cronyism is legend, and his legacy of debt is gargantuan. As to Obama’s record on the environment, he just might be a slave to defunct climate researchers.