Tag Archives: Al Gore

Relax: Natural Variability Causes Heatwaves

30 Saturday Jul 2022

Posted by in Global Warming

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Lately almost any passing weather phenomenon is said to have been rooted in climate change and higher carbon concentrations. The recent heatwaves that seared parts of Europe and the U.S. are no exception, and climate change activists always find heat spells ripe for rhetorical exploitation. But while these would-be Cassandras and Gretas push their fearful narrative, there are strong reasons to doubt that these weather events are any cause for alarm. This summer’s heat waves, like all others, were of limited geographic scope, and they certainly weren’t the most severe heat waves on record in terms of either duration or magnitude. More on that below.

Data Problems

Temperature measurements tend to be exaggerated these days because so many “official” temperature records come from local airports or other urban sites rich in impervious cover and heat absorbing building materials. This gives rise to the so-called “urban heat island effect”, which refers to the elevated temperatures measured in urban versus rural areas. It’s even worse than that, however, as the vast majority of active weather stations in the U.S. are sited at “hot spots”, and many of them are poorly maintained. Data problems plague European temperature records as well.

Furthermore, official temperature records are extremely short on climatological scales, going back only about 150 years in the U.S. And these records have been “adjusted” by weather authorities like the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), usually with the early records “cooled” relative to more recent readings. That means the long-term trend in temperatures is biased upward.

Climate Catastrophists

Nevertheless, Joe Biden has been threatening to declare a wholly unjustified “climate emergency“, perhaps thinking these dog days are the perfect time to assume a host of new emergency powers. It’s unclear whether the new “Build Back” bill making its way through Congress will be enough to satisfy the appetite of Biden’s handlers for costly and ultimately ineffective climate measures.

It’s tempting to think delirium from the heat waves is what prompted Al Gore to compare climate change skeptics to the dithering police officers in Uvalde, TX, but Gore’s fever is nothing new. We’re still waiting for the world to end, which he once predicted would occur by 2016.

Even weather reporters on TV are breathless in their descriptions of the heatwaves. They’ve certainly become dramatists for the climate-change cause. And people love good scare stories. It gives them an excuse to polish up their pitchforks! Or to be lazy and stay inside. It’s telling that so many people now quote heat index values (which combine heat and humidity), rather than actual temperatures, in the warm summer months. After all, it’s more thrilling to say it’s 105 outside than it is to say 95.

Anyway, compare the paired maps in each of the graphics below (here are links to sources for the first and second):

The temperatures are comparable, but the use of RED colors on the 2022 maps is so much more frightening! This post from Anthony Watts provides a list of links to news sources taking alarmist perspectives on the heatwaves in the U.S. and Europe, and falsely attributing the heatwaves to CO2.

Same Old High Pressure Domes

Cliff Mass offers a bone to the climate change community. He thinks perhaps 5% – 10% of the recent temperature anomaly in the UK is attributable to greenhouse gases. An effect of that magnitude is hardly worthy of government action, let alone panic. Mass says:

“Natural variability of the atmosphere was the proximate cause of the warmth and does not represent an existential threat to the population of Europe.”

The heat wave phenomenon is typical of slow-moving high-pressure systems that often develop during the summer months. These domes of high pressure vary in temperature and geographic breadth, and they are sandwiched between or adjacent to low-pressure systems with cooler temperatures. That’s been the case in both Europe and the U.S. during this summer’s heat waves, as illustrated by the following graphics, The northern hemisphere is not entirely enveloped in a heat wave.

And the rest of the globe? In the tropics (below 20 degrees latitude), June 2022 was the coolest June in 22 years, according to satellite temperature readings! Furthermore, the monthly anomaly in June was the coolest in 10 years. In the Southern Hemisphere, Australia and South America have had extremely cold winters. Antarctica had its coldest winter on record in 2021. Yet Joe Biden is under the misapprehension that we’re experiencing “a climate emergency”.

These are not the worst heat waves on record. Both the U.S. and Europe experienced higher temperatures and prolonged heat waves during the 1930s. For example, St.Louis, Missouri matched or exceeded 110 degrees four times in the 1930s, and twice in 1954, whereas the city topped out at 102 so far this year, and that was after a cool spring. There was an extreme European heat wave in 1976 that was drier and much lengthier, and others occurred in 1911 and 1906. Of course, available temperature comparisons are distorted because the early readings weren’t as impacted by urban heat islands. There are historical accounts of drastic heat waves much earlier, such as the 1500s and 1700s. Here is more heatwave history, in case you’re interested.

We’ll Be Fine

Heat isn’t the only story, of course. A wide range of other disastrous events are blamed on climate change. Wildfires are a prime example, but as we know, wildfires are not new, and the worst wildfires have more to do with poor forest management than anything else. Likewise, there is little if any association between extreme weather events and climate change. In that context, it’s also worth noting that cold weather is much deadlier than hot weather. The climate today, and going forward, presents far fewer dangers to humanity than in the past.

I did a lot of dirty, outdoor work in my youth, and it was hot! There were times just as hot as this summer, if not worse, I’d venture to say. Anyone old enough to have lived through the 1970s or even the 1950s should recognize the heatwave Chicken Littles as such.

Doomsayers Batting Zero, Draft Kids To Cause

22 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Environmental Fascism, Global Warming

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Empiricists, take note: The kids were out in the streets on Friday, skipping school to warn us of a climate doomsday fast approaching. Like Greta Thunberg, one of several teenage girls billed as modern-day Cassandras, they just know it. But wait, I think I heard the same thing many years ago… doomsday is nigh! In fact, I’ve heard it over and over through my entire adulthood. And here’s the empirical regularity: “Goose Eggs: No Climate Doomsday Warning Has Come True“. Ever. From the link:

     “Some examples:

    • 1967 — Stanford … expert Paul Erlich predicted “time of famines” in 1975.
    • 1971 — A top NASA expert predicted an “ice age” by 2021.
    • 1988 — It was predicted that the Maldives would be under water by last year.
    • 2008 — Gore said the Arctic would be free of ice by 2013.
    • 2009 — [Prince] Charles said there was just 96 months left to save the world.”

Here are a few other warnings that haven’t panned out:

“Within a few years ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is.’ Snowfall will be ‘a very rare and exciting event.’” — Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia [March 2000]”

“[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots…[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers. — Michael Oppenheimer in 1990″

There have been many others (also see here and here). Oh, but you just wait, they say. This time it’s different  and it won’t be long!. You know, people just love to worry. Even so, what kind of daft world do we inhabit with children and adults completely freaked out about “problems” that don’t approximate reality.

Predictions of a more clinical variety, such as upward temperature trends, have been way off on a consistent basis: much too high, that is. But here’s the key: all of the other calamitous developments said to be in our future are predicated on those temperature forecasts. The warnings are not based on data per se, but on on crappy climate models (and see here), which are simplifications of reality, loosely calibrated to capture a relatively short period of historical records. And the models are crappy because they often rely on one input, CO2 forcings. The modelers have difficulty addressing the empirical sensitivity of temperature to carbon, the net effects of radiative forcing, clouds, and ocean circulation. In many prominent cases they don’t even try. Hey look, we’re all gonna die!

A striking misconception one hears repeatedly is that we experience many more hot days, and they are hotter, hot days than in the past. Sure, extremely hot days are bad, but not as bad as extremely cold days, and probably worse than warm nights. The truth is, however, that nearly all of the warming experienced over the past few decades has been in nighttime lows, not daytime highs. More “seasoned” climate alarmists don’t seem to have any memory of the hot days of their youth, and the kids… well, they just fell off the turnip truck, so they have no idea.

One of the great perversions of climate alarmism is the notion that the private enterprise system must be heavily regulated or even abolished in order to put an end to global warming. Never mind that governments are directly responsible for a major share of environmental degradation. And as private economies flourish, the environmental efficiency of production actually improves. In fact, if one were to stipulate that climate change is a problem, as I will for just this one sentence, vibrant capitalism offers the best path to environmental solutions. There are several basic reasons. One is that economic growth and higher income levels give consumers the wherewithal to demand and pay for costlier “green” products. More fundamentally, economic growth facilitates development and investment in cleaner technologies by business and government.

Miss Thunberg doesn’t understand any of this, of course, but she’s a pretty good little scold:

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean, yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you.”

Here’s Arthur Chrenkoff’s take on poor Thunberg and her message:

“[She] should be going to Beijing or Bangalore and staging her protests there instead of, or at least in addition to, Sweden or New York. She should be hounding President Xi and Prime Minister Modi about their shameful emissions. She should be leading throngs of Asian kids out of schools for her Friday student strikes. She should be castigating the industries and the consumers of the developing world for destroying the planet and killing humanity in the process. She should be doing all this if she were serious about the global nature of the problem.”

I especially like this quote from Scott Adams on the “child advocate” phenomenon we’re witnessing:

“Adults sometimes like to use children to carry their messages because it makes it hard for the other side to criticize them without seeming like monsters. If adults have encouraged you to panic about climate change without telling you what I am telling you here, they do not have your best interests at heart. They are using you.“

Of course, Thunberg is thoroughly propagandized and a useful theatrical tool for the alarmist establishment. She has made all sorts of ridiculous and unquestioned claims before the United Nations and elsewhere (e.g., people are dying from climate change (no); that she can “see” CO2 (okay, her mother said that, but what a hoot!). Don’t think for a second that “we have to listen to the children” is uttered sincerely by any adult climate alarmist. It’s manipulation. I feel sorry for Thunberg not least because she is probably deeply frightened about the climate, but also because she is a tool of a death cult.

You really can’t blame kids for being worried about bogeymen foisted upon them by foolish elders, but you can blame the adults for their own frightened acceptance of chicken-little climate augury. And that’s what the kids are being taught. The schools certainly won’t penalize them for missing classes. In fact, many of their teachers accompanied them to the protests.

The climate scare is part of a larger agenda to dismantle not just capitalism, but a host of innocent individual liberties. Scaring children and making teens into miserable pessimists will groom them as good (if neurotic) environmental soldiers for life. They’ll be fit as compliant subjects of a new, environmental fascist state, never to know the sweet freedom and growth possible without the needless bindings imposed by climate cranks. Children, the protection you’ve been told to demand isn’t necessary or worth it. You’re fighting for goose eggs!

 

 

Amazon Fire Fraud

03 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in Forest Fires, Global Greening

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Leftist activists recently pounced on another opportunity to mischaracterize events, this time in the Amazon Basin, where recent fires were held to be unprecedented. The fires were also characterized as evidence of a massive conspiracy between capitalists and the new government of President Jair Bolsonaro to open the rain forest to commercial exploitation. Warren Meyer squares away the facts at this Coyote Blog post, which is where I found the chart above. Forest clearing in Brazil has been much lower over the past 10 years than during period 1988-2008. It stepped-up somewhat during the first half of 2019, but it still ran at a rate well below 2008. A key reason for the increase is fascinating, but I’ll merely tease that for now.

As for the fires, Meyer provides the following quote about this year’s fires from NASA in a statement accompanying a satellite photo:

“As of August 16, 2019, satellite observations indicated that total fire activity in the Amazon basin was slightly below average in comparison to the past 15 years. Though activity has been above average in Amazonas and to a lesser extent in Rondônia, it has been below average in Mato Grosso and Pará, according to the Global Fire Emissions Database.“

So what was the cause of all the alarm? Meyer points to a August 22 story in the Washington Post, though WaPo might not have been the first. The article was either poorly researched and “fact checked” or it was a deliberate attempt to raise alarm. The sloppy story was picked up elsewhere, of course, and distorted memes spread on social media condemning the Brazilian government and capitalism generally.

The burning that is taking place has been started by farmers preparing land for crops, a process that occurs every year. Meyer quotes the New York Times on this point, which noted that very little of the burning was taking place in old-growth forests.

What’s really ironic and crazy about all this is that U.S. environmental policy is responsible for some of the burning that is taking place in the Amazon. Meyer notes that U.S. ethanol mandates have subsidized a years-long trend of increased sugar cane production in the Amazon Basin. Of course, burning is a regular part of the normal sugar cane harvest. Moreover, that production has contributed to land clearance, offsetting some of the forces that have brought the rate of deforestation in Brazil down overall.

The whole episode dovetails with the ongoing narrative that fires are burning out of control across the globe due to climate change. We heard similar propaganda last year after several large fires in California. Michael Shellenberger does his best to set the record straight, demonstrating that the annual land area burned worldwide has declined by 25% since 2003. He contrasts that record with the hopelessly errant reporting by major media organizations.

As P.T. Barnum once said, a sucker’s born every minute. He might as well have been talking about the armies of well-meaning but gullible greenies who fall for every scare story told by the likes of Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio. And scare stories are exactly what these tales of a global conflagration amount to. Meanwhile, as Alexander Hammond explains, global reforestation has taken hold. In what is apparently a paradox to some, this is largely the result of economic growth. Hammond discusses the logical connections between economic development and environmental goods, including reforestation and biodiversity. The bottom line is that the best policies for reforestation are not those imposing obstacles to growth, as the environmental Left would have it. Rather, it is policies that promote development and income growth, which are generally more compatible with individual liberty, that will encourage growth in the world’s forests.

Deceits of the Climate Claimants

23 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by in Global Warming

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Well-meaning souls innocently parrot the global warming narrative but generally know little of the controversies surrounding its validation, or lack thereof. That includes much of the mainstream media. Every warm day is evidence of global warming. Every cold day is evidence of extreme volatility brought on by climate change. Every big storm, every forest fire, and every endangered species is attributed to warming. The poles are melting, the sea is rising, the sky is falling, and it is mostly bullshit. But in the meantime, the mythology of global warming has become an all-purpose cudgel for state oversight and “redistributive justice”, primarily to the benefit of the “climate change industrial complex. The myths are repeated so frequently that many accept them as facts. Here, I list a few of these myths along with information that should give pause to anyone tempted to take them too seriously.

The science is settled: There are a number of great scientists who dispute the global warming narrative (and see here). But a few studies have claimed incredibly widespread consensus (97%) among scientists that mankind drives climate change. These studies are generally plagued by biased samples of scientists (sometimes including non-scientists), faulty selection and classification of paper abstracts, and direct involvement of climate activists in the research process. These studies tend to present the “consensus” as one side of a stark dichotomy, with no nuance or middle ground for those subscribing to anything less than the inevitability of a warming catastrophe.

Record high temperatures: The temperatures that are almost always reported are surface temperatures that are subject to extreme bias. The most drastic bias is caused by increasing urbanization. Urban weather instruments are often sited in areas with an increasing amount of impervious ground cover, which absorbs sunlight and heat, leading to the so-called “urban heat-island effect”. This has imparted an upward trend in urban temperature readings. Moreover, urban temperature readings tend to be over-sampled in estimates of global surface temperatures, reinforcing the distortions in measured warming.

Melting poles: Arctic sea ice extent has been in modest retreat since 1980, when satellite measurement began to allow more accurate readings. The Antarctic, however, has shown a trend in the other direction, as shown in this piece by Judith Curry. In the same article, Curry shows that specific Arctic locations had less sea ice 6,000 to 8,000 years ago than today. For more complete information on satellite-era trends in sea ice extent, see this informative reference page (scroll way down for Antarctic information). Looks like Al Gore’s dire prediction that the poles would melt by 2007 was just a little off target.

Polar bear extinction: We are constantly seeing warnings of polar bear extinction on social media. Memes feature desperate-looking bears stranded on ice floes, drifting away from their cubs. Perhaps you aren’t supposed to know that polar bears are extremely strong swimmers. Or that the polar bear population is been thriving, increasing by an estimated 10-20% since 2001. So whether or not the past few decades have seen a decline in sea ice, the bears seem be doing just fine.

Rising sea levels: The rate of increase in sea levels over the past 8,000 years has been vey slow relative to the 10,000 years prior to that, when they rose at rates of up to 5.5 meters per century. That compares to recent rates of about one foot per century. Predictions that islands in the Pacific would be swallowed by the seas have not come to pass. In fact, satellite images show that more of the world’s sandy shorelines accreted than receded between 1984 and 2016, This does not appear to be a crisis by any means.

Increasing storms: No, the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclone activity has decreased since 1900, a trend that has continued unabated over the past 20 years. I know of at least one study suggesting otherwise, but it is based purely on modeled relationships, not hard data, and not tested against data. The frequency and intensity of droughts and floods has been flat to declining as well. And while more weak tornadoes are detected today than in the past, the frequency of moderate to strong tornadoes has decreased over the past 45 years.

Desertification: Increases in carbon concentration have not been associated with desertification, as the media seem to have concluded. As noted above, the frequency of drought has been steady to declining. In fact, precipitation data suggests that patterns of variability in rainfall do not square with the predictions of climate models. In fact, the world has seen an increase in green vegetation since 1985, even in arid regions.

Ocean acidification: The reported declines in ocean pH levels over the past few centuries are actually smaller than the normal seasonal variation in pH levels. The presumed negative impact on sea life appears, after all, to be minimal to nonexistent (see the same link).

Higher alpine tree lines: We’ve been waiting. It hasn’t happened, but that hasn’t stopped some activists from stating it as established fact.

Armadillo northward migration: I’ve heard this cited as “proof” of global warming. The range of armadillos extended as far north as southern Missouri and Kansas in the early 1970s, so this isn’t new. In fact, armadillos began their migration northward into the U.S. before the mid-1800s. Some biologists have attributed the migration to warming but acknowledge many other reasons, including more forested habitat in the north and factors such as movement of cattle by rail. Armadillos burrow and are able to keep warm underground in the winter. Of course, a series of warm winters can bring them further north along with other species, but a few cold winters can take a toll on the population and push them south again.

U.S. carbon criminality: U.S. CO2 emissions have been in almost steady decline on a per capita basis for at least seven decades, long before the carbon freak-out began. The declines have resulted largely from the normal market process of competitive efficiency in production. China leads the world in total annual CO2 emissions by a wide margin, about 80% ahead of the U.S. in 2017. Total U.S. emissions actually declined in 2017 for the third straight year, while emissions in China, the EU, and for the world all increased. In fact, China was actually in compliance with its pledge under the Paris Accord despite the increase, so the pledge was not especially ambitious.

High social cost of carbon: The estimates used by the Environmental Protection Agency are plagued by poor methodology and are subject to great uncertainty. Some studies rely on a series of tenuous causal links, such as CO2 emissions to global temperatures to ice melt to sea level to real dollars of coastal damage many years hence, all without considering variances at each stage, and assuming zero effort to adapt or mitigate damages over long time frames. A shortcut approach relies on historical correlations between temperatures and such measures as heat-related deaths, labor productivity and real output. These estimates extrapolate old relationships to the distant future and ignore the very real human tendency to adapt. The underlying assumptions are undercut by such basic facts as ongoing migration to warmer regions. The estimates also fail to account for the likelihood that warmer weather will improve agricultural productivity.

The public’s interest in climate change has waned, and no wonder: sensible people do not buy hype and demands for sacrifice in the face of contradictory evidence. Revelations of statistical fraud have led to even more skepticism. And when your “proof” is founded on model extrapolation, often theoretically-based rather than empirically-based, you’re skating on thin scientific ice. At this link, Steven Hayward has an interesting take on the public’s increasingly jaundiced view of global warming activism:

“Scientists who are genuinely worried about the potential for catastrophic climate change ought to be the most outraged at how the left politicized the issue and how the international policy community narrowed the range of acceptable responses. Treating climate change as a planet-scale problem that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by politics, die by politics.”

The Broken-Climate Canard

19 Thursday May 2016

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MovieDisaster

In the imagination of the climate alarmist, almost everything portends an approaching catastrophe. A hurricane? Tornado? Draught? Warm spell? Cold spell? Blizzard? Bad harvest? To their way of thinking, these are all signs that CO2 is damaging the climate. Obviously, these are weather events that imply nothing in the absence of corroborating evidence, though you wouldn’t know it from listening to the precaution pols. Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog has posted another in his series of essays on this topic, this time called “Are We Already Seeing Climate Change?” He provides links to the earlier installments — all interesting. In this installment, he covers five topics under the heading “Manufacturing A Sense that the Climate Is Broken”, which I think would have made a better title for his post. I’ll try to summarize the five points briefly, but do read the whole thing:

Publication Bias:  This quote speaks for itself: “Every single tail-of-the-distribution weather event from around the world is breathlessly reported, leaving the impression among viewers that more such events are occurring, even when there is in fact no such trend. Further, since weather events can drive media ratings, there is an incentive to make them seem scarier.”

Claiming a Trend From One Data Point: This is the kind of error to which I alluded in the first paragraph. Think of Al Gore’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The charts offered by Meyer in this section are very nice. There is no upward trend in any of the following: hurricane energy; severe tornadic activity; the incidence of draughts or draught severity; heat waves; extremely hot days; and there is no abatement in the upward trend in crop yields. In fact, there is no trend in high temperature records in the U.S. The upward trend in average surface temperatures in the U.S. is entirely due to warmer nighttime temperatures.

Measurement Technology Bias: We now have the technology to measure various aspects of the climate from space. We can track polar ice extent with much more precision. Doppler radar technology and weather chasers have helped to identify more small tornados than we’d have known of 50 years ago. But when events seem noteworthy to alarmists, they draw extreme conclusions. To their great chagrin, these phenomena are often products of our enhanced ability to measure things.

What Is Normal?: This is related to measurement bias. Our detailed records on surface temperatures go back about 150 years, which is an extremely short slice of history. Temperature proxies from earlier eras, such as ice cores and fossilized tree rings, tell us that the recent past is not all that unusual. Moreover, we also know that glacier melting and sea level increases have been happening for much longer than the buildup of CO2. Those trends began near the end of the “Little Age Age”, around 1800. And there is evidence that these types of developments have happened before. Alarmists, however, assume that what we’ve witnessed in the recent past is unprecedented.

Collapsing Causality in a Complex System To a Single Variable:  “With all the vast complexity of the climate, are we really to believe that every unusual weather event is caused by a 0.013 percentage point change (270 ppm to 400 ppm) in the concentration of one atmospheric gas?” Not likely! Here Meyer helps put the recent temperature trends in perspective: they are tiny relative to their annual variation, which occurs both across seasons and within days.

The public seems to regard the co-called climate catastrophe with more skepticism today than perhaps ten years ago. Not only do the facts contradict the dire predictions of carbon-forcing climate models and alarmist scare stories, but people also recognize that the costs of attempting to avoid a global warming trend are massive and, well, probably not worth it. Moreover, they rightly suspect unworthy political motives in the alarmist community. If some carbon-induced warming is an eventuality, and that’s an “if”, it might well prove to be beneficial for people and the planet. Relax!

 

Climate Alarmists Warm To Speech Control

02 Monday May 2016

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AGW-cartoon

The reactionaries in the global warming plunderbund are revealing their philosophical bankruptcy, dishonesty, and inner fascism. Science is a continuous process of learning through empirical observation, theory and testing. Refutation is as important to the process as original research and replication. Experimental results can be confirmed, but theory can never be established as absolute fact. The term “settled science” is very nearly an oxymoron, yet we constantly hear that climate science is “settled”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are asked by the warmists to accept sweeping conclusions on the basis of an extremely short historical record, one that is clouded by sharp disputes over measurement issues. The long-term record based on temperature proxies shows that recent trends are well within the range of natural variability. We are asked to accept conclusions based largely on models that have proven to be extremely inaccurate and that fail to account for important climate influences such as solar variation and oceanic cycles. And with essentially no historical justification, we are asked to accept assumptions about what global temperatures “should be”, and that we should make drastic sacrifices in a quixotic effort to make temperatures stay put. To do so, we are asked to divert resources on a massive scale to mitigate a risk that is speculative at best. An alternative view is that mankind should make sacrifices in order to adapt to change when it occurs, rather than taking the arrogant view that we can, with sufficient coercion and manipulation of private decisions, dominate natural forces to assure climate stability.

Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog has an excellent series of posts on climate change. The most recent of those posts is on natural attribution of climate change. It includes links to earlier parts of his series. Meyer compares today’s alarmists to a hypothetical observer predicting future temperatures in the year 1600, roughly the minimum of the “mini ice-age”. Of course, that observer would have said it would get colder based on his experience, but that would have been wrong. Today’s alarmists rest their case on a 20-year uptrend between 1978 and 1998, tying it to man-made carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, a longer-term view shows that surface temperatures had increased in similar spurts before carbon emissions were a factor of any kind.

Scoundrels tend to twist facts when the facts don’t support their view. Rick Moran reports on an academic paper concluding that it’s acceptable to lie about the threat posed by climate change. It’s not enough to present research and the full range of uncertainty surrounding forecasts, which is very wide. No, the reporting must be wrapped in a sort of Grimm’s fairy tale in order to teach the public a lesson, unschooled children that they are. Such is the manipulative nature of the warmist community.

And the dishonesty is extensive. Remember the claim that 97% of climate scientists accept the proposition of man-made global warming? It was debunked in short order, but the media seemingly can’t get enough of a disaster scenario, so the claim lives on. Famed climatologist Judith Curry has a number of posts on her blog explaining the misleading details of this bit of disinformation. Among the problems of methodology and reporting of this “survey” result is that it was not based on an actual survey of scientists. Instead, it rated abstracts of publications as to their consistency with particular views of the anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) proposition. Not only does this method double-count the views of individual scientists; the authors were highly selective about which scientists and how many of their publications were counted. Even more interestingly, the criteria were so loose that abstracts written by certain scientists known to be skeptical of AGW were counted within the 97%! In one of Curry’s posts, entitled “The Conceits of Consensus“, she discusses the weaknesses and refutations of the claim of a strong consensus, including the participation of non-scientist evaluators of research abstracts in the sample:

“Bottom line: inflating the numbers of ‘climate scientists’ in such surveys attempts to hide that there is a serious scientific debate about the detection and attribution of recent warming, and that scientists who are skeptical of the IPCC consensus conclusion are disproportionately expert in the area of climate change detection and attribution.“

Other studies have found that a majority of surveyed meteorologists (see here and here), geoscientists and engineers are skeptical of AGW. But again, this information is essentially ignored by the media and self-interested politicos because it does not support the crisis narrative that dictates coercive action by government.

Apparently, propaganda in support of the increasingly dubious warmist position must be reinforced by more drastic measures. Prominent leftists in government are asking whether disputing climate change is punishable under the law. You read that right! Two state attorneys general have threatened to prosecute ExxonMobil for allegedly misleading investors and the public about climate change. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has proposed using RICO organized crime law to go after certain energy companies for climate change “denial”. Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney General, has asked the FBI to look into it. To hell with freedom of speech. To hell with the spirit of free scientific inquiry. Your authoritarian masters insist that you must fall into line with their climate change agenda or else!

Josh Gelernter opens his recent discussion of this tyrannical gambit this way:

“Four hundred years ago this week, the Inquisition met in Rome to discuss Galileo’s support for the Copernican model of the cosmos, which placed the Sun at the center of the solar system. After five days of deliberation, a commission of inquisitors ruled that heliocentrism was ‘foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of the Holy Scripture.’ Not a good moment for the Church. Two days later, Galileo was summoned to the Vatican and ordered ‘to abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it . . . to abandon it completely . . . and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.’“

To underscore the hypocrisy of these threats of prosecution, David French observes that there are many other instances in which the public has been misled while the presumed climate mavens profited from the hysteria. Could these opportunistic ploys also be subject to prosecution?:

  • Al Gore insisted ten years ago that by now we’d suffer a “climate doomsday” if we failed to take the measures he advocated;
  • Perhaps ABC/Walt Disney has profited from its breathless warnings that “in 2015 milk would cost almost $13 a gallon, gas would be more than $9 a gallon, ‘flames [would] cover hundreds of square miles,’ one billion people would be malnourished, and Manhattan would be flooding — all because of climate change.“
  • The Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late….” And as French says: “The IPCC has received tens of millions of dollars while hyping the threat of global warming.“

French’s suggestions are not entirely tongue-in-cheek. These suggestions are no more outlandish than threats to prosecute anyone else over a legitimate dispute in scientific debate.

The AGW community suffers from a weak understanding of the philosophy of science, a dishonest presentation of the facts, and a tyrannical streak that should can only be tamed by stripping them of power. First, however, the voting public must wise up to the danger to our economic well being and our freedom posed by these fascist activists.