One of the sad side effects of the global warming climate scam is the way otherwise fairly intelligent people have been snookered into believing the dumbest things. An example in point: in a world where millions die each year due to malnutrition, US Secretary John Kerry lectured African leaders attending a summit in Washington that creating more farms in Africa causes too much carbon pollution. Can you imagine the response of any national leader, being told he must let his people starve because a bunch of rich nation, ivory tower science boffins have this unproven, wild idea that CO2 might cause the world to warm by a degree or two a hundred years from now? This is the type of imbecility that comes from following a pernicious untruth down a rabbit hole of false assumptions. Yet around the globe people seem defenseless against the infectious ignorance that is climate alarmism.
The science is settled, the President of the United States assures us. His pet scientists have produced yet another frightening climate report to prove it. Given this President's tenuous relationship with the truth on other matters, a citizen might pause to ask if the claim of settled science is, in fact, true. In the recent past scientific papers have discovered some “unexpected” phenomena that help to regulate climate. In fact, one of the climate change faithful proposed a mechanism affecting the jet stream that could be responsible for this winter's unexpected weather in the northern hemisphere. Only problem, a number of climate alarmist luminaries have dissented from her idea. Remember the consensus that was supposed to shut down all opposing opinions? Never mind. Another study shows statistically that there is no way to establish a human caused warming trend without another 100 years of observation. Of course, if you believe the climate catastrophists the world as we know it will have vanished by then. So is climate science really settled? Here are just some of the most recent indications that it is not.
One of the scary scenarios frequently trotted out by climate change alarmists is the possible shutdown of the ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean. This would disrupt northern hemisphere climate, particularly in Europe. Indeed, one Hollywood disaster movie had frozen military helicopters falling from the skies in the UK and Manhattan buried under a tsunami of ice. We are told this could happen at any time, if the world gets too hot from all that CO2 our species is churning out. Now a shocking new paper in the journal Science implies that the standard view of a relatively stable interglacial circulation may not hold for conditions warmer/fresher than at present. Why? Because it happened before, over 100,000 years ago, without the help of man made global warming. Another catastrophic climate threat is shown to be totally natural and to have happened before our species began burning coal and driving SUVs.
The past week has witnessed the advent of a new climate change offensive by know nothing progressives, led by the triumphantly ignorant U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry. Kerry and his boss, the equally scientifically naive Barrack Obama, have publicly stated that climate change “is a scientific fact” and that the argument is over. This stunning display of politically motivated, willful belief over scientific rigor demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of scientists and the scientific method. Contrary to popular belief, science is seldom sure of anything and scientists often spend years debating ideas that just don't prove to be true in the end. An illustrative example is the Hollow Earth theory, which suggests that within the bowels of our planet are other, habitable worlds awaiting discovery.
California, the state that raises 30% of US fresh produce, is in the grip of a severe drought. Billed as the driest period in the state's recorded rainfall history, climate change alarmists have hastened to blame the parched conditions on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Paleoclimate history tells a different story, however, and highlights the amazingly short attention span of AGW advocates. Going beyond the 163-year historical period, science shows that there have been other, longer lasting and more severe droughts than the current dry spell. Today's drought is minor when compared with ancient Megadroughts, which occurred between 850 to 1090 and 1140 to 1320. In fact, the worst droughts suffered by the American Southwest all happened so long ago that human memory fails us.
The world is entering the 16th year of the greatest climate science embarrassment in modern history—the pause in global warming. Despite rising IPCC confidence levels and hundreds of computer model predictions, that darned old climate is just not behaving like the boffins say it should. After all, CO2 keeps rising, and we all know that CO2 drives Earth's climate like the thermostat in a house... or not. No longer able to sweep the lack of warming under the observational rug, the climate change community had started flailing about for answers: the heat must be hiding deep in the ocean, it must be soot from China, some have even begun to wonder whether there is something wrong with their models. Most are still convinced that the missing heat is hidden somewhere because they will not accept the simplest explanation—the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming is fundamentally incorrect.
You may have notice that the news media talking heads and TV weather presenters have discovered a new term recently—the Arctic Vortex. In a splendid demonstration of how the weak minded are quickly consumed by group think, and ill understood terms get repeated ad nauseum, the Arctic Vortex has dominated the news during the past week in the US. In truth, the phenomenon is not new. What is new is that its current foray south is being loudly attributed to global warming. For years the effects of a warming Arctic have been the subject of scientific speculation. Dubbed Arctic amplification, some claim it will enhanced extreme weather in the middle latitudes. The fact that such linkage is tenuous at best has not stopped ignorant politicians like the UK's David Cameron and the US's Barack Obama from blaming recent nasty weather on that old nugget, anthropogenic global warming. There is, however, some evidence to the contrary from one scientist who studies atmospheric dynamics and variability under different climates.
You may have heard that Al Gore, the self anointed Prophet of climate doom, is holding a twenty four hour propaganda fest trying to frighten the public into wasting even more money on bogus climate change measures. “Join us as we go around the world, identifying the costs of carbon pollution and the solution that can change the course of our future,” the associated web site proclaims. Why are we telling you about this? Because highlighting the half truths and outright lies perpetrated by climate miscreants is the best way to expose the farce that is the radical green movement.
There was a time when climate change alarmists stood confident in the approaching global warming apocalypse. Even a few years pause in the upward march of temperatures was shrugged off, the catastrophists smugly stating that it would take ten or more years without warming to throw a spanner into their disaster predictions. It has now been fifteen years without the promised meteoric rise in global temperatures predicted by the warmongering climatologists' computer models. Unsurprisingly, some of the anthropogenic global warming faithful have started to question current climate change dogma. In commentary in a journal dedicated to climate change, scientists have admitted that they've overestimated climate change for 20 years. What is more, they do not really know why their predictions have turned out so wrong.
Science is supposed to be unbiased, seeking to understand the workings of nature untainted by the personal beliefs or prejudices of its practitioners. Nature alone is the arbiter of truth—when science and nature disagree it is science that is wrong. But science is practiced by human beings, who cannot keep their beliefs, whether engendered by religious, philosophical, or political leanings, from skewing any result that is equivocal or highly complex. Presented here are two examples taken from the pages of Nature, perhaps the world's primer scientific journal. One is a rehash of temperature history in northern latitudes with a new statistical twist, the other a report on a study regarding fracking. One shows how what scientists leave out of their studies may be more important than what they put in. The other shows how a headline can spin the results of a report even when its authors are carefully neutral in their conclusions.
Despite a decade and a half without temperature rise, climate scientists still stubbornly stick to their predictions of steadily increasing global temperatures. These predictions are all based on GCM, computer programs that model the circulation of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and a myriad of other factors in an attempt to simulate our planet's climate system. The problem is, the computer models are severely flawed, flawed at such a fundamental level that two climate modelers have called for a reassessment of all computer models currently in use. Sadly, a number of the flaws they point out have been known to scientists for decades, yet mainstream climate science continues to rely on these broken models, hoping to get lucky with predictions made for the wrong reasons.
It has been vilified in the press and maligned in school classrooms by the ignorant. Opposing it has become a cause célèbre in Hollywood an a litmus test for liberal politicians. Labeled man's chosen weapon for ravaging nature and laying waste to the environment this poor, largely misunderstood gas is in fact essential to our existence. Without carbon dioxide, CO2, we would not be here and Earth would be a frozen lifeless chunk of rock. Forget that life would never have developed on a planet without greenhouse warming, a recent scientific study say the daemon gas has rescued the planet from the deep freeze at least twice during the Neoproterozoic era, roughly 750 to 635 million years ago.
It's everywhere on Earth, on the other planets and moons of the solar system, and even in comets from deep space. It is the frozen form of water, commonly called ice. Something so ubiquitous and familiar, one would think that science knows a lot about ice. It turns out science knows less than we might suppose. In a commentary in the journal Nature, an ice scientist raises ten open questions about ice. For example, the article states: “We cannot predict with certainty when and where ice clouds will form in the atmosphere; areas of the sky remain humid when we would expect them to freeze.” Ice is a fundamental part of Earth's climate, yet these questions and others remain unanswered. How can climate science claim to predict the fate of the polar ice sheets or mountain glaciers when we do not really understand the substance that they are made of?
We here at The Resilient Earth wish all our readers the happiest of New Years. Hopefully 2013 will be a year without the drama of 2012. After all, the over hyped Mayan Apocalypse did not happen, nor did the Arctic ice-sheet disappear. The Arab Spring slogged on through the summer and fall and is now in the midst of a dismal, dysfunctional winter. The American presidential election finally happened, mercifully removing all the political noise from public media and allowing the populous to return ignoring the government (perhaps to their own detriment). The Euro zone continues on the edge of crisis, Asia boils beneath the surface and Africa remains an open sore. What could go wrong this year?
Something happened this year that has become rare in recent times, much of the United States has had a white Christmas. As of December 28th, 64.4% of the US was covered by snow with an average depth of 6.2 inches (15.7 cm). This compares with last month's coverage of only 19.8%. My own town of Conway, Arkansas, received 10 inches on Christmas day and a winter storm advisory is in effect as another storm makes its way eastward. For Arkansas, this has been the snowiest Christmas ever, breaking the old record set in 1926, and the 7th snowiest day overall since 1875. But North America is not alone in feeling winter's bite—record cold continues in Siberia, while a vicious cold snap across Russia and Eastern Europe has claimed nearly 200 lives. What does all this say about global warming?