Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Today in climate hysteria -- facts are inconvenient

Various liberal mouthpieces have begun popping up again, pushing the climate hysteria meme, probably as a way to distract from those pesky "phony scandals" the President's been complaining about.

There was one commentator going on about the rising temperatures -- hottest years in the last century, blah, blah, blah. Chris Hayes mocking California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher for his talk to an enthusiastic Tea Party group. And then former tv critic for the LA Times, Brian Lowry, now writing for Variety, saying there's no such thing as a credible dissenting voice on climate change. Really?!

Hayes did a nice job with the misdirection in his piece, turning Rohrabacher's talk on its ear, claiming that the Tea Party cry for limited government meant they had to disallow any possibility of Global Warming or any other climate crisis.

Problem is, anyone with access to a computer and the knowledge of how to dig for info can debunk anything uninformed commentators like Hayes and Lowry have to say. The graph below is from NOAA. It shows a 15 year period from 1998 to 2013 of continental US temperatures:

continental us temps 1998 - 2013

I created that with NOAA's interactive database. The horizontal line is a one hundred year baseline average of 52.3 degrees. The blue line is the trending of the last 15 years. Take a look. That ain't goin' up boys! And that is a FACT! And that kind of data is available to anyone who takes the time to find it.

Heard the Prez going on about warming and polar ice melting the other day? Look at these two graphs, also publicly available:



The top graph shows that the ice melt in the arctic is the lowest amount in 34 years. The second graph shows that the arctic "summer" has been one of the coldest and shortest on record. And again, this isn't some conservative "tea-bagger" spouting this stuff, it is simply what the data show.

When people like Hayes (whose degree is in philosophy, not climate science) start going on about rising temperatures, it's important to note that they are cherry-picking data to find places where indeed the temperature is up, but only by hundredths of a degree! Things they ominously claim are true -- not only more storms and wildfires but more intense ones, are simply not borne out by the facts. And those facts are available to the general public via the various agencies that measure these sorts of things.

Commentators like Hayes and the general public believe in climate hysteria because they want to. Not because there is any science or factual data to back them up. And it is their political pig-headedness that is dangerous, not those who simply want to have an honest conversation about the topic.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Global warming has always been one of my favorite lib planes to shoot down. There has never been good evidence for it. Even the IPCC 'evidence' is clearly debunked by its own pages and the whole thing has been spin from the beginning.

The key piece of evidence is in the climate models. They have never correctly predicted a single thing because you can't program the right number of earthquakes, or hurricanes or volcanic eruptions, etc. One thing it can predict is what will happen if you add a known entity in to the model. With no other factors, if you add large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, it should warm the earth. The problem is that one volcanic eruption does more to the world climate than decades of CO2 emissions. There will always be other factors that offset or negate what man does. One could try to argue that a third choice is that what man does could increase natural effects. This is entirely true. However, as you show above, and if you look up climate history, the evidence is that we are entering a period of global cooling. 10-12k years of warming followed by another cooling cycle is what history tells us to expect. We have had 11k years or so of warming and we are due (through sun cycles, if I remember right. It has been a while since a libidiot has tackled GW with me) for a longer period of cooling anywhere in the next 1000 years or so. CO2 emissions will not halt or reverse the cycles of sun activity and dormancy.
Tuerqas

postaldog said...

Quite correct. Alarmist's climate models have not even been able to re-predict past events, which shows them to be completely worthless.

There is no evidence to suggest that CO2 has any specific re-radiative properties. In fact, water vapor is a more effective greenhouse gas and there is already a mechanism in place to deal with that -- global weather.

You could increase global temperatures by pumping enough CO2 into the atmosphere to raise the atmospheric pressure and thus raise planetary temps (like a pressure cooker). But we would all be dead long before that would occur via CO2 poisoning.

Climate astrology (my favorite term) is nothing more than a political cause. There is no science to back it up and it seems the only scientists pushing it either have financial concerns (grants, funding, etc.) or are concerned about protecting their reputations after prematurely jumping aboard this sinking ship of a theory.